I'm actually not that concerned about CS jobs being outsourced particularly soon. I think the impulse to do it will be there - it seems like a readily outsourced job, right? just committing boilerplate code, right?! - but the reality is that determining requirements and co-located work is crucial (this is backed up by decades of research which I can go dig up if someone wants). You can no sooner outsource the development team than you can management and everyone else interacting directly with those developers. And at that point it sounds like you're just talking about a company in another country.
Reason 1 (about human culture etc...) should actually strike a cord with me since I studied Anthropology for my undergrad degree[0], but even still I disagree with this article's premise. Don't take "you should be focusing on HCI and culture" and conflate that with "you shouldn't study CS". This is a stronger case for the argument that social scientists should be taking CS courses (and vice versa) than it is for anything else.
In STEM fields I sometimes find people who condescendingly talk about social sciences and humanities students because their job prospects seem (and indeed are) grim. It's rarer that someone in one of those fields derisively fires back with crap about how shallow a CS (or related) education is, but it happens as it has here. It's not just unproductive; it's toxic. People instinctively respond by digging deeper into the trenches and preparing defensive, even offensive responses in retaliation for what seem like attacks on their intellectual passions. These posts polarize us and discourage us from engaging with people from other fields for fear that we're in for yet another flame war.
We should all be talking about how we can enrich our discourses with wisdom from other fields, not taking pot shots from our respective camps about how much better ours is than the other's. There's a lot that Computer Science can do for other fields, and a lot that other fields can do for CS.
0: to be fair, I double-majored, but I associate personally more closely with Anthropology at the moment (although for credibility's sake, I'm studying CS now).
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I'm actually not that concerned about CS jobs being outsourced particularly soon. I think the impulse to do it will be there - it seems like a readily outsourced job, right? just committing boilerplate code, right?! - but the reality is that determining requirements and co-located work is crucial (this is backed up by decades of research which I can go dig up if someone wants). You can no sooner outsource the development team than you can management and everyone else interacting directly with those developers. And at that point it sounds like you're just talking about a company in another country.
Reason 1 (about human culture etc...) should actually strike a cord with me since I studied Anthropology for my undergrad degree[0], but even still I disagree with this article's premise. Don't take "you should be focusing on HCI and culture" and conflate that with "you shouldn't study CS". This is a stronger case for the argument that social scientists should be taking CS courses (and vice versa) than it is for anything else.
In STEM fields I sometimes find people who condescendingly talk about social sciences and humanities students because their job prospects seem (and indeed are) grim. It's rarer that someone in one of those fields derisively fires back with crap about how shallow a CS (or related) education is, but it happens as it has here. It's not just unproductive; it's toxic. People instinctively respond by digging deeper into the trenches and preparing defensive, even offensive responses in retaliation for what seem like attacks on their intellectual passions. These posts polarize us and discourage us from engaging with people from other fields for fear that we're in for yet another flame war.
We should all be talking about how we can enrich our discourses with wisdom from other fields, not taking pot shots from our respective camps about how much better ours is than the other's. There's a lot that Computer Science can do for other fields, and a lot that other fields can do for CS.
0: to be fair, I double-majored, but I associate personally more closely with Anthropology at the moment (although for credibility's sake, I'm studying CS now).