No more comp sci please, I'm full

by David Holtzman

When I talk to college kids today, I try to persuade them not to go into computer science. Geeks--sure, but the industry can only absorb so many competent geeks. Owning a light saber and speaking Klingon does not a good computer geek make.

The cowboy days are over now. Application software built on top of open source makes one person a software wrecking crew. You only need in depth knowledge of programming when you're opening the hood and fiddling with the internals of the car and honestly, you just don't need to do that anymore.

You don't build your own basic class library, string functions, I/O library and error handling routines the way that we all did over the last 20 years.

Anyone can put up a pretty good web site.

The real computer geeks know who they are. We still need them for the research shops. We need some programmers, but more importantly we need a computer literate generation.

So maybe the visa/immigration issue is less important, because what matters, what really matters in the digital age is not wonkiness, but creativity. We need innovaters, designers and marketers, not more computer engineers.

Posted on February 03, 2006

2 Comments
Technology

A fairly dangerous point of view I think. I agree, that the "geek" of yesterday is no longer needed, but to discount the higher level skills entirely will lead to lack of innovation and creativity. We need the geek to become more business aware and start to pick up skills outside the traditional keyboard hacking arena and we also need a balance of the other of course.

At least that is my $0.02 worth

Posted by Daryl Sheppard on February 3, 2006

Good point on making the geek business-savvy and more aware. My real point, though, is that "geeky" skills are much less useful as a means to get things done. Creativity was often expressed as a hack or a kludge. Now, that's rarely the right answer. The outsourcing trend reflects this position. If application programming was at all creative, outsourcing would not work. It functions because development is often formulaic.

Posted by David Holtzman on February 4, 2006

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