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Thursday, March 25, 2004
Joanne Jacobs posts that computer science is losing students in academia:
Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering amid widespread worries about the accelerating pace of offshoring by high-technology employers.
A new study, to be published in May, shows there was a dramatic drop-off of enrollment in those fields last year -- 19 percent -- and some educators warn about the potential consequences for America's global competitiveness.
Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science courses continued to grow after the collapse of the dot-com bubble until the sharp decline in the 2002-03 academic year, according to the Washington-based Computing Research Association. The number of newly declared majors in computer science also showed a sudden 23 percent plunge last year.
Speaking as a developer, I can say that it is far easier to teach someone who knows your business how to program than it is to teach a programmer your business. Companies who want to offload work to India and other places are free to do so. But it is difficult to ensure that those types of programmers are going to be able to create the robust, useful applications that business end users need.
Software must accomplish a task to be relevant. To make the software relevant, the developers must understand the problem domain. This is the reason why I believe that this outsourcing issue is going to prove to be cyclical. It really isn't like manufacturing, where a repetitive process can be done by someone with little or no training in the business.
Given that, I believe American programmers in large part are ill-equipped to produce meaningful software, because they learn how to code without learning how to produce code. Does it do any good to know the interworkings of PERL and C++ if you can't elicit business requirements from the user? Software engineering skills are sorely lacking in the workplace. Potential CS students would be well-advised to follow a little advice. Learn skills in a way that will make them practical, and relevant. And learn more software engineering skills.Labels: Archives_2004
.: posted by
Dave
3:57 PM
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