Posted on 06/18/2008 3:50:43 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Self-ping.
Why spend four tough years getting a comp sci degree when you will subsequently spend your career sweating out whether you job will get outsourced to Botswana some day?
My colleagues who graduated here with a Computer Science undergraduate degree within the last two years all had multiple job offers each, with salaries of no less than $60,000. Several are now making well over $70,000 two years after graduation.
The president of Harvard got fired for discussing possible reasons for fewer women being in some scientific fields. Some subjects are taboo subjects, and this is one of them. There is no explanation that will pass through the political correctness filter; no explanation that will satisfy the grievance lobbies which are allegedly so concerned about these types of subjects. As long as everyone has the opportunity to major in their fields of interest in college, and has opportunities in the job market in their chosen fields, the under-representation of certain groups in certain fields of endeavor should not be of concern.
For starters, the job outsourcing is nowhere nearly as bad as you may believe. And, seriously, no degree will guarantee lifetime employment. You must continue growing, learning, and adapting...such is life in a global society.
That said, with the presently charged political atmosphere and the high probability of soaking the "wealthy" (unfortunately, productive Computer Science graduates making $60K+ annually are "wealthy" according to the U.S. government)...I can understand why folks would only chase the light, easy majors.
I run a series of computer labs at a university(about 600 systems total) and we only have two women out of a staff of about 14 in the IT department that supports the labs. However, most of the graphics and web designers in our building and on campus are women. Go figure.
As someone who works in the God-forsaken field of computing, might I suggest that women possibly just have better opportunities in other fields that provide better pay, better working conditions, and more job security?
My wife's son-in-law graduated in comp science one year ago. He was deluged with offers. He took one, tired of it (too far from his kin and friends) despite the good working conditions, and quit. The first firm he interviewed for in the city he wanted to work in hired him the same day. And asked him to tell his comp science friends to come in for interviews. I would say that if you're good at comp science, you have an excellent chance of getting a good job.
I got my BSc Computer Science in 1997 and there weren't many women even back then. As for your above statement much of that is true and some isn't. BMC Software had a huge campus in Houston and within 2 years it vanished as they moved shop over to India. I on the other hand remained in the energy industry where software is very proprietary and usually used for in-house research and make a nice 6 figure salary.
Commercial software development is the most likely to get off-shored/outsourced.
The women don't want to move to India to find work.
I would say that it’s rare to find an American woman in IT, must of the women you’ll find in IT are Indian.
*
How about: no good prospect of finding an IT job in the US.
Why bother? The jobs are being offshored to India. Long way to move for a job that is run by a stateside company.
so what... who cares why??? there's no quota.
Does it really matter? Nobody is stopping women from pursuing computer science degrees. Maybe men and women have different interests.
Lets face it, chick are not attracted to a field dominated by overweight, pimple faces, living in their mothers basement, techno dweebs. That aside, its a boring subject that few [other than the above mentioned techno dweebs] are interested in.
I don't see anyone complaining about the disproportionately hight numbers of women enrolled in psychology programs. These people need to get over them selves and just accept the fact that some fields attract more men, and others more women.
“She blinded me with Science!”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.