Early in my undergraduate career, I decided to abandon CS as a major. Even as an undergraduate, I already had a side job in what would become the internet industry, and computer science, as an academic field, felt theoretical and unnecessary. Reasoning that I could easily get a job as a computer professional no matter what it said on my degree, I decided to study other things while I had the chance.
people interested in working in CS can’t just “learn French” anymore. things in the field used to be this way up until a few years ago, but not anymore. you used to be able to major in whatever interested you, and as long as you knew some HTML/CSS/JS you could find work somewhere. now, you need a degree in CS, you need impressive projects, you need to know all these frameworks, you need to spend hours upon hours doing leetcode.
there are several problems here. firstly, like another user wrote, software engineering is one of the only remaining comfortable, well-paying jobs left. if people were guaranteed jobs by the government no matter what they majored in, you’d probably have a 75% drop in CS majors. far more people would be majoring in French, in film, in history, in the arts, etc. shit, I myself wouldn’t be majoring in CS. we have a system and a culture that shames people for studying what they’re actually interested in, and tells them to view university as training for work. we went from “oh, you can’t find a job as a history major? maybe you should have majored in something useful like CS you idiot”. people all start majoring in CS, and now it’s a problem that arts programs are being cut and students don’t know anything about the humanities anymore.
secondly, this isn’t a university problem, but something deliberately caused by capitalists. pay for software engineers was too high for too long, and companies needed to get wages down to increase profits for shareholders. they encouraged everyone to ‘learn to code’, people did it it, and capital won. the job market is awful right now, and wages will likely never be where they were a few years ago.
people interested in working in CS can’t just “learn French” anymore. things in the field used to be this way up until a few years ago, but not anymore. you used to be able to major in whatever interested you, and as long as you knew some HTML/CSS/JS you could find work somewhere. now, you need a degree in CS, you need impressive projects, you need to know all these frameworks, you need to spend hours upon hours doing leetcode.
there are several problems here. firstly, like another user wrote, software engineering is one of the only remaining comfortable, well-paying jobs left. if people were guaranteed jobs by the government no matter what they majored in, you’d probably have a 75% drop in CS majors. far more people would be majoring in French, in film, in history, in the arts, etc. shit, I myself wouldn’t be majoring in CS. we have a system and a culture that shames people for studying what they’re actually interested in, and tells them to view university as training for work. we went from “oh, you can’t find a job as a history major? maybe you should have majored in something useful like CS you idiot”. people all start majoring in CS, and now it’s a problem that arts programs are being cut and students don’t know anything about the humanities anymore.
secondly, this isn’t a university problem, but something deliberately caused by capitalists. pay for software engineers was too high for too long, and companies needed to get wages down to increase profits for shareholders. they encouraged everyone to ‘learn to code’, people did it it, and capital won. the job market is awful right now, and wages will likely never be where they were a few years ago.