Prospective college computer majors have been fleeing to other majors, since the real skills associated with a future in information technology look less like those one needs from a four-year or longer computer science program.
A recent Computerworld article on the promising future of IT professions for college graduates doesn’t emphasized the kind of coding and software architecture skills that once formed the cornerstone of a well-paying profession. Instead, project management wins out over software development.
Touting this as a sign that there is a future in IT drew the attention of University of California-Davis CS professor Norm Matloff, who follows H-1B and offshoring issues. He addressed parts of the article and countered the arguments made therein that suggest all is well in the future of IT employment.
“Today and increasingly in the coming years, the main IT jobs left for Americans will be of the “talking,” nontechnical/semitechnical variety,” he writes in his response to the Computerworld article. Matloff cited one of his student’s views on majoring in CS: “If I’m going to end up with an Econ-type job, I might as well major in Econ,” a quote he had noted in previous newsletters.
The quote gained some extra noteworthiness in the wake of the article, where one family interviewed for the report has one daughter, an economics graduate, working with the State Department to help implement ERP solutions and provide training in Third World countries.
Still unconvinced? Here’s a quote from her father, Randy Carter, a CIO for Cabot Corp in Boston, about who he wants to hire:
There will also be strong demand for project managers and business analysts, Carter says. “I’m telling my managers if they’ve got an opening, those are the skills I’m looking for, and that if they need a developer, get a contractor, not an employee.”
Matloff noted in response that managers once came up through the technical ranks, but that experience isn’t even necessary any more.
Not all IT jobs are equal, and Matloff pointed out that these types of careers are not going to convince high school seniors to opt for CS majors when a degree in another field will be more applicable to their futures:
A job is a job, right? Well, no. First of all, this growth in the “talking” jobs won’t induce those students who abandoned Computer Science majors to return…
But more importantly, there is the broader implication for the U.S. economy. Technology has been sold to us as the key to a strong economy. Can it really work this way if the actual technological work is being done abroad, and all we do is talk about it? Surely we are not the only nation in the world that can talk.
The argument that older Americans in engineering who have lost their jobs due to not knowing the latest software (as well as management’s desire to bring in cheap foreign labor) was likewise dismantled by Matloff in a law journal article he wrote:
(T)his standard industry line about not knowing the latest software has been shown to be just that, an industry line.
(A) quick way to counter the industry’s argument is to simply note the many cases (admitted to by the employers involved) in which Americans have been laid off and forced to train their foreign replacements. Clearly it was the foreign workers who needed a skills update, not the Americans.
This is something to keep in mind when reviewing the job listings for high-tech companies while considering a computer degree as a major. A lot more students may be better off with an econ or business major instead.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
