IT workforce development: Losing the numbers game by Joe Vanden Plas

This article is somewhat regional, dealing with the software industry in southeastern Wisconsin, but the topic of declining enrollment in Computer Science and other computer technology fields is dealt with very well.

Fundamentally, there simply are not enough students in the pipeline to replace the technologists that soon will be retiring in droves, and with computer science enrollment dropping precipitously, IT jobs are either being unfilled or are taking long periods of time to fill.

As a result, businesses are having difficulty finding creative problem solvers in an era where “IT genes” exist in just about every job, even those that seemingly are irrelevant to technology.

Robin Pickering, a recruiting manager for Manpower Professional in Milwaukee, said the talent shortage started several years ago when colleges and universities experienced a dip in the number of students going into computer science and engineering.

That’s a good characterization of the problem. This next quote is, in my opinion, right on in its assessment of some of the key factors in the current crisis.

Several culprits have been cited. Certain segments of the media are blamed for the way they covered the dotcom bust, which coincided with the start of declining enrollments in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines, and their inability (or unwillingness) to cover issues like offshoring in their full context. The coverage has played a role in creating the myths that IT salaries are low and all the jobs have been moved overseas.

I believe the market for software and computer talent in the U.S. has never been stronger (and that’s even in the presence of offshoring and outsourcing).

So you’re Computer Science seniors. Congratulations! We’ve taught you to write…

code.

And you’re darned good at it from what we can tell. Some of you are elegant composers of programmatic poetry, others architects of grand software structure, and others are codeslingers — the last programmer left standing when all the shots have been fired. Truth is, you’re good at what we’ve trained you to do. And the industry will reward you for your aptitude and your perseverance.

To a point….

Until it’s time to write your annual report and convince your managers that you’re all you think you are. Heck, maybe you are. But they won’t know it until you express it… In writing.

Until the time that you see a critical technical need in your organization and set about to write a persuasive memo (in English!) to convince the powers-that-be that the collective captains should change course quickly. “Trust me because I’m smart,” won’t cut it.

Until the time that you find that you don’t work alone anymore, and that others must come to understand what you understand, using your arcane scribblings as their primary source of enlightenment. Or when those naïve newbies find themselves maintaining the software that you wrote, struggling to understand your code because the comments are, shall we say, terse.

At these junctures, I hope you come to understand more deeply that while code controls computer behavior, prose is better suited for persuading people.

And while your computer delivers perfect, blind obedience to your incantations…

People distribute the promotions… and the praise… the respect… and the raise.

Rich Programmer Food by Steve Yegge

Lengthy but brilliant rant by Steve Yegge on the educational, personal, spiritual, moral, intellectual, and engineering value of compilers (knowing how they work, writing them… that sort of thing).

Several of my favorite quotes follow:

Gentle, yet insistent executive summary: If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.

Designing an effective undergrad CS degree is hard. It’s no wonder so many ivy-league schools have more or less given up and turned into Java Certification shops.

I’d call compiler optimization an endless chasm of eternal darkness, except that it’s pretty fun. So it’s an endless chasm of fun eternal darkness, I guess.

You get the idea. It is a *lengthy* rant, so be prepared. But it’s worth the ride, whether you agree or not.

Continued Drop in CS Bachelor’s Degree Production and Enrollments as the Number of New Majors Stabilizes

Yet another article on CS enrollment, but this one from the Computing Research Association (CRA).

According to HERI/UCLA, the percentage of incoming undergraduates among all degree-granting institutions who indicated they would major in CS declined by 70 percent between fall 2000 and 2005.[1] Unsurprisingly, the number of students who declared their major in CS among the Ph.D.-granting departments surveyed by CRA also fell (Figure 1). After six years of declines, the number of new CS majors in fall 2006 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,798). Nevertheless, this was only a slight decline from the 7,952 new majors reported in fall 2005, and may indicate that the numbers are stabilizing.

It’s a very short article with several enlightening graphs. I particularly like the concluding paragraph, which lends some historical perspective that seems to be lacking in almost every other article I’ve seen on this subject.

It is important to note that a steep drop in degree production among CS departments has happened before. According to NSF, between 1980 and 1986 undergraduate CS production nearly quadrupled to more than 42,000 degrees. This period was followed by a swift decline and leveling off during the 1990s, with several years in which the number of degrees granted hovered around 25,000. During the late 1990s, CS degree production again surged to more than 57,000 in 2004.[2] In light of the economic downturn and slow job growth during the early 2000s, the current decline in CS degree production was foreseeable.

Students staying away from IT majors, by Nicole Dionne, Providence Business News.

Thank you Nicole for a positive article that appears to back my bold prediction from an earlier post.

Despite the fact that high-paying technology jobs are plentiful, students have been shying away from the profession and leaving a talent gap across the country.

“We have more jobs than students,” said Hal Records, chairman of the computer information systems department at Bryant University. “In 2001, with the dot-com crash, a lot of parents lost their jobs, and everybody said technology is not a good way to go.”

At Bryant, he said, “we’ve gone from 119 graduates in 2001 to 60 last year, and we’ll probably graduate 40 this year. The irony is, the jobs never really went away. In spite of the outsourcing, the number of technology jobs is increasing. So what we have now is a massive gap between the demand for technology graduates and the supply of technology graduates.”

Amen. That’s what I’m seeing. Glad to know I’m not the only one… 🙂

Is computer science dead?

Without intending to do so, I appear to have launched a series of posts on the topic of Computer Science enrollments. I guess it’s been getting quite a bit of press attention lately, and we’ve certainly had our fair share of discussions on the subject in the CS department at BYU.

With respect to the title of this article, it’s one thing to note that there are upturns and downturns in any industry, particularly in one as volatile as ours. But it’s the “X is dead” alarmists (or the more subtle “Is X dead?” alarmists) whose arrival officially announces the popularity of issue X, whatever it happens to be. So here we are.

The author of this article leads by citing the article by Neil McBride, whom we already discussed in a previous post.

After some gloom and doom reporting of dropped enrollments, and a moving story about a young woman whose family insisted she would never get a job (but who did — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles), the author settles into some decent analysis, culminating in some potentially encouraging (or at least pleasantly neutral) news.

“Some of the newer aspects of IT are more prescriptive; they require less innovation. Computer science is more cutting edge,” Professor Looi says.

The university offers a general IT overview in the first year of its technology degree, branching into business analysis, software development, system administration and computer science. There are 40 students in computer science, down from 200 15 years ago.

But Professor Looi still believes there is a market for purists. “There will always be a need for computer scientists or technology will stop advancing,” he says.

“It will only advance on what has already been invented. We still need people to create, but possibly not as many as we needed before.”

Or possibly more than we needed before…

Or possibly a greater diversity of professional destinations for technical people than before…

Or possibly…

At this point I’m just not buying the demise reporting. I think two issues have contributed to decreased enrollments: 1) the dot.com implosion and 2) the threat of outsourcing. I’ll hit those in greater detail in a later post.

Meanwhile it seems to me that the market is once again heating up, and employers in the Utah software industry can’t fill spots because demand is so far outstripping supply at this point. Salaries are going up to where they were 6 or 7 years ago during the paper-thin over-heated boom.

I’m going on record right now and predict that enrollments in Computer Science worldwide will begin rising no later than Fall 2008 (although my heart is screaming “2007!”). I further predict that Computer Science enrollments will exceed 2001 enrollment levels by 2015. Yes, I know about outsourcing. I’m including that reality in my prediction. I’ll try and write a bit more about that China and India and what outsourcing implies as soon as I can get to it.

The following two articles appeared on the British Computer Society web page over the past few weeks.

“The death of computing” by Neil McBride

“Demise of computer science exaggerated” by Keith Mander

The first article was written 22 January 2007 by Neil McBride, a principal lecturer in the School of Computing at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom.

The second is a response, posted in February 2007 by Keith Mander, Chair of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing in the United Kingdom and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kent.

McBride takes a generally dim view of things…

So where does that leave computing departments in universities? Do we pull up the drawbridge of the castle of computational purity and adopt a siege mentality: a band of brothers fighting to the last man? Or do we recognise that the discipline is dying if not actually dead, and breathing shallowly.

Hmmm… Seems as silly as suggesting that because cars are a commodity, we no longer need automative engineering departments or automotive engineers (or mechanical engineers for that matter). Does the manner in which we train software engineers need to shift? Absolutely. Is the field shutting down? Not a chance. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on all the software systems the world will ultimately know. And the remaining pool of fundamental research questions in computing is huge and growing.

Prof. Mander’s rebuttal is well-written and thoughtful…

Suggestions that the teaching of computer science in universities is about to fade away are premature. While it is certainly true that applications for undergraduate courses in computer science have fallen by about 50 per cent since 2001, its value to the graduate remains as strong as ever, and will be so for the foreseeable future.

For those playing in the software industry at any level, I recommend these two articles — the first because it is thought-provoking, the second because it is balanced and rational. The issue of declining enrollments in CS is huge, especially for those of us who make our living training those majors. But the issue is even more critical to an industry that is once again expanding rapidly while university enrollments languish.