TEERA 2.0: Vancouver Sun

Found this interesting article, “The Death of Computing” from SlashDot site. On this article, the author expresses his view on the declining in popularity of Computing Science in university.

As a CS and Business administration undergrad myself, I agree with the author that the demand of CS grads seems to be in the decline of late. Yet, to say that the impact and importance of CS will be diminishing overtime is somewhat incorrect in my opinion. Rather, I believe that CS will become even more significant in the future than ever. Here are my 11 thoughts reflecting on certain points from the article:

1.
'Number of CS students is dropping from the view of IT as job for geek sand social misfits and there’s nothing interesting in computer science'

•  I do not agree with this. Ever since computer became a commodity, less and less people think that IT is a job for geeks and nerds. It’s more of the other way around. From my experience, most of us in 2.0 generation perceive IT people as trendy, up-to-date, well-educated, and smart. Look at a few CS idols, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Max Levchin (Paypal), or Kevin Rose (Digg), don’t we just love these nerds?

2.
Games programming as CS salvation and the last lifeboat

• Game programming is cool. True, universities’ CS department doesn’t teach you how to do game programming - they teach you how to build a program that is used to build game. I also think the recent popularity of game programming is a trend (like SOA =) ?). If you think game programming is the coolest thing in CS, you should come visit my university CS labs. We do research on CMT system software, Natural Language Processing, RNA computational modeling, Robotics, and more cool stuffs. So, you still say CS is boring?

3.
‘Virtual robots - Zooks - can be created by eight-year olds without needing programming, logic or discrete mathematics skills’

• Can this robot do something more than simple arithmetic? I don’t think a robot that is built by eight-year olds can do anything beyond what an eight-year old could think of. Of course, it’s not the kids’ fault. The potential is there. Once they attend Computational Algorithm class (most likely offered by a university CS department) 10 years from now.

4.
'Web designers build complex business sites'

• Can you really build anyting complex from just Dreamweaver and Photoshop?
  

5.
'Accountants assemble business systems without needing to go object-oriented.'

• This is scary....(but not such a bad idea actually, most of IT projects are overbudget and late in delivery).
  
  

6.
'There is no longer a need for vast army of computer scientists. The applications, gmaes, and databases that students once built laboriously in final year projects are bought at bookshops and newsagents'

• This is possible because of what we do in CS: innovation 

7.
'IT departments now focus on contracts, tenders, service level agreements, training, system usage and incident management.'

• Isn’t Management of Information System one of CS discipline? How can you do UML modeling, system integration, system architectural design without attending CS classes? I doubt that you can learn all these from ‘Teach Yourself’, ‘Dummies’ or ‘Idiot’s’ books series.

8
'Implementation, facility management, systems integration, service management, organisational change even environmental audit are the language of IT. These hardly feature on computer science courses.'

• I believe they are now a part of CS curriculum now, at least in most of North America’s universities.

9)
'Computing is also affected by globalization. The loss of jobs in IT and the declining computer science enrollments is a global problem for developed countries.'

• From my ECON 101 class, the law of supply and demand suggests that eventually labor cost and wage in Chindia will increase and competitive advantage from outsourcing will diminish.

10)
'There is a need for innovation, for creativity, for divergent thinking which pulls in ideas from many sources and connects them in different ways.'

• Sharing is what we do at Sun. Let me borrow Jonathan’s famous quote here: “Volume drives value”. Can’t say it better =).

11)
'Computer science curricula are old, stale and increasing irrelevant. Curricula needs to be vocational, and divergent, widening the computing student's view of the world, not creating a sterile bubble, closed off from the wider issues in the world, and from the networking, the integration, the global reach of computers.'

• I totally agree on this =)
  

Quite a long blog entry, this article is very thought provoking.