Early in my undergraduate career, I decided to abandon CS as a major. Even as an undergraduate, I already had a side job in what would become the internet industry, and computer science, as an academic field, felt theoretical and unnecessary. Reasoning that I could easily get a job as a computer professional no matter what it said on my degree, I decided to study other things while I had the chance.
people interested in working in CS can’t just “learn French” anymore. things in the field used to be this way up until a few years ago, but not anymore. you used to be able to major in whatever interested you, and as long as you knew some HTML/CSS/JS you could find work somewhere. now, you need a degree in CS, you need impressive projects, you need to know all these frameworks, you need to spend hours upon hours doing leetcode.
there are several problems here. firstly, like another user wrote, software engineering is one of the only remaining comfortable, well-paying jobs left. if people were guaranteed jobs by the government no matter what they majored in, you’d probably have a 75% drop in CS majors. far more people would be majoring in French, in film, in history, in the arts, etc. shit, I myself wouldn’t be majoring in CS. we have a system and a culture that shames people for studying what they’re actually interested in, and tells them to view university as training for work. we went from “oh, you can’t find a job as a history major? maybe you should have majored in something useful like CS you idiot”. people all start majoring in CS, and now it’s a problem that arts programs are being cut and students don’t know anything about the humanities anymore.
secondly, this isn’t a university problem, but something deliberately caused by capitalists. pay for software engineers was too high for too long, and companies needed to get wages down to increase profits for shareholders. they encouraged everyone to ‘learn to code’, people did it it, and capital won. the job market is awful right now, and wages will likely never be where they were a few years ago.
It’s a top down problem. The universities didn’t invent it. For years, candidates have campaigned on “lrn2code” so much so that we make fun of it here. They weren’t saying that to bring new perspectives or art to the discipline. They were saying it because tech jobs have basically become the only path to the middle class. Small wonder, then that enrollment situations are what they are.
I graduated from UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering with a CS degree right as the recession hit. Even then, I could see the demographics of my classmates trending away from your typical nerds who just like being on the computer into guys who were just after a paycheck.
Point being, like everything, this is a systemic issue. Give people one path out and they’ll take it. The US economy is basically just giant business conglomerates and tech companies. Myopic capitalism has led us to this.
Same: so many people signed up because they heard IT payed well and has many offers. Half the class dropped after the first year when they realize it’s not for them.
I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.
Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.
If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.
What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.
Which is hardly trivial to create. CS is a vast field, with a lot of subsectors and areas of specialization, and not all of the relevant skills are tied to things you can toss in a resume or portfolio. A lot of companies need people who have 1) good communications skills and 2) the ability to identify problems in code or infrastructure and offer efficiently implemented solutions, or at least the path to those solutions and 3) knowledge of multiple coding languages and a certain degree of specialization in Linux. Some of these are difficult things to present in a CV and the place they really can be demonstrated is in interviews. The hard part for a new graduate is just going to be able to talk to someone who can give them the job and see if they’re a good fit for the company. Internships or co-op opportunities are also very important, as they let you talk about work you’ve actually done somewhere. But these are hard to come by.