"Yes, it is, and that is why such comments are so sad."
yes, it was a sad comment ... and not too well-informed either.
OTOH, what drives the volume of people getting BS degrees is if they can get a good job ...
"We have left our profession to the MBAs. 99% of the software out there is junk and very poorly designed."
... and likely there is a relationship between
your statement and the decline in CS interest.
Somewhere along the line, software development itself
become commoditized so much that there is a decline in the value of CS (you can hire in India), and a vicious cycle
where professionalism declines in the field.
baut the error may be that the job of "software developer" and "Computer Scientist" are distinct things. I am lucky to be in the one area - EDA software and IC design - that actually utilizes many parts of what you learn to get a CS, or in my case EECS degree.
That is the problem. Anyone with a liberal arts degree, an IQ above 125 and a willingness to learn can become a passable programmer in under a year. they wont have a clue about runtime complexity, may be weak on SW engineering, and have no inkling about P vs NP, but they can hack SQL or Visual Basic just fine.
((SW Job != SW profession)
&& (SW Job != Computer Science as a field))
It's a pity, because Moore's Law is rolling down the track like a runaway train, we have computers 1,000 times faster than 20 years ago.
... and software has barely evolved !!! ...
... the best OS out there (LINUX) is basically the same danged OS that was banged out in berkeley 20 years ago (UNIX BSD). In 1990, I figured UNIX would beat out the pathetic MS DOS cr*p. boy, was I wrong. by 1995 Win95 took the world by storm. same year I started playing with LINUX.
10 year later, and *still* MS is not as good as UN*X.
Huge development teams only seem to create dinosaur code.
more people notice LINUX these days ... now that it has become less of a hacker's innovation, and more of a 'commoditization of the OS'.
Maybe we can do better.
What's the difference between hardware and software?
As time goes by, hardware get smaller, faster, and cheaper.
Software gets bigger, slower, and more expensive.
One of the things I like about my job is that I program for micros where size and speed actually matter. A typical machine I program for has less than a millionth the RAM of a typical desktop machine, and runs at about a thousandth of the speed.
BSD started life with a distribution tape of System 7 UNIX from Western Electric. Microsoft created Xenix on the 68000 (TRS16A) from the same tape. I still have a functioning TRS16 with Xenix in my basement. I used it in 1983 to bootstrap 10 UNISYS 1100 mainframes running UNIX*1100 from Bellcore. I had to fix some of the segment swapping code in the kernel to accomodate more users. I also had to fix the tty interfaces to the underlying OS1100 GCS subsystem. After 25 years as a UNIX professional, I still prefer that OS and the numerous imitators. QNX is my favorite embedded solution today.
"10 year later, and *still* MS is not as good as UN*X. "
Once again, another statement that proves how ignorant those in the industry really are.