Computer Science

I was woundering what type of jobs are offered in the computer science field. I herd not much because of out sourceing.

Answer: pick another field. Any other field.

(Honest! Really!)

>>2
get out while you can

>>1

yeah, i have a degree in CS and 0 jobs. go to business or dentistry or smth, I'm talking a few classes to go into dentistry right now.

I'm in my third year of a CS degree and I've decided to quit because frankly it's pointless. I've learned plenty of useful things, but now there's a whole bunch of projects and exams due all at the same time, and I'm not going to learn anything from doing them. The job prospects are pretty depressing too. "TOP COMPANY REQUIRE PROGRAMMER WITH 3 YEARS COMMERCIAL EXPERIENCE VB.NET ORACLE XML..." Sucks.

>>5
uh aint tht cos u r looking at the wrong place? As a fresh graduate, I tot u are suppose to be looking for jobs that are entry-level or are for graduates in specific. These kind of jobs as I understand do not have specific task in mind but are more training in general to groom you for a longer term in the company. Which still sucks cos those jobs are only obtainable by the super smart or super suck-up.

>>6
Welcome to the current job market.

>>6
I can't read most of that, but I did get the gist. Yeah, a few of the big companies (IBM, Fujitsu) hire graduates specifically for rehabilitating them from their time at uni and giving them some real training. Then you get to be a code monkey for the rest of your life.

>>8
I went into CS for the love of it. Now I'm going into biology. The reason is that programming for fun != living in a cubical farm surrounded by fat sweaty guys banging out business code.

Some people are lucky and find interesting jobs, like a physicist friend of mine who writes code for the world's biggest cyclotron, but that uses specialized knowledge. That's one reason why I'm now off into a pure science field...

>>9

Me too, and that's why I'm not bothering graduating. I've got everything I want out of it, time to stop wasting time on uninteresting Java projects.

I'm asking this to all of you: what kind of degrees have you to say it sucks and gets you no job? Why is it pointless? I just got my first job in embedded systems and it's been the dream of my whole life. I've got my own office with music, food and cigarettes whenever I want.

Why is it stupid to live your dreams? Were you thinking that CS is playing games and creating GUIs with VB all day long? It's great but maybe it's not what you were looking for in the first place.

>>11
Um. No one was saying you personally did not find your degree useful. Perhaps you even went to a good university - I know I didn't. I congratulate you on your success, but please stop taunting the failures with your big musical office.

>>12
What failures are you talking about? You're really a bad troll, someone was speaking about outsourcing and I answered: There is NO outsourcing if you study and like computer sciences.

I didn't went to a "good" university because there is no distinction between good and bad universities in my country.

>>13
a) Because the good jobs are few and far between. And this is your first job?
b) Because more knowledge is laudable. If McJesus wants to study another field on top of it, more power to him. I study bio because being an idiot savant isn't it for me.
c) You're supposed to say the industry sucks, you clueless dipshit! Why do you think lawyers earn so much? There's few of them.

Man, some people need

*need everything spelled out for them.

>>14
More knowledge is laudable? Yes and so what?

>>You're supposed to say the industry sucks, you clueless dipshit!
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you drunk?

>>14
I'm curious and wondered what was the meaning of the c) sentence. Were you trying to be sarcastic or angry?

No, I'm not. I suppose this is why people with business sense make money while others don't. Supply and demand, remember? I suppose I do have to clarify:

If someone asks you what CS is like, and you claim it's absolutely wonderful, they might go into it. Congratulations, you now have an additional person competing with you for the same work. Given that there's already significant pressure on the profession (at least in the US - some parts of Europe and Oceania are booming) it's in your own interest to minimize the number of competitors.

Selfish? Yes. But then many Americans don't want to pay higher taxes for social safety nets either. Mine, mine, mine. This is just an extension.

Dishonest? Probably. But that's why quite a few lawyers earn $250 an hour (and up, up, up), and you don't. I've graduated from law school, so take it from me, lawyers don't earn a large wage because it's a hard subject. Rather, they ensure that there's a small pool of legal expertise relative to the demand, and do it in such a manner that they can't be nailed by anti-competitive laws.

The hard-core will go into CS regardless. People like >>1 will get scared off. People like McJesus and me will just go into more specialized or diversified fields which we find more interesting. Fair enough?

Having said that, I think >>13 smells like an industrial neophyte. I thought the exact same thing about my first pro employment too. I still have fond memories of it, but I like to think I don't suffer illusions that most of the industry is like that. Even though I sometimes enjoy flaming McJesus, I 100% agree with him in his pursuits elsewhere; most CS jobs are soul-destroying.

Whoops. s/>>13/>>11/.

>>13
| What failures are you talking about?
Myself and the rest of 4chan mostly.

| I didn't went to a "good" university because there is no distinction between good and bad universities in my country.
May I enquire as to what country you live in good sir?

>>20
You consider yourself as a failure? I don't understand where the joke is... And FYI I live in France where universities are public, hence the lack of competition between them.

I don't understand this need for more "diversity" because I find that CS is already wide enough to the point we can almost call it a "science" now. Of course I see this in France only, all the americans I talked to were doing two things at the same time which is pretty disturbing: CS and physics or CS and chemistry. I've never seen in my whole life a chemist who wanted to learn C++ for fun.

>>23
What's disturbing about it? Maybe they just find more things interesting. You can't tell me your whole life rotates around a glorified calculator.

What I cannot understand is why you, who has a free education system, don't take advantage of that. All those double-majors from the US would almost kill for such a gift.

Look at it another way: there's more job security in Europe. In the rest of this rather volatile world a lot of us recognize that being a one-trick pony is the fast-lane to unemployment. We can compete with people like you for the jobs you can do, and also the jobs you can't. Sorry.

s/>>23/>>21/.

Everything in the US is built on money. We live in a captalists society with a no so great democracy government. Free anything over here is out of the question. Universitys didn't be come prestegus by giving away education. I, for one, find this non-free education really hinders many. There are lots of intelligent people in the US who do not have the money to go to college. Some might bring up the point of Financal aid to go to college but I am still going through Financal Student Aid and it take long to reply. Some at this point whould have gaven up. Now, with the computer science degree, doing my reasurch (aka looking up shit at wikipedia) I have found some of the jobs that are offered in the computer science field to be broad. Some even showing the CS could be as pure as a science as chemistry or biology. Right now we are going through a technological age which needs more people to help out the problems it causes. The dream that most CS majors have is that of the early programming days of college students hacking on a TX-0 or something like that. Those type of jobs of programming are manily outsourced to India, China, anywhere were we can make it cheap and fast. That's the kind of marketing system we live in. The jobs are going over seas leaveing most of us with no jobs at all. If the US were to have a free college (which there were but you couldn't get a offical degree because it was a free college started by some hippies in the 60's) then people would be able to major in one thing (CS) and major in another (let's say mathimatics) and have way to combine the one and the other. Some goes of a Chemisty and Biology majors. Those two are combined in ways to get your degree but if you could have a phd in both maybe and still be young we would get more jobs. More productivity. More money. But for right now the US is the US and Europe is Europe.

Also outsourceing causes security problems with code

>>22
You can't "double major" in France. When I was doing my Master's degree, I was working something like 10 hours a day and couldn't do nothing more (especially another getting another degree).

>>25
(Score:-1, Troll)

>>26
Uh... hate to point out the obvious, but studying for a Master's degree and studying a second degree isn't all that different...

You're assuming that people always study a second degree at the same time. That's often not that case. So you're really no different from us, except that you choose to go deeper while we go broader.

As a computer "scientist" I'm sure you can appreciate that both paths have their unique strengths. After all, you won't have a pure CS programming a particle-accelerator analysis package, just as you wouldn't have a biotech engineer writing a thesis on topographic optimization.

A question for the Americans here: how many years do you study for your "first degree" (after high-school) and how many years for the second if you do another one after?

This question may be strange for you but studying a second degree is not in the french culture. I haven't really "chose" this path, it was just natural as I was having fun with other students and never felt the need to do something else. Of course I may study new stuff later but it would be on my own, not a part of my official job.

If you want a job in the tech industry, just learn Hindi.

I'm actually taking a CS Masters degree right now and I can tell you it is very, very different from going for a second degree in something else.  Bachelors level CS is very basic and spends a lot of time teaching you stuff that really belongs more in IT. 

Masters on the other hand has me banging my head against my discrete math and algorithms books and whatnot on a daily basis.  It's very theoretical.  You don't just learn how to do things, you learn new ways to think (lambda calculus, domain relational calculus, etc.). 

You also have to do an original research project or thesis as well with a faculty sponsor and that is tough also, much tougher than my senior project for my BS.  So keep in mind graduate work is very different from lower level stuff.  Maybe because you are expected to contribute to the field instead of just learn it and because the people just learning enough to hold down jobs all left after undergrad.

sucks that you don't get to the more interesting parts till masters

>>32
I guess it depends on where you live and what the teachers choose for their material because what I did during my bachelor's degree was really interesting.

I wasn't saying that it's not interesting in 31, just that it's pathetically simple compared to what you need to learn before you can contribute to the field.  I wasn't alone in noticing the difference either.  There were like 2 A's total in one of our early graduate level algorithms classes and these were students who got their bachelors from all over the place.

My undergraduate course was full of theoretical stuff, with hardly any IT crap. We had one module in the first year where Julian Burt taught us how to use Word and Frontpage, which sucked. But we did do loads of modules relating to discrete maths, graph theory, automata theory etc which were very interesting, especially the latter. My AI lecturer (Bill Teahan - break his limbs for me if you happen to meet him) was consistently incompetent and unknowledgeable for the entire 3 years I was there, which was somewhat apathy inducing since his modules made up large parts of my course. During the second year I started to give up after the management announced they were considering closing the maths department because it wasn't profitable. This of course led to the rapid departure of our few good lecturers.

I'm considering applying to a good university in a couple of years to repair my education. In the meantime I'm going to see how far I can get with a massive intellect but no qualifications.