And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them.  ..bruce..

I was reading the comment thread to this Slashdot post on the declining percentage of women studying computer science. All the explanations you would expect are offered, with a fair amount of point and counterpoint. But one commenter offered a very real example of the difference between computer science and the various professional engineering fields (civil, mechanical, etc.):

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. We met in college. She was a civil engineering major, I was a computer science major. She later changed her major to mechanical engineering when she learned that ME’s are more widely employable than CEs. When we met she was a freshman and I was a senior.

I went on to get a masters degree, she took the classes for a master degree but spent the time she would have spent on a thesis getting ready for, and passing, the P.E. exam. She has had her stamp for a long time.

We are both now in out fifties. She gets calls several times a year offering her jobs. Some in the private sector, some in the public sector. People value her decades of experience. People look up to MEs with decades of experience and a professional certification.

I was laid off for the last time on my 49th birthday and have not been able to find a technical job since. It is hard to find a company that will believe that I actually have the experience I have. I can’t tell you how many times I have had an interview where I have been challenged on my experience and even though I can prove every bit of it people just don’t believe it. And, don’t get me started on certification for computer people, compared to getting a PE certification in the computer world isn’t even a bad joke. It is mostly just a con.

Both sexism and ageism are quite rampant in the IT field. Much of the hiring that goes on consists of bringing in cheaper labor willing to work long hours without overtime. Such an approach is, I believe, counterproductive, but that’s true of much of what passes for IT decision making and management within corporations and government agencies.

The problem is that no certification and licensing standards were set up 30-40 years ago, when they should have been. The debate raged — we discussed it at length in my CS 404 class as an undergrad — but the problem was that software engineering was just then being created, and there was no consensus on what the governing standards and practices should be.

Thoughts?  ..bruce..

My two latest Baseline columns talk about ways to retain IT staff. The first column talks about making an effort to align your staff’s individual professional goals with your organization’s goals. The second column talks about how to improve your IT staff while encouraging them to stay with your firm.

As always, feedback is welcome here or there.  ..bruce..

Back in 1985-87, while I was teaching at BYU, I mentioned to my friend Wayne Holder — one the finest software engineers I’ve ever known — that students at BYU could no longer simply declare their major to be Computer Science; instead, they had to take certain prerequisites, apply to the CS department, and be accepted. Wayne thought that was too complicated. He suggested that the prospective candidate be put into a room with (a) a bowlful of money and (b) some really nifty hardware and software. The candidate could then choose either to grab a handful of money and leave or to hang out and play with the computer gear; those who chose the latter would be admitted to the program.

I think Wayne was dead on, and this article in Computerworld (hat tip to Slashdot) tends to support that, though the survey quoted in from the United Kingdom rather than the United States:

Responses from nearly 2,000 undergraduates across the UK showed that most students think the IT sector has a bright future with good prospects for highly paid jobs.

But over 60% of non-computing students do not wish to enter the sector because they think it will be boring.

I’ve written before that talent is a key factor in IT personnel issues, and only a small portion of the general population appears to be talented in IT. People who have little or no aptitude for IT are likely to find it boring at best and confusing at worst.

However, that natural aversion to IT has been overcome at least twice in the last 30 years. The first time was in the mid-1980s and was largely a response to the explosive growth of the personal computer industry, led by Apple, IBM and Microsoft, but including many, many firms making both hardware and software. I wrote for BYTE Magazine back then, and individual issues of BYTE ran anywhere from 300 to nearly 600 pages, due to the sheer volume of ads. My observation as a CS instructor at BYU was that many of our students had come into the program thinking they were going become rich and/or famous, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.  They viewed computer science the same way my fellow undergrads a decade earlier had looked at law or med school. Hence the tremendous run-up in CS enrollment, not just at BYU but all across the United States.

Then came the First Tech Crash, which hit around 1988 — helped along, if not outright triggered by the stock market crash in October 1987 — and lasted into 1991 or so. Large numbers of hardware and software companies went out of business, and the personal computer market pretty much narrowed down to IBM and a small number of IBM PC clone manufacturers, with Apple treading water (at best). The chart above shows how CS enrollment mirrored that crash. By the early 1990s, the joke in the IT industry was: “Do you know what the status symbol of the 90s is? A job.”

CS enrollment nationwide was pretty flat from 1991 to 1997, and down at a level that you’d have to go back to 1981 to match. Most likely, people going into computer science at that time were — like me, all the way back in 1974 — going into it because we liked the field, not because we thought we’d be rich.

By 1998, however, the “dot-com boom” had become visible enough to start driving CS enrollment up again. There was an enormous demand for software engineers, with a lot of venture capital to back it up — news articles reported programmers being recruited out of high school, and CS graduates were getting large salaries and signing bonuses. Beyond that was the vision of the “nerd lottery” (to use Bruce Henderson’s phrase): dot-com startups would go public, and many of the startup’s employees (right down to receptionists) would walk away multi-millionaires. Mainstream corporations tried to get in on the dot com boom as well, starting various e-commerce and internet intiatives.

In just about this same time period, the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem got everyone’s attention, and even those organizations, both commercial and governmental, that kept the dot-com craziness at arm’s length found themselves having to do exhaustive testing and remediation of their IT systems from top to bottom. Business and government in the United States would end up spending $110 billion on Y2K remediation, all in just a few years.

As the chart shows, CS enrollement skyrocketed again, nearly tripling from 1997 to 2003, largely due to the combination of these two factors.  Unfortunately for those students, Y2K remediation largely finished up almost at the same time the Second Tech Crash (or “Dot Com Crash”) started, namely March 2000. The NASDAQ stock index peaked at its all-time high value of 5048.62 on March 10, 2000, a 100% increase over what it had been just a year earlier. (Stop and think about that: what if the Dow Jones Industrial Average were to hit 24,000 a year from now?) It was a classic bubble, and now it was popping, or at least deflating; the NASDAQ index currently trades at less than half that value. (Note that the DJIA is up roughly 20% — and was up over 30% earlier this year — from its value on that same date eight years ago.)

This tech crash was far more brutal than the first one. The IT employment marketplace was flooded with massive numbers of IT engineers who were no longer needed, one way or the other, and even talented IT engineers had a hard time getting visibility over the sheer number of warm bodies out there.  But it took a while for that feedback to get back into the colleges and universities; enrollment continued to climb until about 2003 but appears to have been slumping since then (see the chart above) and could actually drop back nearly to where it was when I graduated with my own CS degree some 30 years ago.

In other words, the real issue isn’t why CS enrollment is declining; the question is why did it ever climb so high in the first place? And it’s pretty clear that it tracks the two major bubbles of the past 30 years: the personal computer boom in the mid-1980s and the dot-com/Y2K boom of the late 1990s. After each bubble deflates, CS enrollment sinks back to its “natural” level, based on the distribution of IT-related talent and inclination in the general population.

The problem, however — as I first noted over 12 years ago — is that this “natural” level isn’t enough to supply sufficient IT talent for successful IT develompment and deployment in all the businesses, vendors, government agencies and other organizations that need it.

In my opinion, there is no shortage of IT engineers — particularly not after the vast numbers drawn into the industry due to Y2K and the dot-com boom — there’s just a shortage of talented ones. This is why you get conflicting claims and statistics about “personnel shortages” in the IT industry (cf. here vs. here, as well as the battle over raising the limit on H-1B visas and the offshoring debate).

The various attempts to “boost” CS enrollment at colleges and universities will have only a small effect on that talent shortage; for the most part, it will likely bring additional people into the IT industry who lack the talent or inclination to do well there.  In other words, it won’t solve our IT problems at all.  ..bruce..

After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.

Read the whole article.  ..bruce w..

Thanks to the Computing Research Association, I’ve found the National Science Foundation data that shows this was a national trend and a very real spike — and that I taught right at what would be the peak of CS degrees awarded (1985-87) for almost a decade:

(Click for larger view. Note: the NSF source has no data from undergraduate CS degrees for 1999; the value used above for 1999 is interpolated from 1998 to 2000.)

From what I could tell as a CS instructor during that period, this massive surge of enrollment was due largely to the hype surround the advent of personal computers, with a particular focus on the attention given to Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft. However, the personal computer industry went through what I call the First Tech Crash starting roughly in 1988. Lots of personal computer hardware and software companies shrunk in size or went out of business altogether, so that by 1990, the running joke around Silicon Valley was: “Do you know what the status symbol of the 90s is? A job.”

Not surprisingly, the dot.com craze of the late 1990s triggered another explosion in computer science enrollment and degrees, clearly shown on the table above. What is not shown on the table above is that the Great Tech Crash of 2000 significantly depressed the job market for students graduating in the 2000-2004 timeframe.

The results has been a decline in both CS enrollment and undergraduate degrees granted. Here’s a chart from the CRA reflecting a decline in CS undergrad enrollment since 2000:

As you can see, the percentage of undergraduates declaring a major in computer science has dropped to a level not seen since just a few years after I graduated in 1978. The decline appears to have leveled off for now, but it’s still a bit staggering, according to the CRA (emphasis mine):

After seven years of declines, the number of new CS majors in fall 2007 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,915). Nevertheless, the number of new majors was flat in 2006 and slightly increased in 2007. This might indicate that interest is stabilizing.

The decrease in new majors has meant that the number of students enrolled in CS has fallen for several years (Figure 2). Between 2005/2006 and 2006/2007, enrollments went down 18 percent to 28,675. Overall, enrollments dropped 49 percent from their height in 2001/2002, while the median number of students enrolled in each department fell 53 percent since 2000/2001.

The NSA data only goes up to 2004, so it doesn’t reflect the corresponding decline in CS degrees awarded — that won’t start showing up until 2005. But the second table above shows how closely enrollments and degrees track (when time-shifted by 4 years).

In my next post, I’ll talk about what I believe are some of the factors that cause these up-and-down trends in CS enrollment and degrees. ..bruce..