It’s not just about jobs. Ideally, you study and do something you love. But for most people, job prospects are part of the equation too when you are choosing a major — especially if mom or dad is paying the tuition bill.
Which is why those of is in the CS profession are mystified over the widespread belief that there aren’t any jobs in this field. The rumor is either that CS is old news (all the jobs went poof in the dot.com bust) or CS jobs have all been outsourced to Bangalore or Beijing. Talk about your false rumors. If you decide to avoid CS for these reasons, you’re just not paying attention in my opinion. Lots of flaky companies did disappear in the dot.com bust. But there are all kinds of new, more subtantial companies that have arisen since then. And IT is growing like crazy in India and China and lots of other places, no question. But there is absolutely no shortage of interesting and profitable opportunities in the U.S. for people in CS. (More on that in future posts.)
There have been lots of news item recently that are starting to correct this mis-conception. Here’s one from last week. And there are several more at the CS department ‘Why CS?’ FAQ page. But here’s a close-to-home statistic that you won’t get anywhere else: in the first 25 class days of this semester, we forwarded 21 job announcements to our undergraduate email list. I don’t know exactly how many students we are going to graduate with B.S. degrees this year — probably somewhere around 125 — but at the rate things are going right now, there will easily be more jobs than people. Lots more jobs infact, when you remember that several of these employers are looking to hire several students.