The CRA Policy Research Blog points to a well-written article in yesterday's New York Times on the dispersion of computer science into other disciplines and vice versa.
On the one hand, the article quotes people like Thomas Malone saying that mere scientific depth or technical skill is no longer the best route to a job in informat... info... in... (shudder) Sorry, I just can't say it. You know, computing.
"If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable," said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of "The Future of Work" (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). "But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it's a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore." [...]
On campuses today, the newest technologists have to become renaissance geeks. They have to understand computing, but they also typically need deep knowledge of some other field, from biology to business, Wall Street to Hollywood. And they tend to focus less on the tools of technology than on how technology is used in the search for scientific breakthroughs, the development of new products and services, or the way work is done.
Bill Gates suggested the same thing a month ago.
The article makes one strange statement about the job market:
For people who stay in computing, the job outlook is brightest for those skilled in the application of technology. While jobs in categories like programming have declined since 2000, according to the Labor Department, the need for information technology experts has not.
In fact, jobs that involve tailoring information technology to specific industries or companies, like software engineers who make applications and specialized systems, have grown. Total employment among information technology professionals, the government reports, reached nearly 3.5 million by the end of last year, surpassing the previous high in 2000, when the technology investment boom peaked.
Umm... Mr New York Times reporter dude? Those software engineers? They're programmers. There's no difference. It's the same thing. Sanitation engineer? Janitor. Software engineer? Programmer. Same thing.
On the other hand, the article quotes people in business, medicine, and the arts describing the utility of computer science in their own fields.
Ken Michelson, a computer science major at the University of Washington, is entering medical school at Columbia University in New York this month. Mr. Michelson caught the computing bug early, starting to program simple games and puzzles as a 9-year-old.
His computer science training, Mr. Michelson said, will also be useful in medicine, especially "in the way you learn to attack and break down complex problems."
Edward D. Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington, points to students like Mr. Michelson as computer science success stories. The real value of the discipline, Mr. Lazowska said, is less in acquiring a skill with technology tools - the usual definition of computer literacy - than in teaching students to manage complexity; to navigate and assess information; to master modeling and abstraction; and to think analytically in terms of algorithms, or step-by-step procedures.
The job market in informa(cough) infor(cough cough)—sorry—computing is brightest for those who can effectively apply computing technology. But the real value of computer science is not technological ability, but the critical thinking and organization skills. I honestly can't decide if these two statements reinforce or contradict each other.
But they both suggest that the technology itself ain't where the action is.
Naturally, the article has photographs of computer science students. Remarkably, except for one blurry reflection, every single person in the photographs is female, black, or both.
(On the other hand, out of the nine people quoted in the article, only two are women. They're both photographed.)
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