Posted on 06/03/2024 7:20:28 AM PDT by zeestephen
The Wall Street Journal has an article this week on the grim job market for computer science majors...Students were told the myths about the great shortage of computer workers and they responded by flocking to computer science programs. Now they are discovering that the shortage claims were a sham when they apply for after-graduation jobs. [Link to WSJ article in Comment #1 - my computer hits a Pay Wall]
(Excerpt) Read more at cis.org ...
Part of the problem is that employers are still requiring onsite/in person work, when a good 75% or more can be done remotely.
I work in networking, and as long as my site has an internet connection and one of the multiple FW’s are up I can VPN into my company and work. In fact, the work provided laptop connects on VPN remotely 100% of the time (”always-on” VPN).
I have to work 2 days in office, 3 days work (aka, Hybrid work), because that’s what they’ve decided is best. However, during CoVID the office had 100% work from home, and nothing was left/dropped/a problem.
I really feel the whole “gotta be in the office” is to increase the commercial real estate values, to help the company valuation and has nothing to do with productivity.
I’m a unicorn. I’ve worked in the fields that computer science grads inhabit, and I don’t have a degree.
Me too, I guess. I’m a network/switch/firewall analyst/engineer/architect. I’ve designed plants from greenfield/new, and re-designed existing networks. Did forklift upgrades for a university campus 3 times, and designed the (still existing) wireless architecture 3 times over 12 years (due to new hardware/requirements).
I joined the Navy at 17, was in til I was 22, and never went to college/university until I worked at one.
I’ve worked in SCO Unix/Xenix, various versions of Linux, thin-net, thick-net, all manner of wireless (was a Crypto Tech, Technical in the Navy), Vax/VMS, Wang VS, OS2 Warp, every flavor of Windows from 3.0 up, and even Novell.
I’ve done Racal Datacomm, Bay Networks, Cisco, Juniper, 3Com, Ubiquiti, Meraki, Extreme, Enterasys, and I don’t know what else for routers/switches.
Cisco, Palo Alto, Juniper, and even some Checkpoint FW’s.
Of course, 30+ years of industry experience sort of helps to overcome the ‘no degree’ bias.
True, that's how I came into teaching 5 programming languages at a 2 yr college back in the 90's and IT director at a large regional airline with just a GED of my own. The college diploma/degree just isn't what it used to stand for.
Long ago I was a systems programmer inside PacBell. I had UNIX systems with full source code from Bell Labs. It was a wonderful resource to learn how the various UNIX utilities worked inside. Today, I find interest in languages like rust. There isn't the same opportunity to learn from a mature code base. Last night I used ChatGPT to generate an example REST server that accepts JSON input via POST and returns a JSON reply. It's pattern I use daily in my Java/Spring oriented microservices. ChatGPT coughed up a working example and a curl script to test it. The curl script failed. I noticed the curl script didn't look properly escaped to run from a Windows command line. I prompted ChatGPT to correct the curl script to work in a CMD window. The corrected script was generated and ran perfectly. AI can save some effort if applied to the correct problem AND at a technology point within the currently built model. I've tried "chat" against problems in keycloak and found the "model" stops at keycloak version 18. The problem I was trying to solve is unique to keycloak 21 and later. In this case, "chat" isn't going to resolve the issue. Upon additional research, I discovered the problem to be a commonly observed "bug" that has been reported for remediation.
I did some of that in my 20’s.
Very hard to do it beyond 55 as the body just won’t cooperate.
I got into electronics in my late 20’s.
Best decision of my life.
You sound like a manager.
I've seen the same thing, having worked with computers for many decades. Lots of useless "programmers", who would beg me for help and have me code their subroutines or programs, even when I had a lower title than them. Many of them went on to become project managers at high pay levels, which was their intent all along to bypass the coding stage. Congrats to you for surviving working around useless co-workers, it is a problem at many companies.
Worst situation was where I planned and installed equipment racks and configured servers and routers, and women asked me to install PC monitor setups for them, even though they were given a systems engineer title (I was a senior). They were given the job because their husband was a project manager. These women didn't know how to plug in cables, let alone do any coding.
END H1B and rescind all Indian visas, regardless of why they were issued.
STEM is good if the jobs were open to Americans. Sadly, with 99% of the recruiters now Indian, they are not.
This has nothing to do with the problems in education. That is a different topic. We need to send our kids to college, we also need to straighten out colleges to be American and promote our values, our culture, and make education academically sound and challenging.
Facts are a beyotch. I know that.
I’ve worked with offshore coders.
They’re not worth it.
American employers of off-shore coders may have a different opinion. Problem with coders is they are in most cases not doctors, lawyers, design engineers, manufacturing scientists, physicists, chemists, Biologists, etc. How can anyone code anything significant without being educated in depth? Depend on other experts to guide them? Good luck with that. I was able to develop programs to design heavy machinery components since I was highly experienced design engineer, and I was able to programs to machine heavy machinery parts in numerically controlled manufacturing machines since I had operated every such machines manually and was an experienced manufacturing engineer. My program needed only dimensions of finished part and the starting dimensions of casting or forgings made of high strength 4150 or higher-grade steel alloys. The program determined tools needed, cutting speeds needed, and all the geometric motions needed to go from rough part to finished part, required multitude of repeat cutting motions. There was no such software on the market during my work years 1963-1986. I had a lifetime secure job, since no one knew how to do my work. Only reason I quit was due to an offer from one of the research labs funded by US department of energy, which was impossible to refuse due to compensation and benefits offered.
ChatGPT is plagiarism in the rear view mirror.
That is pretty much the case for every large language model "AI". The same can be said of the internet as a whole where news articles are freely shared without compensation to the person(s) who put in the effort to dig up the facts and write the story. The alternative is putting everything behind a pay wall. No pay, no access. That is already underway.
We’ve got some stellar offshores.
I apologize; I was commenting on your earlier post about the ChatGPT which could only code up to version 18 when you were working in version 21.
Even if the AI back end people include the specs for new versions, one will likely have to chaperone/massage the machine-generated source code.
Eventually it will be Subject Matter Experts who code.
The days of the “heads down” coder are coming to an end.
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