Is Computer Science Dead? 641
warm sushi writes "An academic at the British Computing Society asks, Is computer science dead? Citing falling student enrollments and improved technology, British academic Neil McBride claims that off-the-shelf solutions are removing much of the demand for high-level development skills: 'As commercial software products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop software from scratch. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable? Or has the software development industry stabilized to an off-the-self commodity?"
A question of "R" vs "D" (Score:5, Insightful)
Academic Research - Which has grown at a steady rate
Corportate Development - Which collapsed at the end of the dot-com boom.
There is still a need for "pure" computer science research for the next big improvement in the field of computing (where is the next "Google" going to appear?)
ZombieEngineer
dead no, dying? yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I've encountered CS students recently who in their third year are unable to do such basic things as understand memory allocation. As for algorithm design? Well that's simply unknown by the majority. That scares the shit out of me.
The Mantra is 'don't re-invent the wheel'. This is used as an excuse for students taking off the shelf components for assignments (sorting classes for java being used for sorting assignments for example), or being given virtually complete assignments by lecturers and being walked slowly through the assignment to the point where little or no original thinking is required.
Now it is true that re-inventing the wheel is a bad move at times. However whilst studying for their qualification, they should learn how to build the wheel in the first place.
Back to the memory allocation point. I currently know of no final year students with a decent understanding of this topic, and yet it is the main cause of security problems in code. They should at least have a working knowledge.
The ephasis is more and more on using languages designed to try and remove the main problems in code, but who writes these languages? It sure isn't the people who are only taught to use them, not create them.
The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments. I'd love to blame it, I ferkin hate the language, but that isn't the root cause.
Computer science is a hard topic that they are trying to make simpler to encourage more students. This has the result that CS students are graduating with ever reducing levels of ability, so people no longer see it as a worthwhile topic. Nowadays a CS student who wants to do really well has to work on independent study entirely apart from the course they are attending, and has also to face the unpleasant reality that their education as provided by the university is so poor that they may face years of further study to gain a useful level of ability.
Post graduate study can reduce this problem, but there are fewer post grads too, and often it is funding, not interest in a topic, that guides the selection of a course.
Pertinent part of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
ie. not Computer Science. For those not familiar with the UK education set up I should also explain that De Montfort University is the old Leicester Polytechnic. The Polys were set up to provide much more practical education than the theoretical stances of the Universities, and a damned good job many did of it too - I'm certainly not playing the one-upmanship card that some do about the old polys, Leicester Poly was a good place and its successor De Montford has reached even further.
But the point stands - this point of view is coming from an academic teaching at a more practically-oriented institution and already running a non-science based course. His viewpoint should be considered against that background.
Cheers,
Ian
Not dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember the 4th-Generation-Languages that were supposed to make programming unnecessary? Where are they today?
Ask innoviative organisations like BitTorrent, Apple, Google or Blizzard if they see Computers Science be obsolete any time soon. I dont think so.
Re:We get asked this every few years (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that what spreadsheets are for?
But look where it comes from... (Score:5, Insightful)
De Montfort, one of the new universities that traditionally advertises on the TV and offers vocational courses in media and the like.
Academic really doesn't mean much these days. He's not even consistent:
"Interrupts, loops, algorithms, formal methods are not on the agenda."
vs
"The complexity of embedded systems, of modern computing applications requires a different way of thinking."
I'd not like to use an embedded system he'd developed, unless by embedded he was thinking Windows Mobile + Flash.
Sorry, a rant from someone who works at a real university, and knows he isn't an academic.
The hard sciences are all dying (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter so is education in general. I am not a computer scientist, my education is technical instead. (LTS/MTS/HTS for the dutch)
When I attended the LTS we had real shop class, learning how to work with wood, steel, electricty with real world equipment in an area that looked much like you would expect to find in industry.
I recently had the occasion to visit a modern school that supposedly teaches the same skills, yet what I found was an ordinary classroom with a very limited and lightweight set of equipment. The kind of stuff you would find at home, NOT at work.
Yet somehow todays kids are supposed to learn the same skills.
And as if that ain't enough the number of hours of shop class have been reduced while the number of theory hours has been increased. Worse, the amount of technical theory has decreased as well and instead the amount of soft theory like history and such has taken over.
This has TWO negative impacts. First young kids coming to work can't hold basic equipment and don't understand the theory behind it and even worse the kinds of kids (like me) that used to select a techincal education because they don't like theory have that choice removed. I myself was far too restless to do a theorectical class, 18 hours of shop class per week however made the remainign theory that much easier to handle and because theory and practice were linked it all made sense.
Even worse, the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?
No this is not old people talk. Notice even here on slashdot how the art of discussion is dying out, say anything remotely controversial and be labelled a flamebaiter or a troll by some kid who can't handle the heat. I actually had a 20 year old burst in tears about two years ago because I chewed him out for drilling through the work bench. Modern education is so much about empowerment that kids who think they are the top of the top can't handle suddenly being the lowest of the low when they enter a working life. This is already a shock simply because you just went from being the youngest in school to the oldest in school and now suddenly you are the youngest again.
Simply put, I think education in general is less and less about turning out skilled proffesionals and more and more about just keeping kids of the job market. Comp Sci ain't the only victim. Just try to get a good welder nowadays. Hell I settle for anyone who can knows the difference between a steel drill bit and a stone one. (And no, that doesn't mean one is made out of stone, rather what it is for drilling into).
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
College Enrollments != Future Business Needs (Score:2, Insightful)
Many of the students who would look for a degree to get rich were enrolling in CS. Now that the news is filled with stories of out-sourcing to India and the collapse of programming as a way to earn infinite wealth these students are no longer interested in CS and are pursuing careers as doctors and lawyers instead. Good riddance, I say, anyone who is only into programming for the money is probably not overly good at it.
Programmers will always be needed. As tools become more capable and advanced, the only thing that changes is the methodology of programming. Programmers are required because of their ability to think discretely. Any tool is only as good as the organizational ability of the person who uses it. I've met precious few non-programmers (and scientists in general) who are able to think in discrete enough terms to actually create a functional system.
Here is an example I often use, involving how organizational systems often spring to life. Imagine a sorting facility that tells it's people to sort all the items into three different areas: one area should have all of the blue items, another will have the metal items while the final area will have tall items. The items are being sorted on three non-exclusive properties and there will undoubtedly be an issue when the tall, blue metal item is encountered. Most business managers will claim, "we'll deal with that issue when it arises." But computers don't deal with exceptions gracefully and no company has the resources to deal with the constant onslaught of exceptions produced by a poor data/process organization. This is the function that programmers provide. We always are concerned about the exceptions. The stuff that actually goes according to plan is almost an afterthought.
Anyone who has walked into a company that has it's entire order fulfillment system running on a Microsoft Access database that was kludged together by the dozen office workers cum computer programmer that make up their IT staff will immediately understand why programmers will always be needed. Garbage in = garbage out.
Re:Graduates are in short supply (Score:2, Insightful)
Modern CS doesn't teach these concepts either, try wikipedia. I'm being serious.
Re:dead no, dying? yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Of the people I knew who did well, those who self studied alongside their normal course did things like website design, search algorithms, micro kernel design, robotics and advanced study in certain languages (lisp, c++, C, Object Pascal, assembler), everyone I knew did the last thing, but the languages varied.
You can pass and get a 2.1 or 2.2 easily just by following the course guidelines. I got my phd offer not by doing this, but by cramming every day (almost every day, have a blowout night at the weekend, you've got to have some fun time) with additional study. I exceeded the requirements of every assignment (I wasn't alone in doing this), and studied around every topic taught. The result was a lot of very interesting phd offers when I graduated, it rocked. I was tired a lot, I will admit, but the benefit was vast, I was so far ahead of the students who just followed the course that I actually tutored some.
Don't assume I'm that clever though, I sweated blood sometimes trying to get assignments done early, and the extra learning was oft times very difficult. Every evening spent on it was one well spent however.
Most of the people I know personally who did this are now in great jobs, one heading towards millionaire status at 25. In his case he worked like a dog, even more than I did. You wouldn't beleive what he was capable of on graduation.
So work hard, and study around the subjects.
CS is a research/academic discipline (Score:4, Insightful)
CS won't be dead until all the interesting questions in the theory of computing are solved : is P != NP? What can a quantum computer achieve? what are the theoretical limits to computation in the physical world, beyond Turing machines? Given the truly enormous current production in all the branches of IT from HCI to pure mathematics via signal and image processing, I would not be worried at all.
Just to rehash, CS is not about designing the best accounting package. This is ICT, not CS. CS is a means to an end.
As to ICT, I don't think the final word has been said either. Just look at the sad state of Vista, or for that matter, at just about any accounting package. Who can say with a straight face that's the best that can be done?
Dead like a webmaster, or a dinosaur. (Score:4, Insightful)
Recently we mourned the Webmaster [slashdot.org], even though some of us were implicated in his murder.
That's the kind of Computer Science that is dead: the kind that Computer Science, by its progress, leaves behind.
An similar questions might be: Is evolutionary science dead? Or was that just the dinosaurs that died?
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Who buys it? What skills do Computer Scientists need to differentiate between Brand X and Brand Y billing system? Basically, proper product selection is as tough a job as product design - because you have to beat down sales jargon and work out what a system actually does - generally without unfettered access to the system itself.
2. Who builds the Middleware/Integration layer? This is so specific to individual companies that you'll never get a solution that fits all the heterogenous parts of your network.
3. Who builds large networks of products - i.e. works out that Portal solution 1 goes well with reporting solution 2 and alarm system 3. Who breaks down the business flows between these and who keeps track of strategic direction in each area?
Dunno, still think there's plenty of non-dev jobs out there for CS graduates...
C.
Re:CS: Dead As It Ever Was... (Score:3, Insightful)
I read once that assemblers and compilers were both described as enabling the "self programming computer" when they came out.
Of course such things just increase productivity and open up new applications.
If you only want to do pure research, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Way I see it, reality is a lot more... perverse. Everyone still needs programmers, still needs an IT department, etc, they just don't want to pay for it.
And enrollment has just reflected this. Studying engineering or CS is hard work, and there are only a limited number of people who do it for fun. And even those can do it as a hobby at home if all else fails. For most people you have to pay well to get them to do the extra effort. If you don't pay up, they'll go do something else.
At any rate, the jobs do exist. Sure, not most of them involve researching the next great algorithm, but they exist. There are a ton of companies who need very specialized internal applications, or their own "B2B" applications, and I just don't see the off-the-shelf software who does those. Of course, most of it doesn't involve researching any new algorithms, but rather researching what the users really want. Then again, most computer-related jobs weren't exactly academic research in the past either. There were maybe more companies making compilers and new computers and what have you, but the bulk of the jobs was always in doing corporate software.
At any rate, _maybe_ if all you're seeing yourself doing after college is researching the next paradigm shift in computing, yeah, that market has somewhat shrunk. If you don't have any qualms with writing some buzzword-ladden application for some corporation, it's as strong as ever. It just doesn't pay as much as in the dot-com times any more.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
"stable, well-proven
I've yet to see, say, a well written and stable ERP system.
In Norway some of the more popular ERP/logistic and sale-systems are CS (Client System), Movex, Visma Unique and IBX. Systems which are just "ok". Terribly modules, inane logic, most likely a lot of bad code all over, but since it's closed source it's impossible to tell. From all the errors (some, really strange), lack up updated documentation and integration specifications, system resources used, and just from looking at the system documentation, you can easily tell that the systems are not "state of the art".
What most of these complex systems really are, are a collection of small modules of which many are most likely writtin at different times, by different people, for different projects and just barely working together. The companies developing the systems probably have thousand and tens of thousand bugs and points for optimizations which will never be fixed. Any work done on these systems which is not directly connected to a new deployment and paid for by one or many customers are simply a loss for the company.
Much of the "valuable" experience people get from using such a system, is actually how to use it without breaking it/how to use it despite all bugs, errors and strange quirks and twists.
What my small company has been busy with the last years, is to move a lot of logic and data outside such systems. Because it's just to expensive to try and "upgrade" these huge behemoths. We develop external databases to store different data feeds, most likely recieved in XML-format which some of these systems is not capable of using. Actually, one of those systems are only capable of importing/exporting data with fixed lenght ASCII-files.
I don't see any less work needing to be done on these systems in the coming future. Rather, the need for more developers working both inhouse and independent, to patch them up, make small adjustments here and there, and/or write "connectors" for logic/data processing will probably increase.
Re:Graduates are in short supply (Score:3, Insightful)
Moving towards a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
no, no, no (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters, the more automated tools are not efficient enough for most computing platforms (hint: think running that nice VB.NET application in 32KB of ram). Then combine that with the need for algorithms (re: 16MHz processors) and you can see that RAD tools don't apply.
Tom
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about imaging research (stuff like using image processing to learn about the state of food stuffs with infrared cameras), or the hard problems that need to be solved to get to the Semantic Web?
There is a lot of CS work out there. But it's science work, not programming or product development. That's not CS, that's engineering or just programming.
CS not dead, but CS not IT (Score:1, Insightful)
But indeed, most IT people don't need a CS education. The current CS curriculum should be split into a pure CS curriculum and an IT cirriculum. CS should focuus on subjects like computation and computer organisation. IT should focus on information processing and application development. Ofcourse, there will be overlap between the two fields, and overlap with mathematics and other science diciplines, depending on what area you wish to specialise in.
Listen to these dudes (Score:5, Insightful)
Undergraduate education has a few factors that drive the curriculum: one is enrollment (make it too hard, and nobody shows up; require everybody to take it, and everybody has to pass it), another is vocational preparation (what does the job market demand? or -- mixing enrollment and vocation -- what do the students think the job market demands?). The folks doing the teaching aren't really interested in either of these, and nor are the "good students".
The "vocational" side of university education has always been there, and it's always been looked down upon by the really sharp people. And, you know what? In spite of the political rhetoric you hear around the US and Europe, the students who "Hit it out of the park" career-wise, the big successes, the Googles, Netscapes, Yahoos, Nokias and so on, aren't the ones who stick to a vocational curriculum. The ones who just did what the course told them to do are the guys who end up seeing their Technical Support jobs get outsourced.
The "enrollment" issue is even more pernicious. No department wants to lose students -- since students are tied to money and power in the universities. So if a subject gets "less popular", the curriculum gets "easier" to boost retention.
University courses, like other forms of professional formation, do teach a major professional skill: that to achieve results you need to be willing to do lots of crap-work, and that a good job involves doing boring stuff much of the time.
Outside of that, the true strength of universities is that you're given some good resources to play with, and are surrounded by smart, curious, interested people. Find your passion, pursue it, and don't sweat money or jobs. Any employer you'd want to work for will recognize your abilities.
The guy who wrote this article is retarded... (Score:4, Insightful)
1- even if that's true, the 8-year old won't do anything revolutionary without knowing the details
2- even if he could, it would probably be just a toy, not something usable in practice
3- even if it was usable in practice, someone else with more knowledge could do something better
4- etc etc etc
Civil engineering has lost its mystique. There is no longer a need for a vast army of civil engineers. Apartments and houses that civil engineers once built laboriously in final year projects are bought at internet websites and real estate agents.
Good riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
There are problems. From my point of view (*), the typical graduating student is falling behind. It has always been that young person entering the ICT field professionally has had a lot to learn regardless where he got his decree. Right now that knowledge cap is bigger than it has ever been in the 10 years that I can talk about from experience. I see two main reasons for this. First, there simply is more to know. Basic skills like discrete math and coding aren't enough. You need at least strong design skills or a near mastery of a specialty. In fact, if you can't know all it makes more sense to know a specialty. Four or five years you have in college is not long enough except for the most gifted students. Second reason is that ICT is in fact changing and education has been slow to respond. ICT is now more conceptual than before (some other people like to talk about "information intensive vs. data intensive", I think they mean the same thing
Of course, in absolute numbers people will write more code in future than now. It may even be that the absolute number of people working mostly in coding will remain relatively static or even increase a bit, but I do think it more likely that number of coders in decrease at least moderately. In any case it is fairly certain that, relative to non-coders in ICT, the number of coders will decrease significantly.
As to "computer science dying", well, it should have "information science" to begin with. So, in a sense, good riddance.
(*) ICT within FE, lot of contact with student (comp.sci projects), lively but informal connections to industry, work hard to keep myself up-to-date. I would say I have pretty good view.
Is Smelting Dead? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yeah. All my years working in tall buildings, and I never once panicked that the builders didn't know how to smelt, or that maybe they took one metallurgy course in engineering school but have forgotten everything about it except "don't drink incandescent liquids."
Yet the whole world is made of stuff that was, at one point, smelted.
What we're seeing is a new level of abstraction, with a much steeper amplification curve than ever before: The work of a very few extremely expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a relative few very expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of a slightly few relatively expert people becomes the building blocks for the work of relatively many ordinarily skilled people becomes the building blocks for everything everybody else uses. There enough layers between the person the guy designing the circuit traces for a chip's sign-extended add instruction and the guy writing an Excel macro that one chip designer can support the work of hundreds of millions of others. Compare this with the mid-1960s when the guys writing the accounting package could walk into the machine room and physically rewire the machine to make sign-extended adds work faster with odd numbers.
Computer science is not becoming dead. But it is becoming more focussed and more niche-oriented. There are so many things one can do with a computer without a CS degree that the lack of one is not a universal barrier, if it ever was. My last analogy for the day is the automobile factory. There's an assembly line in there full of people making cars, who have never even heard of smelting, have no comprehension of what makes gasoline burn one way and diesel fuel another, and would be utterly hopeless designing the ideal valve geometry, a whole industry full of people without the slightest clue about extractive metallurgy, yet here we are with hundreds of millions of rock-solid, reliable cars on the road.
Re:If you only want to do pure research, maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
But if this is not what you want to do with your background in CS, then don't do it - there are an ever-increasing number of companies that do need things built from the ground up with serious attention to low-level detail: medical research facilities, geographic planning organizations, and metropolitan governments aren't going to find all they need on a shelf somewhere. They just don't post the positions on careerbuilder.com, so you have to pound on doors, wedge your foot inside, and make yourself indispensable.
&laz;
Re:Graduates are in short supply (Score:2, Insightful)
So you are telling me that Universities that teach Computer Science don't teach about the programming paradigms anymore? No computational theory? No proofs of correctness? They don't even give you projects in Haskell or Prolog? (I suck totally at Prolog, but I loved Haskell) Wow, they dropped all that since I graduated 10 years ago?
If you haven't heard of anything I just wrote, you have proof that you didn't have a computer science curriculum, but a programming class. *sigh* Kids these days....
It's the same story everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hardly just CS. My major in college was studio art -- printmaking, illustration, photography, and graphic design -- and I've been a professional graphic designer for 20 years+. People just don't need the same kind of designers anymore. Advancements in technology have made most graphic design tasks really easy, really automated. I bet most people reading this post think they can "do" visual design, when in fact they simply happen to own Photoshop/GIMP and some other graphics apps and some snazzy clip art off of iStockPhoto.com. I bet you can even create fliers or web pages that don't look awful; with a good template, they might even look good. But you still don't have a true understanding of color theory, typography, layout, negative space, photo manipulation, and all the other skills that make a good, creative, original designer. But these advancements in technology have led directly to the decline of art departments around the country (and the rise of smaller, higher-quality art schools such as Parsons, School of Visual Arts, RISD, etc.
This is completely analogous to supposed "CS" majors who don't understand efficient coding, memory allocation, reusable code, storage optimization, security models, etc. And heaven forbid they try to do interface design (which is the best marriage between visual design and software development). They may be smart enough to piece together some Java or C# clips off the Internet into a program that, technically, produces the proper data output, but that's it.
Re:no, no, no (Score:3, Insightful)
Computing Disciplines (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer Science: This is the theoretical, researchoriented discipline. It deals with developing new algorithms, optimization and that side of things.
Software Development: This is the application side of Computer Science. It takes the algorithms developed by CompSci and makes useful applications out of them.
Information Technology: This is the techie discipline. Building computers, setting up networks, administrating systems. I'm not sure why it got that name, but it seems to have.
The problem that this guy has is that he has conflated Computer Science and Software Development. And it used to be the case that they were pretty much mixed - if you wanted to program, you needed to understand all the theoretical stuff yourself. But in these days of large, freely-available libraries and modular software design, the two have become very distinct disciplines.
It's not that Computer Science is dying out; it's that it has subdivided into two separate disciplines, and of the two, there is a much greater demand for Software Developers than Computer Scientists.
Re:Computing Disciplines (Score:4, Insightful)
"Research", "Design", "Practical Application"
Computer Science looks into things which are not immediately practical.
Software Development takes those ideas and makes them practical
Information Technology applies the technology developed by Software Development on real data (ie: information)
But then, by those definitions I'm just an I.T. guy, so that's no fun
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just the evolution of the field (Score:2, Insightful)
As technology improves, the amount of functionality that can be added to our core system increases. I support systems written back to 12 years ago, and you can see the progression where what we did then would be possible for off the shelf software now - our own core systems would handle it with a couple of weeks work. But they'd miss out on a lot of optimisation of processes and when the installations cost millions a year in running costs, that optimisation is well worth the cost.
This is the nature of the industry - permanently moving towards off-the-shelf software, but I don't expect it to finish that process any time soon. We've just started to move to a new level of that with open source, where really standard software gets easy enough that volunteers can supply it for free. Off-the-shelf vendors need to keep moving ahead of the open source advances. Bespoke software houses needs to move ahead of off-the-shelf applications.
The only 'dead' ones are those standing still.
Comp. Sci. is alive and well (Score:2, Insightful)
Computer *science* is what researchers do, not code monkeys.
Re:Needs to evolve into Computer Sciences (plural) (Score:4, Insightful)
Mechanical Engineers and Mechanics
or
Electrical engineers and Electricians"
That's what it _is_ like, but it should really be like:
Physicists and Mechanical Engineers.
Physicists and Electricians.
Computer Science should be about the _science_ of computing, not the design and programming needs of the commercial software industry. If you want to get a job designing roads or mass irrigation systems, you don't spend your entire time at university studying physics or mathematics just because both are involved in becoming a civil engineer, so expecting a computer science course to turn out software engineers makes no more sense than expecting biology graduates to be vets or medical doctors.
What's killing computer science as a curriculum (rather than a field, where it's still alive) is therefore the fact that too many universities have allowed the distinction between science and engineering to become so blurred that it's ended up being something that students, potential employers, and lecturers have become disillusioned with because they all have different definitions of what it should be. The only way to alleviate this would be having three distinct computing degree courses:
1) Computer Science. A purely theoretical and heavily mathematical course that covers all aspects of general computing for those who want a career in research or academia that aims to produce people like Doug Englebart, Alan Kay, Edmund Djikstra, and Niklaus Wirth.
2) Computer Systems Engineering. Geared towards what used to be called "Systems Analysts", i.e. people who know how to define requirements, and then convert them into a working system of arbitrary complexity (i.e. from small office to world-spanning mega-corporation) that _does what the customer wants_.
3) Software Engineering. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of designing _and implementing_ software for everything from small embedded systems to vast n-tier multi-user set-ups, hugely parallel systems, etc. Also includes a module on human-computer interfaces, i.e. writing stuff that people will actually want to use instead of doing so because they.
IMO fields like artificial intelligence and robotics would do much better in terms of both their theoretical foundation and practical results if they were removed from computer science entirely, and instead became distinct fields that would therefore be freed from the current "throw a huge binary computer at every problem that nature seems to have solved with the equivalent of a four transistor analogue circuit, and then make excuses for the fact that it's still crappier at everything than an ant" syndrome.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of companies cannot stay ahead by buying off the shelf products - they NEED to be ahead of the game, and they recognise that a so called "off the shelf" product at the level of ERP, CRM, etc. is really just a bag of components that the vendor will integrate into a product for you - they will charge you to do the analysis for your industry sector, and then they will take the knowledge they have gained and sell it on to others in the same sector - you paid them to shape the product for your sector
On the legacy side, it's fine to buy a big integrated suite if you are a new start-up, but I have never worked anywhere that could contemplate stripping out all their apps and starting from scratch, it's an endless round of upgrade payroll, replace ERP, bring in CRM. And someone has to makle all these work together.
There are also those systems that no one writes - Engineering, Financial (as in city trading - I'm sure someone does do these as packages but in my experince there is a lot of in house software development going on in this area), process monitoring and control
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
This statement makes me weep inside.
The number one issue that governs how how well a team can work together is how well they communicate with each other. If everyone on the team has a basic understanding of the theory, then they share a common vernacular which is their most valuable asset when it comes to actually getting work done. Without a common vernacular, they will be required to invent their own which is a time consuming and error-prone endeavor which inevitably results in a late and bug-ridden product.
You don't need to have a CS degree, but if I have to go to the white board to explain stuff that could have been quickly and clearly communicated verbally to anyone who had studied the basics, I'm probably better off not giving you development assignments in the first place.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
But the work of a software engineer just ain't science.
My collegues and I, being software engineers in X-Ray astronomy, disagree with you
Sure some CS majors go on to make a new computer language or new technique for image analysis, but that doesn't make the software engineer less scientific. The systems we develop are used by X-Ray astronomers and would not exist without the Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Computer Engineers, and Software Engineers.
It has been my observation that most of the science is done by physicists (and other scientists) who understand enough about computers to code their own small routine to illustrate their point, and hand it off to us software engineers to clean up, make reliable, and integrate in to a complete hardware system that is capable of performing the science work they need.
When spending millions of dollars on one-of-a-kind hardware, you not only depend on the computer algorithm being correct but also reliable, thoroughly tested, and an integral part of a well engineered system. All of our science is done in unmanned flights, so we can't simply reboot when something goes wrong.
Before you correct me and say that we are not capable of computational science, my collegue developed a tracking system that calculates vehicle orientation based on images of stars captured by a telescope mounted on the vehicle...
Anyway my point is that science is more engineering than algorithm these days. I'm not saying pure computer science is not important. I'm saying that we must introduce engineering practices into computer science to tackle the hard problems. This is why I believe that Computer Science is evolving into Software Engineering.
As for the non-scientific information systems, thats a job for a MIS graduate.. :P
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
2. computer science might be spinning off "engineering" disciplines, but only after certain hard problems are solved; I seriously doubt that in your effort to create your positional system you discovered anything new about graph theory, cryptography, or algorithm analysis.
I work with people like you everyday who think that because they write highly technical programs to convert their specialized knowledged into something that runs is doing "computer science." That is "applied" CS, and if you wanted to get into it you are really doing an engineering task.
I have an undergrad in mechanical engineer, a MS in CS, and am working on my PhD in CS right now. I know the difference between real CS and applied CS/software engineering - and it is vast. I'd also argue that MIS people are vastly more useful than people who call themselves computer scientists because they have a formal education in some technical discipline yet work mostly with computers.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
my example of a linked list was the simplest algorithm I could suggest where a crap programmer could do the wrong thing.
Re:The hard sciences are all dying (Score:2, Insightful)
You might just have stumbled across a sensitive 20 year old. I'm 32 and I'd still burst into tears today if someone yelled at me - even if I thought they had a point, the shame, frustration, and the knowledge that you've fucked up can be overwhelming. (Of course, humiliation isn't acceptable workplace behaviour under any circumstances, so I'm assuming such a chewing out would happen in private.)
The rest of your statement may or may not be justified (although the same thing happens to debate quality anywhere the number of participants is constantly growing - it's happened on reddit and USEnet, and every web forum I've ever seen - and I don't think it's unique to the age). But either that little anecdote doesn't support "entitlement culture" the way you think it does, or there's a fair bit more to the story you're leaving out. (Or you're just a bully. I hope it's not that.)
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
computer science might be spinning off "engineering" disciplines, but only after certain hard problems are solved; I seriously doubt that in your effort to create your positional system you discovered anything new about graph theory, cryptography, or algorithm analysis.
Have you? I admit its been a couple of years since I studied cryptography (S-Boxes, Fiestel Networks, Self synchronizing stream ciphers, oh my!). However I do perform algorithm analysis, and I use and try to improve the current working state of graph theory. You assumed that since I use engineering practices that somehow I am incapable of performing science. I admit my last internal paper was over 2 years ago, but in lieu of publishing I have been working within a couple of science missions.
I work with people like you everyday who think that because they write highly technical programs to convert their specialized knowledged into something that runs is doing "computer science." That is "applied" CS, and if you wanted to get into it you are really doing an engineering task.
I'm sorry I thought science required using specialized knowledge to prove a hypothesis (or create a program that does). I'm glad you corrected me... I have worked with people who think that because they are pursuing a PhD, that somehow they know better than the rest of us on how things are done.
I do work with people who have actual PhDs in CS (and physics), and they never once considered me a code jockey or strictly "applying" computer science. We have mutual respect in our field of work. Just because I have a degree in Software Engineering, does not mean that I just code. I am not a manager of a large software project, I am a member of a 3 person software team (within a larger program) tasked with doing cutting edge work. If current technology can't do what we need, we must invent it. Admittingly, I do need to publish more.
My point in my previous message was not that all software engineers are scientists, but rather some computer scientists are software engineers. Well, I'll let you get back to pumping lemmas...
For the last fucking time... (Score:2, Insightful)
laws of physics & math same in Bangalore (Score:3, Insightful)
But it is cheaper to do it overseas. If it does not involve local culture or heavy interaction with the customer, then firms will find it cheaper to offshore such work. The laws of physics and math are the same in Bangalore, but paychecks are not.
I see IT in the US moving toward more hands-on work. Companies want liaisons between customers/users and technology, NOT technology purists. It is not that technology purist demand is outright going away, it is that the demand is shrinking, or at least stagnant compared to liaison work.
CS != CS Academic Research (Score:2, Insightful)
But computer science academic research is not computer science! In academic research, you have to publish good results and write funding proposals (that actually get the $). And often, long term research (say 5+ years) that are worthwhile are neglected by grant committee because they like to see results sooner or they deem the research itself is too risky. So to some people (e.g. non-tenure track researchers), their prospect could be better without pursuing CS research at this time.
I start to suspect that what we observe now in CS academic is merely a consequence of the gradual disappearance of long term CS research over the last two decades. After all, without new ideas and concepts, CS academic research would exhaust the existing ones eventually. And when these ideas are being reused too frequently, the public stop caring and CS academic research loses funding support.
But then, if we look back to history, we can see great research can be done by people without funding. e.g. Einstein and Godel both completed their monumental works without people funding them. So I wouldn't be too pessimistic about the future of CS. CS Academic Research is another story though.
Econ 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Some years back, before the boom, I decided that Moore's Law (and other economic forces) were going to increase the number of programmable devices exponentially for decades to come, creating an insatiable economic demand for programmers. When the iBoom arrived, I saw it as a short-term overreaction, but still a part of long term extreme ramp up in demand for programmers.
Then I started studying economics seriously and discovered the mistake in my thinking. Demand for programmers is not proportional to the amount of code running in the world. I've written code that will soon be on a billion (with a "B") devices, but it's the same code it was when it was on fewer than 100 M devices, and those of us who wrote it easily fit in one small cubicle pen.
Real demand for programmers depends on how much NEW code has to be written and HOW FAST. (And by "new" I certainly include maintenance, glue code, customization of existing packages, etc.) If the number of programmable devices explodes (as I still believe--and observe), much of it will run code written by very few people, customized a bit, tweaked and glued by a few more people for other devices, and massively replicated. And if that customization can be done slowly enough, it can be done by an arbitrarily small group of programmers. Custom code for your own personal needs and those of your business group will constitute most new code, and that will be supported by tools that do what you want with a minimum of "programming" on your part--tools like Excel.
Then the same Moore's Law and other forces that create the "everything will run software and be connected" world of the future also brings a hundred million or more new potential programmers into the developed world economy (without ever leaving their local undeveloped economies) each year to meet the demand for however much new code needs to be written each year, and the job of "programmer" is going to look more and more like various factory worker jobs (the decent ones, not the dangerous ones.)
So the professor is decrying the falling interest in Computer Science. How would enrollment look in a "Factory Science" department at his university, I wonder....
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Insightful)
You are absolutely correct. Working for a physicist doesn't make me a physicist. However, for the physicists to do their science I must perform mine. Sure, they garner headlines with their achievements. But that doesn't make my (or my co-workers) work less of a science. I don't want (or can) divulge much info, but what I (and others) do is not off the shelf and do require some computational theory.
We have hypothesis, we have established theories, we create new theories, we perform proofs, and we publish (when allowed). Sometimes, we prove ourselves wrong.... Anyway scientific method is being used. If it walks a duck and quacks like a duck, there is a good chance that it is a duck.
Maybe you accidently made a good point - That Computer Science only appears to be dying because the actual work doesn't always take center stage. Instead, it (mostly) works behind the scenes to accomplish some other task, and only seeing the light of day in some obscure paper in the IEEE or ACM repository.
Not to mention, people assume that all the fundamental rules of computing have been defined and all that is left is to hire a programmer to connect all the pieces together.
Funny the engineering community is skeptical that computer science can be made into engineering discipline, and the slashdot community is skeptical that it is actually science... Just can't seem to get a break ;)
Is McBride credible? (Score:1, Insightful)
It seems that the article he wrote is neither accurate or credible. The amount of damage that he is causing to DMU students following CS related subjects at is unacceptable and should not go away quietly. I know for sure that if I was a student studying a CS related subject at DMU I would not be happy and would also be forwarding him an invoice for my full course tuition costs, seeing as he has in effect has devalued any DMU CS related degree immensely.
I call upon the staff and principles within the DMU CS department to come forward, debunk his comments and then terminate his involvement with the university post haste.
I heard all this in the early 90's (Score:1, Insightful)
Accounting hasn't changed much over the years, but after that from Distribution facilities to resturant management. Do you really want someone telling you how to run your business? Off the shelf is good for perhaps a small operation, but a large one needs to think in unique ways to stay in business. Having the technical experts on hand to make those alterations for 5mill a year might beat to hell the 14mill a year you will pay on consulting and software lisc costs.
The Difference (Score:2, Insightful)
Take relational databases and SQL. Coming up with the concept of storing information based on predicates concerning relationships between data: Science. Writing some SQL queries/designing a database: Engineering.
In short, if you can express the results of the research in a form that is mathematically verifiable, you research is in the domain of the science of computation.
And while at it's heart CS is purely mathematical, we often see today a mixup in universities where informatics(theories concerning how computational frameworks should be, e.g systems design..etc)is referred to as CS. This is simply wrong - technology is not science, even if it develops on scientific basis. I personally think neither is going to "die" soon, although the true theorists will have a harder time justifying their existence (coming up with new mathematics) than the informatics/soft.engs, who will always have some room to expand and design new technology and technological frameworks. CS is not physics - the science is purely conceptual and the main theory is established with mathematical certainty because, in fact, it is mathematics. To stay alive we need to find more questions to ask, and there are a few left I think.
Exactly where I'm coming from (Score:3, Insightful)
I see no reduction in computer science work here at my university. The possibilities are increasing, not decreasing. One can bemoan the out-sourcing of American jobs, but that has nothing to do with the fact that computer science is not dead. Such a statement is as ridiculous as saying physics is dead.
Computer science is still a very vibrant research field.
Re:Econ 101 (Score:3, Insightful)
What kind of work are you thinking of, specifically? I'm having trouble imagining how programming would look as a factory worker job. Having assembly-line "programmers" as IT advances seems counterintuitive to me. Seems to me that all the real grunt work should be done by the off-the-shelf software and all the really creative/custom stuff still needs programmers.
The only real trend I can identify is an increase in high level tools/languages used. But I don't see how that makes programmers more like factory workers. Just because you're not twiddling the registers of the video card with assembler doesn't mean you don't need a solid foundatation in computer science (ok, nobody NEEDs such a foundation, but it helps).
-matthew
Re:It's the same story everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Good to hear. I've been the UI designer on several programming projects. It is usually a tough battle to convince programmers that data output needs to be more than correct -- it needs to be useful as well. As with any kind of engineering, the amount of effort required of the user is inversely proportional to the amount of design required of the developers. If you want the user to spend a lot of time figuring out what the interface or data means, then don't worry about the interface. If you want the user to spend only a little time getting what they need, then you need to do a lot more work to make sure the data is clear, the interface is simple, and the user's time is optimized.
In the end, a bad interface will make people believe your data is wrong, even if it's not.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
He is correct, in so much as you basically described software engineering.
Engineering, in my mind, is finding solutions to problems. Science, on the other hand, is more like identifying new problems.
Just because your systems are designed to solve science problems doesn't make you a scientist. That said, it's not like there isn't any cross between the disciplines. Software engineering grads probably learn about P vs. NP and CS grads recieved minimal instruction in software engineering (I say minimal since 95% of the class probably got coding jobs...) Then you land in the real world and learn what you need to know for your job. That may involve expanding on CS theory or doing cutting edge stuff using components from the established body of knowledge in new and interesting ways.
I, of course, do absolutely no CS in my job. It's all software all the time. I don't think what I do is at all uncool (and it's not even close to as cool as what you do). I get the impression that a lot of software engineers want to be called scientists, and according to my 2nd year stats teacher, that's the wrong approach. He always said "call yourself a software engineer, they get paid much better."
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say you were wrong. Just that you bit in a little hard, since your job description sounded pretty much like pure engineering.
Compsci degree going; IT-tech degree replacing (Score:3, Insightful)
Working as a programmer in an IT department doesn't usually have much to do with science -- it's about trying to create more standardized cogs from a growing number of previously coded cogs.
How much research is being done today on individual users benefitting from 32-128core machines?
Assuming some magic doesn't happen and GHz start climbing / doubling without frying, it seems like they are just raising GHz/chip by adding more cores at similar
clock rates. How can this benefit the average PC user? If it can't be exploited for "individual persons", it sounds like the PC may be a thing of the past.
Is that what people want? Right now, the only ways of using multi-cores is usually running separate programs at the same time -- if you can use that -- but a home system doesn't usually need to serve web pages to 1000's of users. OR, divide your machine into "VM"s Nice for test/develop/production/redundancy, but again -- not too helpful for the average joe wanting programs to run faster/smoother, more user friendliness.
What will it take to use Parallel computing in the Personal Computer industry? doesn't that sorta imply, if not the death, a serious problem in the Personal Computer industry.
Do we have enough cores to start building some practical AI's? Can we develop
special compilers and light-weight threads (i.e. - not separate processes) to allow use of multi cores dynamically in an individual program (for loops not needing previous loop result could all be parallelized if parallelizing cost to create helper threads for a few to several loops could have low enough overhead to make it worth it.
Seems like AI and parallelizing are at least two areas that need computer science, but that doesn't seem to be what most people are doing these days. Might use it in voie and face recognition, but again -- not very general tasks.
What companies are doing Computer Science these days? Seems like most employers just need development of applications to run curent "paradigms. No "computer science" needed.
Most high level developers at companies -- even in Open Source (or at least the Linux Kernel) are awfully conservative when it comes to doing computer science. They want the tried and true, step-wise development vs. large scale "disruptive technologies" that could enable whole new ways of doing things. People at the top of most large projects (commercial and O.S.) are too conservative to be doing real computer science.
Maybe research grants? Seems like the Bush idea of research grants are things that are guaranteed to provide benefits in the near future (soon enough to be used in the theater of battle, for example).
Is there any place for computer science research outside of getting your doctoral?