"Is CS really that rich of a "science" to spend 12 years getting a PhD? "
Yes, it is, and that is why such comments are so sad. We have left our profession to the MBAs. 99% of the software out there is junk and very poorly designed. Well, it isn't really designed at all. It happens by accident.
BTW, a PhD is about 7-8 years total, not 12. No Masters required.
A good student will need no more than 5 years to get a PhD. Those taking 7 to 12 years are in the humanities where the whole point is to avoid real work and to stay in college as long as possible.
"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.