I'm done supporting local businesses ~ you sucked me dry!

In my teens and 20s, I used to spend all my money on department stores, game stores buying everything like clothes, dvds, videogames and none online. That was up until 2011-2012. Stores used to price gouge and I used to buy at full retail in my 20s. So supported local community stores for 15 years from 1998-2012.Stores had me for a decade out of high school. Sorry, I’m  low on cash. It's not that I was always on Amazon or Ebay spending my money, its just extra disposable income got a ton smaller since 2012. I have to budget my money better now. I’m approaching middle age now. There is age discrimination now.

I’m basically done with it all. I won’t let the stores suck my savings dry, because some  yahoo next to me did it. I was also burned by no connections from the stores I loved. One stupid thing after another.

Except I'll still probably go to the grocery store, gas station,

When All Else Fails, Democrats Resurrect the Russia Trump Collusion Hoax

Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Democrats in Congress, their voters, and the anti-Trumpers have spent the last three years trying to delegitimize his administration with their phony smear that Trump colluded with Russia to win. Over and over, they have peddled this false narrative, trying to get more mileage out of this dead horse.
There is no evidence that Trump colluded. Zero. Yet it hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying to make it stick. They spent two years on a witch hunt that spent millions of dollars and wasted the nation’s time chasing a ghost. They knew it was a scam. But they also knew that
what mattered was raw politics—using anything to get rid of Trump outside of the electoral process. Keep in mind that Robert Mueller’s investigation in his 448-page report never established that Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia during the election. That still does not matter. The phony narrative alone was damaging enough. It was repeated and propagated by every liberal media outlet obsessively for two years while Trump had to fight the lie to keep it from sticking.
And now what? No collusion, but here we go again with the resurrection of the phony Russia collusion nonsense. If you recall, I said after it was proven that there was no Russian collusion that we had not heard the end of this political mischief. I know Democrats. There is no getting rid of them completely. They never give up. They never quit. I warned that Democrats would try to get additional mileage out of the Russia collusion hoax.
Recently, leaks have appeared, and news cycles again claim that Russia is trying to help President Trump win in 2020. Still, no evidence. However, a few troubling things are emerging about these accusations. First, this information was leaked out of a classified briefing to members of Congress. Yes, classified. One news story pointed out that a Democrat lawmaker in the room told Vox’s Alex Ward that, “the evidence was very compelling that Moscow favored Trump.” The story also said that “it was not clear what specific steps, if any, US intelligence officials think Russia may be taking to help Trump.” Yes, no specifics. Another point written in the Vox story said that “while details about the exact nature of Russia meddling remain unclear, there is good reason to believe the reports—despite lingering questions. Oh really.
Democrat members of Congress immediately jumped in. Senator Sherrod Brown, without a stitch of evidence, claims that Trump is colluding with Russia to help his reelection. Jerry Nadler now wants more investigation of political interference by President Trump in the Justice Department.
Since Barack Obama became president, our intelligence agencies and investigative agencies have become infected with politics. Leaks are now a frequent occurrence of information that is supposed to be confidential, classified, and top secret. Politicizing intelligence is extremely dangerous and very troubling. Integrity in our intelligence agencies and officials is vital to maintain trust and credibility. They get to operate in so much secrecy. The American people never know what they are doing. We blindly trust them, and congressional oversight is lacking. Recall this blind trust of these intelligence officials led a FISC judge to accept the Steele dossier to obtain wiretap approval of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016. These leaks could deter other allied intelligence agencies like the UK MI6 or Israel’s Mossad from sharing critical information out of fear that they may be outed as the source. Maybe about an impending attack, for instance. Shameful.
Confidential information must not be discussed or referenced by anybody briefed in a confidential hearing. As a former sheriff, I know a thing or two about intelligence reports, the stages involved in the process, intelligence briefings, and how intelligence is used. Intelligence and reports generated are estimates about the future. Opposing intel views are supposed to be included to prevent the decision-maker from being steered to decide by a person with a vested interest in what decision should be made. They are a compilation of bits and pieces of information that may reveal a picture. Intel reports identify enemies, their intentions, and their capability of carrying out an attack. These reports are used by a decision-maker, like the president, that action by him may be necessary.
Another interesting observation is that US officials informed the Bernie Sanders campaign about Russian efforts to aid his campaign. When the FBI had information about Russia attempting to infiltrate the Trump campaign, Trump was not afforded that courtesy. Instead, the FBI used it to obtain a wiretap and put a plant inside the Trump campaign. Why the double standard?
Trump is a fighter. He understands what is going on here. When he recently ousted Joseph Maguire from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) post, I smiled. Maguire went around the president in briefing Congress. Maguire can’t be trusted. When serving the president, trust is the vital virtue. Maguire should have told the president what he would brief Congress about. The criticism about Trump’s choice to be the next DNI, Richard Grenell, is the typical dribble that comes from swamp dwellers when another swamp creature isn’t selected. Saying he is not qualified is a dog-whistle for saying that he’s not one of them. That is a good sign. Trump needs someone he can trust.
The DNI post was created out of the 9-11 Commission report to bring cohesion and eliminate stove pipes within the intelligence community’s 17 different agencies that were working separately and not sharing information before 9/11. Grenell will have the added and more difficult task of getting these agencies out of the business of politics.
So brace yourselves for another Russia collusion hoax. The only way to stop this is at the ballot box. Get ready for November because the swamp draining is not complete

Finish the Wall

The senator was adamant.

"People should not have to force the federal government to live up to our responsibilities to enforce our borders and our laws. Period," she said.

"We do not have the luxury of debating this issue for another two years or four years," she added. "Rather we have the responsibility to take action now."

She wanted the government to enforce the border and the laws against employing illegal immigrants.

"Illegal immigration, however, is a matter of law enforcement," she said. "Whether it is enforcing our borders, enforcing our laws against working illegally or hiring someone to work illegally."

"It is the federal government's responsibility to enforce these laws," she insisted.

Yet, just three years into office, this senator seemed to have lost faith in Washington's commitment to that responsibility.

"Unfortunately," she said, "this job has not been done well over the years, and the prohibitions against illegal immigration, while on the books, have meant very little in reality.

"The cost of the failure to act on this responsibility has been very high," she said.

Was this the Senate's version of President Donald Trump? Who was this firebrand?

It was Sen. Dianne Feinstein -- the former Democratic mayor of San Francisco, who was first elected to the Senate in 1992.

On Sept. 30, 1996, Feinstein stood on the Senate floor and -- in the words cited above -- advocated enactment of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

It called for a triple fence along the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego.

On May 1, 1996, Feinstein had given a floor speech advocating an amendment she and fellow Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California had offered for this bill.

"Earlier I sent an amendment to the desk on behalf of Senator Boxer and myself which relates to the triple fencing of the Southwest border, particularly in the vicinity of San Diego and Mexico," Feinstein said.

"Essentially, the language would authorize the appropriation of $12 million for the construction, expansion, improvement, and deployment of triple fencing," she explained.

The final version of Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act included language specifically authorizing this triple fence to protect the border in Feinstein's home state.

It required the attorney general (who was then responsible for border security), to "provide for the construction along 14 miles of the international border of the United States, starting at the Pacific Ocean and extending eastward, of second and third fences, in addition to the existing reinforced fence, and for roads between the fences."

President Bill Clinton signed this into law.

But just because the law commanded it, did not mean the government would do it.

"Environmental concerns and litigation resulted in significant delays in fulfilling this requirement," the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2017 report. "Over eight years after IIRIRA was enacted, the DHS had not completed the fencing project."

So, in 2006, Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act. This reduced the number of layers in the required border fence from three to two but vastly expanded the number of miles it was required to cover.

"CBP estimated that covered roughly 850 miles," said the Congressional Research Service.

Two years later, in an appropriations act, Congress amended the fence law again. This time, it reduced the number of layers from two to one, reduced the length of mandated fence from 850 miles to "not less than 700 miles" and gave the secretary of Homeland Security discretion over where it should be built.

The law also did not specify the architecture of the fence. So, the Department of Homeland Security built some "fencing" that was not designed to stop people from crossing the border.

"Some disagreement has arisen over DHS's use of 'vehicle fencing' to satisfy IIRIRA's fencing requirements," said the Congressional Research Service report. "Vehicle fencing is a type of barrier designed to inhibit the illegal crossing of vehicles into the United States, but not pedestrians."

Five days after he took office, Trump reinvigorated the effort to build a border barrier. He issued an executive order that said: "It is the policy of the executive branch to: secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration."

This Republican president in 2017 sounded a bit like Dianne Feinstein in 1996.

"The nearly $4.5 billion in appropriations provided by Congress for border barrier planning and construction since the signing of the E.O. exceeds the amount provided for those purposes from FY 2007 to FY 2016 combined by almost $2 billion," the Congressional Research Service said in a report published this January.

Even so, this was merely a modest down payment on enforcing the laws Feinstein had called out the government for not enforcing -- almost a quarter-century ago.

In fiscal 2006, the year Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act, the Border Patrol apprehended 1,071,972 deportable aliens illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

By fiscal 2017, the year Trump took office, total apprehensions had dropped to 303,916.

In fiscal 2019, they climbed back to 851,508.

At the end of fiscal 2019, according to the Border Patrol, there were 654 total miles of "primary" barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Of these, 374 miles would stop pedestrians, and 280 miles would stop vehicles; 37 had a "secondary" pedestrian fence; and 14 had a "tertiary" pedestrian fence.

The full border is 1,954 miles long.

Trump needs to keep fighting the Washington establishment to build his border wall and establish for history that he meant what he said when he beat that establishment in the 2016 election.

Thinking of Quitting Information Technology

1: Stress

Don't let anyone ever tell you that a career in IT is easy going. It's a rare occasion that someone will have a job in the IT field where there isn't stress. Remember, IT is disaster management. When a client or user calls you, it's almost always an emergency that must be taken care of immediately. And when you are working on those jobs, you had better get everything right, as failure could cost you a contract or a job. What makes this worse is that the stress rarely lets up. Every minute of the day, you are working and working harder than you might expect.

2: Hours

If you want a Monday through Friday, 9-to-5 job, look elsewhere -- IT seems to be a job you carry around with you 24/7. Not only do you put in more hours in the office (or the field) than your average professional, you also have to work outside the office to keep your skills up and make sure you're better than the guy standing next to you. And the people who aren't your clients or users (friends and family, for example) will want to take advantage of your knowledge and keep their computers running smoothly for free.

3: Getting paid

If you are an independent contractor, one of the most stressful issues you face is getting paid. I can't tell you how many consultants I know who have had to make threats or use an attorney to get paid. And when you're freelancing, if they don't pay you, you don't eat. That is some serious stress there. You don't have the advantage of having that regular check coming in weekly or biweekly. Honing your interpersonal skills is key to keeping those relationships as good as possible. Good relationships (even with not-so-good people) will go a long way to make sure you do eventually get paid.

4: People (in general)

This one I hate to mention. A long time ago, I was a positive, upbeat, people-loving kind of person. But after being in the consulting business, I've found myself getting taken advantage of, used, abused, unpaid, underpaid, unappreciated, and more. It's a constant fight to resist wanting to retreat to the woods and off the grid. That is not to say that people, in general, are bad. It's just that when you have your IT hat on, people seem to look at you in a different light. You are both savior and sinner in one stressed-out package.

5: The chain of command

Let's face it. Not many higher-ups understand your job. They think you should be able to get everything done on a shoestring budget, with no help, and you should treat end users as if they were better humans than yourself. And to make matters worse, the higher-ups want you to magically make those PCs last for more than a decade. This misunderstanding of both duty and technology does one thing: It makes your job impossible. When the powers-that-be begin to micromanage your department for you, every single bad element is exacerbated. You know your job and you know you know your job. Management does not know your job, but they don't know they don't know your job. It's all a vicious Mobius strip of stress.

6: Technology

Have you ever had one of those days when it seems like the whole of technology has rebelled against you and it looks like the singularity might very well be on the horizon? Those days will have you wishing you were walking out of the building with your belongings in a cardboard box. This has been one of the issues I have had to deal with since working with a consultancy that deals primarily with Windows clients. It seems that entropy has a strong hold on the Windows operating system, and every day is a battle to keep PCs and systems working. Some days you win that battle, some days you lose it. The days you win are always lost in the pile of days you lose.

7: Competition

One thing you can count on -- there will always be someone better than you. But in the IT industry, it isn't a 1:1 ratio. Instead, it seems that for every one of you there are one hundred IT pros who are smarter, faster, and better equipped. That ratio is quickly realized in dollar signs. Remember, the IT landscape is constantly changing, and if you can't keep up, you may not be hired or remain employed. The longer I am in this business, the more I realize it's a young person's game. Being as agile as necessary, being able to work the necessary hours... it all adds up. I'm not saying us older folks can't run with the pack. We can. But every day we work is another day even more competition is added to the field, and the competition is fierce.

8: The cloud

Every time I hear an actor on TV speak the phrase "to the cloud" I want to pull out my hair and kick in the television. The cloud has been one of those aspects of IT whose definition has been, and probably always will be, in flux. What exactly is the cloud? Should I be using it? Is the cloud safe? How much does the cloud cost? I get hit with these questions all the time. Generally, I just answer by asking the clients if they've used Google Docs before. If they say "yes," I tell them they are already using the cloud. But that is never satisfying. Clients and end users want the cloud to be some magical experience that will make all their work easier, better, and faster. If only they knew the truth.

9: Lack of standards

Our lives would be infinitely better if some sort of standards could be applied, across the board, in IT. Many open source projects have done everything they can to achieve a set of standards, only to be knocked down by proprietary software. Those proprietary software vendors want to keep their code closed and not compliant with standards so they can keep their bottom line as padded as possible. I get that, I really do. But while they are refusing to conform to any sort of standard, they are causing end users and IT pros any number of horrendous headaches on a daily basis. There is no reason why standards can't be followed without preventing proprietary software vendors from making a killing.

10: Respect

The general public has a bad taste in its mouth for IT professionals. Why? There are many reasons. They've been burned before. They've been ripped off before. They've had consultants who only seemed to want to sell them bigger and better things. So long has this gone on, and so jaded has the public become, that IT pros have a hard time earning respect. Oh sure, when they see you walk in the door you are their best friend... for the moment. But the minute you get that one "impending doom" issue resolved, it's time to go off on you or insist you do more than they hired you to do (or more than you have time to do).

11: No Social Media perks and no friendships in nepotism culture

The I have material collections including CDs, books, DVDs, Blurays, a car, videogames.  I didn't get comments or attention of my material stuff.   No comments. No recognition. Very few mall trips, MLB gatherings, NFL gatherings, pub gatherings, no friendships in nepotism world.

Thinking about quitting?

Are the downsides of working in IT starting to outweigh the positive aspects of your job? What career would you pursue if you left IT? Share your thoughts with other TechRepublic members

Why do so few people major in computer science?

In 2005, about 54,000 people in the US earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science. That figure was lower every year afterwards until 2014, when 55,000 people majored in CS. I’m surprised not only that the figure is low; the greater shock is that was flat for a decade. Given high wages for developers and the cultural centrality of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t we expect far more people to have majored in computer science?
This is even more surprising when we consider that 1.90 million people graduated with bachelor’s degrees in 2015, which is 31% higher than the 1.44 million graduates in 2005. (Data is via the National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics) That means that the share of people majoring in computer science has decreased, from 3.76% of the all majors in 2005 to 3.14% of all majors in 2015. Meanwhile, other STEM majors have grown over the same period: “engineering” plus “engineering technologies” went from 79,544 to 115,096, a gain of 45%; “mathematics and statistics” from 14,351 to 21,853, a gain of 52%; “physical sciences and science technologies” from 19,104 to 30,038, a gain of 57%; “biological and biomedical sciences” from 65,915 to 109,896, a gain of 67%. “Computer sciences and information technologies?” From 54,111 in 2005 to 59,581 in 2015, a paltry 10.1%.
If you’d like a handy chart, I graphed the growth here, with number of graduates normalized to 2005.

(Addendum: Several people have pointed out that 2005 was an idiosyncratic year, and that I should not rebase figures from that date. I graphed it from this point because in the NCES dataset I’ve been using breaks out the data by one-year intervals only since 2005. Scroll to the end of the post to see data on graduates from 1975, which shows clearly that 2005 was a peak for graduates. A more full discussion would involve the impact of the dotcom bubble; see below.)
I consider this a puzzle because I think that people who go to college decide on what to major in significantly based on two factors: earning potential and whether a field is seen as high-status. Now let’s establish whether majoring in CS delivers either.
Are wages high? The answer is yes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has data on software developers. The latest data we have is from May 2016, in which the median annual pay for software developers is $106,000; pretty good, considering that the median annual pay for all occupations is $37,000. But what about for the lowest decile, which we might consider a proxy for the pay of entry level jobs that fresh grads can expect to claim? That figure is $64,650, twice the median annual pay for all occupations. We can examine data from a few years back as well. In 2010, median pay for software developers was $87,000; pay at the lowest decile was $54,000. Neither were low, now both have grown.
Now we can consider whether someone majoring in computer science can expect to join a high-status industry. That’s more difficult to prove rigorously, but I submit the answer is yes. I went to high school during the late-aughts, when the financial crisis crushed some of Wall Street’s allure, and Silicon Valley seemed glamorous even then. Google IPO’d in 2004, people my age all wanted to buy iPhones and work for Steve Jobs, and we were all signing up for Facebook. People talked about how cool it would be to intern at these places. One may not expect to end up at Google after college, but that was a great goal to aspire to. Industries like plastics or poultry or trucking don’t all have such glittering companies that attract.
I tweeted out this puzzle and received a variety of responses. Most of them failed to satisfy. Now I want to run through some common solutions offered to this puzzle along with some rough and dirty argument on what I find lacking about them.
Note: All data comes from the Digest of Education Statistics, Department of Education.

***

1. Computer science is hard. This is a valid observation, but it doesn’t explain behaviors on the margin. CS is a difficult subject, but it’s not the only hard major. People who proclaim that CS is so tough have to explain why so many more people have been majoring in math, physics, and engineering; remember, all three majors have seen growth of over 40% between 2005 and 2015, and they’re no cakewalks either. It’s also not obvious that their employment prospects are necessarily more rosy than the one for CS majors (at least for the median student who doesn’t go to a hedge fund). Isn’t it reasonable to expect that people with an aptitude for math, physics, and engineering will also have an aptitude for CS? If so, why is it the only field with low growth?
On the margin, we should expect high wages to attract more people to a discipline, even if it’s hard. Do all the people who are okay with toiling for med school, law school, or PhD programs find the CS bachelor’s degree to be unthinkably daunting?
2. You don’t need a CS degree to be a developer. This is another valid statement that I don’t think explains behaviors on the margin. Yes, I know plenty of developers who didn’t graduate from college or major in CS. Many who didn’t go to school were able to learn on their own, helped along by the varieties of MOOCs and boot camps designed to get them into industry.
It might be true that being a software developer is the field that least requires a bachelor’s degree with its associated major. Still: Shouldn’t we expect some correlation between study and employment here? That is, shouldn’t having a CS major be considered a helpful path into the industry? It seems to me that most tech recruiters look on CS majors with favor.
Although there are many ways to become a developer, I’d find it surprising if majoring in CS is a perfectly useless way to enter the profession, and so people shun it in favor of other majors.
3. People aren’t so market-driven when they’re considering majors. I was a philosophy major, and no I didn’t select on the basis of its dazzling career prospects. Aren’t most people like me when it comes to selecting majors?

Maybe. It’s hard to tell. Evidence for includes a study published in the Journal of Human Capital, which suggests that people would reconsider their majors if they actually knew what they could earn in their associated industries. That is, they didn’t think hard enough about earning potentials when they were committing to their majors.
We see some evidence against this idea if we look at the tables I’ve been referencing. Two of the majors with the highest rates of growth have been healthcare and law enforcement. The number of people graduating with bachelor’s degrees in “health professions and related programs” more than doubled, from 80,865 in 2005 to 216,228 in 2015. We can find another doubling in “homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting,” from 30,723 in 2005 to 62,723 in 2015. Haven’t these rents-heavy and government-driven sectors been pretty big growth sectors in the last few years? If so, we can see that people have been responsive to market-driven demand for jobs.
(Sidenote: if we consider the pipeline of talent to be reflective of expectations of the economy, and if we consider changes in the number of bachelor’s degrees to be a good measure of this pipeline, then we see more evidence for Alex Tabarrok’s view that we’re becoming a healthcare-warfare state rather than an innovation nation.)
In the meantime, I’m happy to point out that the number of people majoring in philosophy has slightly declined between 2005 to 2015, from 11,584 to 11,072. It’s another sign that people are somewhat responsive to labor market demands. My view is that all the people who are smart enough to excel as a philosophy major are also smart enough not to actually pursue that major. (I can’t claim to be so original here—Wittgenstein said he saw more philosophy in aerospace engineering than he did in philosophy.)
4. Immigrants are taking all the jobs. I submit there are two ways to see that immigrants aren’t meeting all the marginal demand. First, most immigrants who come to the US to work are on the H1B visa; and that number has been capped at 65,000 every year since 2004. (There are other visa programs available, but the H1B is the main one, and it doesn’t all go to software engineers.) Second, rising wages should be prima facie evidence that there’s a shortage of labor. If immigrants have flooded the market, then we should see that wages have declined; that hasn’t been the case.
To say that immigrants are discouraging people from majoring in CS requires arguing that students are acutely aware of the level of the H1B cap, expect that it will be lifted at some point in the near future, and therefore find it too risky to enter this field because they think they’ll be competing with foreign workers on home soil. Maybe. But I don’t think that students are so acutely sensitive to this issue.
5. Anti-women culture. Tech companies and CS departments have the reputation of being unfriendly to women. The NCES tables I’m looking at don’t give a breakdown of majors by gender, so we can’t tell if the shares of men and women majoring in CS has differed significantly from previous decades. One thing to note is that the growth of people earning CS majors has been far below the growth of either gender earning bachelor’s degrees.
More women graduate from college than men. (Data referenced in this paragraph comes from this table.) In 1980, each gender saw about 465,000 new grads. Since then, many more women have earned degrees than men; in 2015, 812,669 men earned bachelor’s degrees, while 1,082,265 women did. But since 2005, the growth rate for women earning bachelor’s has not significantly outpaced that of men. 32.5% more men earned bachelor’s degrees in the previous decade, a slightly higher rate than 31.5% for women. It remains significant that women are keeping that growth rate for over a higher base, but it may be that it’s no longer the case that their growth can be much higher than that of men in the future.
What’s important is that the growth rate of 30% for both genders is below that of 10% for CS majors over this time period. We can’t pick out the breakdown of genders from this dataset, but I’d welcome suggestions on how to find those figures in the comments below.
6. Reactionary faculty. The market for developers isn’t constrained by some guild like the American Medical Association, which caps the number of people who graduate from med schools in the name of quality control.
CS doesn’t have the same kind of guild masters, unless we want to count faculty to be serving this function on their own. It could be that people serving on computer science faculties are contemptuous of people who want high pay and the tech life; instead they’re looking for the theory-obsessed undergraduate who are as interested in say Turing and von Neumann as much as they are. So in response to a huge new demand for CS majors, they significantly raise standards, allowing no more than say 500 people to graduate if a decade ago only 450 did. Rather than cater to the demands of the market, they raise standards so that they’re failing an even higher proportion of students to push them out of their lovely, pure, scholarly field.
I have no firsthand experience. To determine this as a causal explanation, we would have to look into how many more students have been graduating from individual departments relative to the number of people who were weeded out. The latter is difficult to determine, but it may be possible to track if particular departments have raised standards over the last few decades.
7. Anti-nerd culture. Nerds blow, right? Yeah, no doubt. But aren’t the departments of math, physics, and engineering also filled with nerds, who can expect just as much social derision on the basis of their choice? That these fields have seen high growth when CS has not is evidence that people aren’t avoiding all the uncool majors, only the CS one.
8. Skill mismatch and lack of training from startups. This is related but slightly different to my accusation that CS faculty are reactionaries. Perhaps all the professors are too theoretical and would never make it as coders at tech companies. Based on anecdotal evidence, I’ve seen that most startups are hesitant to hire fresh grads, instead they want people to have had some training outside of a college. One also hears that the 10X coders aren’t that eager to train new talent; there isn’t enough incentive for them to.
This is likely a factor, but I don’t think it goes a great length in explaining why so few people commit to majoring in the field. Students see peers getting internships at big tech companies, and they don’t necessarily know that their training is too theoretical. I submit that this realization should not deter; even if students do realize this, they might also know they can patch up their skills by attending a boot camp.
9. Quality gradient. Perhaps students who graduate from one of the top 50 CS departments have an easy time finding a job, but those who graduate from outside that club have a harder time. But this is another one of those explanations that attributes a greater degree of sophistication than the average freshman can be observed to possess. Do students have an acute sense of the quality gradient between the best and the rest? Why is the marginal student not drawn to study CS at a top school, and why would a top student not want to study CS at a non-top school, especially if he or she can find boot camps and MOOCs to bolster learning? I would not glance at what students do and immediately derive that they’re hyperrational creatures.
10. Psychological burn from the dotcom bubble. Have people been deeply scarred by the big tech bubble? It bursted in 2001; if CS majors who went through it experienced a long period of difficulty, then it could be the case that they successfully warned off younger people from majoring in it. To prove this, we’d have to see if people who graduated after the bubble did have a hard time, and if college students are generally aware of the difficulties experienced by graduates from previous years.
11. No pipeline issues anymore. In 2014, the number of people majoring in CS surpassed the figure in 2005, the previous peak. In 2015, that figure was higher still. And based on anecdotal evidence, it seems like there are many more people taking CS intro classes than ever before. 2014 corresponds to four years after The Social Network movie came out; that did seem to make people more excited for startups, so perhaps tech wasn’t as central then as it seems now.
I like to think of The Social Network as the Liar’s Poker of the tech world: An intended cautionary tale of an industry that instead hugely glamorized it to the wrong people. The Straussian reading of these two works, of course, is that Liar’s Poker and The Social Network had every intention to glamorize their respective industries; the piously-voiced regrets by their creators are absolutely not to be believed.
Even if the pipeline is bursting today, the puzzle is why high wages and the cultural centrality of Silicon Valley have not drawn in more people in the previous decade. Anyone who offers an argument also has to explain why things are different today than in 2005. Perhaps I’ve overstated how cool tech was before 2010