As a person with a degree in CS I have to say this is bogus.
The writer doesn't explicitly state what CS skills are but he says they will be outsourced. I take it he thinks CS means you only learn basic programming or how to install software. He then says it is good to spend time in the lab learning how stuff works. I had to learn plenty about how computers work from low level details to theory of computation to high level specifics of software design.
His second part about languages coming and going so therefore don't study languages?? seems odd since someone is apparently making all the new languages. Apart from that, understanding concepts such as oop or functional 'paradigms' are not as easy to wing although admittedly things are becoming freely available on the web.
Then he said people who build OS's are ditch diggers but if you look at how hardware has changed, building software that can handle different devices and allowing them to interact with the OS is huge! Just look at the evolution of super computers that physicists use. From vector processors to multicore cpu to gpgpu, there needs to be people who understand computer science to work on these things because computers require someone to know about computation itself.
Lastly, I had to learn computer architecture, physics up to quantum mechanics, and I had to take all sorts of deep math courses so the writer is completely wrong about the CS major.
[edit] and I forgot to add in algorithms and data structures which are themselves deep topics and no, algorithms are not useless, knowing which algo or data structure to use can save a lot of time and therefore money. I should say that theory of computation and algorithms really distinguish the major and add that currently in demand are skills such as machine learning or data mining which are subsets of the CS field.
If I was to give a reason not to major in CS it might be that the degree is very popular right now and the demand for the degree might at some point be larger than the demand for persons with the degree.
I graduated in 2002 and at the time people were really scared about outsourcing. I chose to go EE however. At the time what scared me was actually that my college education would be useless. I saw too many 13 year olds being invited to conferences, friends who never went to college becoming software engineers, etc. So I picked a field where I felt my college education would be an advantage.
In the end I got the CS masters anyway and now I realize that neither is really a threat and, despite what people say, the degree was very valuable. Depends what you do with it I guess.
Comments
As a person with a degree in CS I have to say this is bogus.
The writer doesn't explicitly state what CS skills are but he says they will be outsourced. I take it he thinks CS means you only learn basic programming or how to install software. He then says it is good to spend time in the lab learning how stuff works. I had to learn plenty about how computers work from low level details to theory of computation to high level specifics of software design.
His second part about languages coming and going so therefore don't study languages?? seems odd since someone is apparently making all the new languages. Apart from that, understanding concepts such as oop or functional 'paradigms' are not as easy to wing although admittedly things are becoming freely available on the web.
Then he said people who build OS's are ditch diggers but if you look at how hardware has changed, building software that can handle different devices and allowing them to interact with the OS is huge! Just look at the evolution of super computers that physicists use. From vector processors to multicore cpu to gpgpu, there needs to be people who understand computer science to work on these things because computers require someone to know about computation itself.
Lastly, I had to learn computer architecture, physics up to quantum mechanics, and I had to take all sorts of deep math courses so the writer is completely wrong about the CS major.
[edit] and I forgot to add in algorithms and data structures which are themselves deep topics and no, algorithms are not useless, knowing which algo or data structure to use can save a lot of time and therefore money. I should say that theory of computation and algorithms really distinguish the major and add that currently in demand are skills such as machine learning or data mining which are subsets of the CS field.
If I was to give a reason not to major in CS it might be that the degree is very popular right now and the demand for the degree might at some point be larger than the demand for persons with the degree.
I graduated in 2002 and at the time people were really scared about outsourcing. I chose to go EE however. At the time what scared me was actually that my college education would be useless. I saw too many 13 year olds being invited to conferences, friends who never went to college becoming software engineers, etc. So I picked a field where I felt my college education would be an advantage.
In the end I got the CS masters anyway and now I realize that neither is really a threat and, despite what people say, the degree was very valuable. Depends what you do with it I guess.