Gates Puzzled by Computer Science Apathy
 

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&e=7&u=/ap/20050719/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_research

REDMOND, Wash. - Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he's baffled more students don't go into computer science.

Gates said Monday that even if young people don't know that salaries and job openings in computer science are on the rise, they're hooked on so much technology — cell phones, digital music players, instant messaging, Internet browsing — that it's puzzling why more don't want to grow up to be programmers.

"It's such a paradox," Gates said. "If you say to a kid, 'Yeah, what are the 10 coolest products you use that your parents are clueless about, that you're good at using,' I don't think they're going to say, 'Oh, you know, it's this new breakfast cereal. And I want to go work in agriculture and invent new cereals or something.' ... I think 10 out of 10 would be things that are software-driven."

Gates made his remarks on the first day of the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, which drew nearly 400 computer science professors from 175 schools in 20 countries to the software maker's campus.

Sharing the stage with Gates, Maria Klawe, Princeton University's dean of engineering and applied science, said most students she talks to fear that computer science would doom them to isolating workdays fraught with boredom — nothing but writing reams of code.

Gates said computer scientists need to do a better job of dispelling that myth and conveying that it's an exciting field.

"How many fields can you get right out of college and define substantial aspects of a product that's going to go out and over 100 million people are going to use it?" Gates said. "We promise people when they come here to do programming ... they're going to have that opportunity, and yet we can't hire as many people as we'd like."

Citing statistics from UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, Klawe said students' interest in computer science fell more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2004, even though salaries have increased and more jobs have opened up.

Klawe opened an hourlong question-and-answer with Gates by asking him what he thought could be done to stem a decline in federal funding for computer science research and graduate education.

In past three years, she noted, the Defense Department's research agency — a major source of money for computer science academics — has cut its funding for information technology research at universities almost in half.

The National Science Foundation is awarding a smaller percentage of grants for computer science than for other fields, she said.

Gates said Microsoft and other high-tech companies need to keep telling the government it's making a big mistake — one that could forestall stunning advancements in medicine, environmental science and other fields.

He also said companies can help by boosting their own investments in research and development.

"The best investment we've ever made is having our Microsoft Research groups," Gates said.

Modeled after academic research facilities, Microsoft Research focuses on work that is relevant to Microsoft's product lineup, such as security or search technology.

Products including the TabletPC have come out of the research arm, which has labs in Redmond; San Francisco; California's Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Beijing and Bangalore, India.

They would rather play their playstation and get fat.....after all...we owe them a living after highschool.

The apathy part is clear...but you would think they would get excited about the technology they base their life on..

I don't care about eliminating apathy on CS.

Apparently they have been taught about "outsourcing". A purely market-driven economy drives many good jobs overseas, and they don't feel like moving to Karachi.

Perhaps the apathy comes from Microsoft's stiffling of creativity and independent research. Think about when the biggest leaps in design and invention took place and you might see that it was before Microsoft steamrolled the personal computer industry.

How old are you...and do you remember the pre-windows95 era? I do and I prefer the Microsoft monopoly to those days.

BHD, I was working in Santa Clara when people were breadboarding Zilog and National Semiconductor circuits at home, so yes I was there during the pre-MS-DOS days. I've done my share of TRS-DOS, CP/M, AppleDos, MS-DOS, Appletalk, Netware, WinWkgrp, NT, Wordstar hacks, Wordperfect macros, dBaseII scripts, Hypercard stacks and other miscellaneous end user products, along with many manhours with a bunch of Borland's languages and AT&T/Novell's flavor of Unix.

I think the apathy comes from the changes in the job market in the early 2000's. In the late 90's computer science was the bomb as there was massive demand for programmers and salaries were higher than in most other fields. That was also the time I was working towards my Bachelor's degree and I was one of many who switched to computer science from another major. Then came the dot com crash and the economy fell into a recession. Many programmers got laid off and couldn't find another job and at the same time computer science was no longer the "hot new field" that it used to be in the 90's. Now there aren't enough qualified programmers and the job is in high demand again, but the field just doesn't have the hot exciting feeling about it anymore. I still like it though and I wouldn't consider switching to something else.

Back in the 80s CS majors were the “next big thing” after MBA majors. For many years, even over a decade, the volume of CS grads continued to increase. This created market saturation. Along with this saturation of the market, the devaluation of the degree followed. My guess is the combined effects of years of disillusioned programmers, the decline of perceived prestige of being a programmer or other CS training, coupled with the huge volume of outsourcing has conspired to encourage folks to look elsewhere for a career. Add to this mix the perpetual re-learning of techniques that takes place within the field and it’s not hard to see why folks don’t beat a path to become CS grads.

Even worse, as suggested above, the commercial industrialization of CS has served to squelch individual initiative. There have been no new “killer apps” for many years now. In fact the most innovative element of the industry have been by those who pursue viruses and spyware. Everything else seems to consist of incremental and largely irrelevant changes, done only to add glits and create a reason to resell something for the 15th time.

Look at Excel, a leading spread sheet program, and compare it to Lotus 1-2-3 of 20 years ago. Now you get better graphics, more built-in functions and that’s about it. The vast majority of folks barely know how to use a spread sheet, and databases are out of reach of more than 99% of all computer users. What irony! Make great tools, make them easy to use and few will take the time.

I guess in the end the puzzlement is less to do with CS itself and more to do with the combined effects of relearning, and the obvious trend towards general lack of motivation on the part of the American public.

Plus who want to spend 4 years running up debts to get a CS degree to have some paper pusher outsource your job to india to make it look like he is saving the company money somehow...

Why wouldn't everyone want to work in a field that is setting records in outsourcing and has historically rewarded shallow, superficial, self-aggrandizing, snot-nosed, elitist pricks?

Bonehead I think some of the younger generation is planning things like my 18 year old nephew. He's going to retire now while he can enjoy retirement. Then when he's 62 or 65 he will go to work. :mad: Rotten little bum! I wonder what he plans on doing when our generation is too old and feeble to support him.

One word:

India

- Patrick

If computers are not so hot, how about bio-tech? What say Bot?
Mark

He'll wise up about the time he gets hungry.........

He is addressing computer scientists. There is a huge difference between the programmers he is referring to and "programmers" i.e. the low skill, slow pace programmers i.e. the people that think they are programmers because they "know" HTML and VB (and have no desire to learn anything else). I am dissing the limited, focused on one technology, get it done now whether it's software or not, type job rather than those particular technologies. He is talking about the people that create new technologies instead of using/re-writing old ones. The jobs that are being outsourced to India are low skill jobs. Graduate with a C from any good university and you will start out at $55K+ (or $70K-$90K if you are in a larger city). I am a 3rd year and this summer I am making that. Get a graduate degree and you are starting out at $120K (or several hundred K if you are in a large city).

Um..I beg to differ..........these guys are outsourcing the heavy duty programmers........A lot of my new customers the last 3 years are software houses owned and staffed by Indians....with an office and a few people here but all work done overseas....I know of 12 places in the DC area that do just that...

Handwriting and speech recognition is improving. ASIMO. The ability to model biology (neurons, synapses), weather, etc. is improving (although we need SOOOO much more processing power). Computer architecture is being radically redesigned to allow heat dissapation and more even distribution. Processor caches are going to be drastically changed to accommodate new designs (i.e. control by a programmer instead of an algorithm). Sure it will take a while for these improvements to work their way into the next "killer app" but it will happen.

I consider Napster and iTunes to be killer apps. The ability to get instant access to a huge library of music with accurate meta data is a pretty big change. Self service/pay groceries and gas stations are another example of a recent killer app. Although some might suggest that isn't an improvement. Maybe you're right. Technology is stagnant. Oooops gotta go. My stove just informed me that the cookies are burning ...

Outsourcing = the real Y2K effect on our computer systems.

What I have been seeing is H1-B scams. A company advertises for some flavor of IT that requires a master's degree, for $10 an hour. When no one applies, a "shortage" of that type of programmer is declared, allowing the company to apply for an H1-B visa for some Indian guy hiding in his brother's closet. Indian guy gets visa, and goes to work for $9 per hour. Indian guys gets tourist visa for his other brother, now that the closet is free.

I'll take your word for it. There are obviously skilled people in India but everything is dirt cheap also. Infrastructure costs money because it's worth it. I think the majority of the stuff getting shipped out of the country is stuff that their infrastructure can handle better than ours. The main thing that India has going for it is that in some parts of the country there is a strong cultural push to become a professional i.e. accountant, programmer, lawyer, doctor etc. Many of these kids are required get a doctorate. If they move back to India and are more qualified then it is fair that they get the job.

THese guys work realtime......dedicated T-1 and E-1 lines between offices let them do this....same methodology Call centers use overseas....I have several customers running callcenters in India and the Phillipines using the same infrastructure I provide them. Medical transcriptions are frequently done offshore too the same way.....the communications lines are costly...but paying someone dirt wages and no benifits let them do it and save a few bucks.....so the fat cats can waste the savings on themselves.

Wages are dirt cheap in India...and colege educations are free IF you have the grades and contacts to get into school....they can work cheap becasue they got no student loans to pay off, plus everyone else is even more poor over there...

I was dealing with a large US software house trying to get a problem fixed. When I wasn't getting anywhere, they finally told me that the developers in Taiwan were on holiday that week.

I'm a systems guy myself, and I found a niche in mainframes, which are making a mini-comeback due to the big push in server consolidation.

The story I am hearing is that new grads are are facing $60K in student loans and are being told that they need to go back to school and retrain to get a job.

Just yesterday I heard about a guy who is driving a concrete truck to make his student loan payments.

Meanwhile the word is that international employment will set the standard for benefits. Employees here who want benefits will see their jobs move overseas.

Again what you are talking about is not computer science. Although CS students do learn some of the current technologies they are for the most part expected to pick up tools, languages, etc. on their own. You learn how to write compilers, how to write operating systems, software development methods, discrete math, finite state machines, digital logic, how to create micro-processors, develop algorithms, etc. In the course of doing so you might use C#, Java, or some language that no one has even heard of and you will never use again. You are assisted in learning the software and languages but learning the software/language is not the focus. Much of the CS learned 20 years ago is still relevant today. In fact there are a lot of concepts that are almost two hundred years old that form the basis of computing that are still taught today.

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

Doom and gloom is not the story here. Most that graduate with a Bachelor's from the CS department either go on to graduate school or get a job in the $48K-$80K range. A friend who works at the same place that I do graduated with a C or C+ average in CS last spring and is salaried at $55K + benefits. That is actually quite decent for around here. I would say the average income is $30K- 40K/year here. A really nice 4-5 bedroom house is $250K-$400K.

I always enjoy your comments, Laurence.

Not sure if the killer aps are really so or just incremental. As example since the late 80s restaurants have used an ordering system called Squirrel. This employed a programmed touch screen that provided details down to each chair, table, and meal that each diner had. That was tied to inventory and accounting, and the kitchen. The modern day automated check out tools are more similar, although they now employ an optical scanner, scales and payment processing. It is nice, but largely incremental.

The napster and other file sharing software are very revolutionary and a great example of employing decentralized databases along with a friendly UI.

IMO over over-cook sensors in ovens, right along with the hilarious MCS system in recent issue Mercedes are fun toys but more silly than killer. MS came out with a program recently called One Note. I like it! It employs a tabbed layout, and permits storing in virtually every format imaginable, plus it’s entirely free form, and best of all, it saves as soon as the data hits the page. Its chief shortcoming is that it is clumsy to copy data from one computer to another.

OTOH, speech recognition, once it lands, will change life as we know it. A friend helped develop a tool called the Voice some time ago. Then as now it has a very long way to go. But biometrics is quietly becoming insidious.

But isn't there an irony that Gates, who is probably the most compelling individual for employing over-seas talent, is complaining about the lack of local talent? Heck, he almost single handedly created this problem.

On the other hand, according to someone I spoke with recently our friends in India all get about 16 years of compulsory education. Given the higher standard of education they experience, especially combined with lower pay for their efforts, I can understand why the incentive to hire these folks is there. It is truly the free market at work.

At the same time, it is a betrayal of the local efforts. Rather than try to encourage folks to get a better education, our companies are simply abandoning us. That, IMO is the core issue we face.

Wow, assumptions like that shouldn't be made by any student of logic, much less by one with such a quality education.

What is important is that you are happy with what you are doing.

Even the numbers you are giving are no reason to jump for joy. At $80K if you are planning to tackle the payments on a $250K+ house I recommend some serious financial planning.

Don't forget that the next class will graduate hungry just about the time that you are looking for a raise.

Don't discount your contemporaries in India. They have better CS schools over there, they just haven't scaled-up for the volume yet.

As do I yours and many of the people on this board.

I haven't used One Note but a student here worked on it as an intern. She was one of a group of students from our school who have either finished an internship or develop at Microsoft to give a presentation and answer questions about what it is like working at Microsoft. There is free pizza/drinks and an XBox (1), games, and software so even the Linux/Mac geeks betray their religion and show up. It sounds like a really fun place to work and the developers there are top notch. The cool thing about an internship at MS is that your code actually goes into the prodcut on the shelf.

What assumptions? Logic is a process that can be applied accurately or not.

Yeah I really enjoy programming. I have been doing it since I was 15.

Most 22 year olds who just graduated from college don't need a really nice 4-5 bedroom house. Most get an apartment or buy a condo and a corvette/cobra.

I won't. I tend to trust my judgement though. I skipped 10-12 grades and went to a community college instead when I was 16 and believe me I heard all sorts of dismal projections about my future from people who don't say much of anything these days.

I don't. When a prof. that I highly respected said that some of the best programmers are Indian I took note. It still doesn't change the fact that the really valuable work is not going to be outsourced to an environment that cannot support it. CS can be fit into an assembly line a little better than math but not much better. a lot of one off business apps sure.

You are absolutely right.

I should keep my mouth shut, since I (a Canadian) have my summer job to thank at the hands of an American company who has outsourced work to another American company (not public) who owns the Canadian company (not public) that employs me :) .

I get a great hourly wage which, after working the summer, inables me to PAY for my university tuition ($5063.50 this coming september) for the YEAR, with money left over. AND I don't have to worry about paying for hospital stays if I were to ever have an accident or get sick either.

In the province I live in, Ontario, the number of my contemporaries pursuing higher education is quite high. Everyone seems to be educated in Ontario here. I've since, changed my focus in my undergraduate, to stream into going after a profession (not law, by the way). It may be my only hope at a secure future, without the constant worries of job security etc...

I'm scared for you Yankees. You seem to have lost your way, the apathy towards American made products is evidence. I'm scared because I owe my paycheque to American ownership. I personally think most american car products for example, are up to the build quality levels of imported nameplates. People just don't want to buy them (for various image reasons or the halo effect of imported brands on uninformed/anti-car people). I'm a little upset that people here in Canada think cheap goods made in China are the latest, the greatest. When you stop building widgets you open yourselves up for invasion. We are a perfect example (the American branch plant economy which had destroyed most of our Canadian firms after WWI).

We depend on you Yanks for our standard of living, certain groups of us Canucks talk smack/talk tough like we don't need you but, we are weak, we do. If you guys falter, so do we.

What's next? :confused: :confused: :confused: :(

My apology, Laurence. I was talking with a customer named Loren shortly before I wrote my comments. At first I wrote your name as his, then looked again, but obviously not very well. Anyway, I’ve corrected it.

I agree with your comment about the folks here. This site offers a number of view points from talented folks.

There is an element of self-satisfaction from helping a project to come together. It has a very powerful appeal to a lot of folks. One Note is a curious app. I don’t know if you know of or ever used a product called Framework. It was made by Ashton-Tate, and employed multiple work objects within a tabbed layout display. Framework didn’t permit input of all media, but for the time it was hugely popular with a number of industries as it integrated serial communication, programming, word processing, database, and was about the best of spread sheets around, plus did graphics and some proportional font related presentation. It was darned near a complete operating system with a nicely developed API, performed memory management and did a lot of things very well. One Note is similar to Framework, but does show 12 years of progress. I wonder if Ashton-Tate would still be around if they didn’t give up pursuing new ideas and products rather than spending most of their $$ on law suits over dbase platform. They were a really good candidate to become what Microsoft ultimately did, and almost always pushed hard on the innovative front. Anyway, if you keep a lot of notes and they are scattered throughout several documents, give One Note a try, i haven't come across anyone that doesn't like it.

While on the road yesterday, I thought about your comment about Napster et al and how new killer apps are born of a confluence of technologies, and it occurred to me that something similar, but different would provide a solution to many of our transportation problems. This is a rough 1st pass but here it is: The personal transport is popular because the convenience can’t be beat, and also because of the aesthetic value. But it is expensive and will only become much more so. The convenience issue is tough to get around.

Were someone to put together a fleet of, say 5,000 vans (or pick a fairly large number), each complete with GPS, keyboard, and 2 way computer communications and remote input ability. These vehicles would be used to transport folks and their normal baggage (anything from a pack to a bike), and maybe even for cross town shipping. For the sake of coolness put nice, heated seats and fit the vehicle to lux standards.

Say someone wants a ride. They go to a convenient computer, and schedule their starting and ending point, along with what they want to transport. This information gets entered into a database. The database knows the location of the vehicles, and all the routes scheduled. The database then picks a vehicle which is a) in the area, b) isn’t too backed up (and can even state the ETA). The selected vehicle gets sent to the pick-up spot where the riders get a comfy seat, maybe even coffee or a beverage, access to a computer, TV, radio, and with few or no routes takes them to their destination. Payment would be based on some practical means. The key is that by the combined use of GPS, routing databases and computer communications, there would be nearly the efficiency of time compared to driving, but would probably cost far less than owning even a nice vehicle.

I’m sure there are projects similar to this, if not, there ought to be. 5,000 upscale transports would probably remove 100,000 vehicles from the road. The more transports the less time folks would be obligated to wait, which is probably the major disincentive for public transport.

In Seattle we’re in the death throws of a monorail project turned too expensive for even the democrats to tolerate. The price tag was about 11 billion, including interest, for a scant, 14 mile run, for which the city needed a 50 year tax schedule to pay for it. For a tiny fraction of the cost of the monorail, the approach outlined above could move more folks and offer greater convenience to almost any white elephant approach. The beauty of it is that the tools are all there, and just need to be assembled.

Comments?

Public transportation tends to work very well in very large cities due to the relatively short distances involved, the great number of people going to roughly the same place, and the cost of parking. Trains, cabs, etc. are just more economical. However, most of the country is such that the length of travel, people going to the same place, and cost of parking is not suitable for anything but personal transportation.

I think that what you have hit on is a more common issue when dealing with technology. The software and hardware is out there but companies often do not have inhouse experts that understand what is possible and how to go about putting together what they need. Any change costs a lot of money and technology is no exception. Combine that with a huge uncertainty and nothing is going to happen.

What you have described is used to schedule airline flight routes, frequencies, etc. There is no reason that the same thing couldn't be done for "luxury transports" in large cities. The problem is getting a cab company that is 1. big enough 2.innovative enough to realize the benefits of graph theory :) .

A lot of the companies that were moved overseas were started here by immigrants and it was only natural that they would move home when they could make more money there. In fact much of the boom in silicon valley was driven by companies that were founded by immigrants.

Many of the CS grads will be offered jobs at much smaller salaries than stated in this thread. Many of the jobs that pay more are in areas with living expenses so high that it makes more sense to work a lower paying job in an area with lower living expenses and higher quality of living.

What works for a few people is anecdotal and doesn't represent a trend that people can use to plan their future.

The myth of the "computer genius" hurts this as a career choice. The idea that some people are born with computer skills turns away people who find that they really have to work to develop computer skills.

If you don't enjoy doing puzzles, you probably won't make a very good programmer. My personal observation only.

This is from salary.com for Washington DC:

Client/Server Programmer I 25th%ile Median 75th%ile
Washington, DC $51,071 $57,156 $64,998

A lot of students that I know work for Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and they usually start at $51K-$54K and actually the cost of living for them is about the same as here because they commute. In NYC it is sort of the same story. Take a train into the city and live on the outskirts.

The model I was thinking of was from a program called win mx. The key element was that you could observe the backlog for a given source, and about how long before it would be available, plus schedule the delivery ASAP. Far from ideal, but okay for a basis.

But combine a similar UI with a means of sending routing to the driver. Not just routing to the pick up point, but also the destination. Add enough distraction for the passengers and you’d have to think it’d be a hit. The trick would be a big enough project to get an idea of how it works in say a 100 square mile area.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a letter to Gates and our gov and ask them to look into it. Put the two of em together and they have the means to experiment along with the great a pilot area. MS is one of the proponents of increased mass transit anyway. So I'm sure Bill would shortly launch ms commuter route. Maybe we can get DC in on it and they’d use modified Sprinter vans!

My own take is that this kind of solution will be necessary within 10 years max. There is no sense in putting together a hugely expensive and completely novel solution, such as a monorail, when it’s far cheaper and more efficient to continue to leverage the current roadway infrastructure.

As to folks not wanting to try, that, sadly is emblematic of the USA today. Its easier to seek more of the same, than to even try something useful. At what point is it so important to maintain the status quo that we give up everything for it? In turn the answer to this question takes us right back to the comments on the top of this thread.