> I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this - whenever I try to explain it to someone they look at me like I'm crazy. In the late 90s and even early 2000s the common wisdom with guidance counselors and even local recruiters was that programming and software design were dead end in the U.S. I remember one article literally said "the bud is off the blossom". I wound up majoring in electrical engineering instead of computer science as a result.
It all worked out in the end, but not following my instincts at the time is one of my few regrets.
It was hard to figure out at the turn of the century when the career fair was literally cut in half after the dot com bust. Although websites had been around for years, web apps were still pretty clunky and it felt like the world of internet-based possibilities still had a long way to go. I decided to try doing application development for pay because it seemed interesting and I figured I could easily switch to something else down the road. Plenty of relatives and acquaintances did inform me that my job was going to be outsourced abroad, though. :) And things looked dire again with the financial crisis but I was shocked that a few years after that, I discovered when recruiting at my alma mater that CS had become the most popular major whereas it was one of the smallest ones when I was studying it! So, lots of predicting that turned out differently...
Yeah, that's why I don't take re-kindling of the "it'll get offshored any day now" panic post-Covid that seriously. Time zones haven't gone away. The communication-based hard parts of software development haven't gone away. The way that delivering what someone asks for usually leads to them asking for more things, not fewer, hasn't gone away.
Yes, this is one reason I am personally really sensitive when various people say how privileged I was to get into computers and that we somehow got all this encouragement unlike young women, etc.
In the 80s we were mocked and called nerds for being interested in computers, and before and after dot com people thought this was dead end career.
Yes. Even as the internet started to become a thing in 1994-1995 when I was in middle school, I'd reckon less than half of my class had a computer at home - and fewer still of them would ever want to mention it.
OT, but when I search for "the bud is off the blossom" the only references I get from google are 2 links to hacker news comments... There's 0 in bing for that phrase. Never heard it before ever.
In the early days computer programming was considered a clerical job one learned in trade schools. I think people looked down on it partly because many of the early programmers were female, beneath the dignity of a male profession.
It rook my alma mater MIT until 2018 to recognize software worthy of a department in itself (after a huge financial donation). Before then it was a step child of Electrical Engineering. This is kind of ironic because me and most of my classmates ended up writing software for money, though almost none of us majored in that field.
> In the early days computer programming was considered a clerical job one learned in trade schools.
That's because in those days, the term "programming" didn't mean "software development", it referred to data entry. It actually was clerical work, comparable to typing a dictation on a typewriter. Only later, when user interface devices (keyboards, displays) considerably improved and it became more efficient to unify those tasks in one person, did "programming" and "software development" start to become synonymous.
It has nothing to do with "dignity of a male profession", or oppression of women, just a misunderstanding of a shift in the meaning of words.
> In the late 90s and even early 2000s the common wisdom with guidance counselors and even local recruiters was that programming and software design were dead end
My career advice as a teenager was that there wasn't any point doing software, as Microsoft had made it all already with Microsoft Office.
My mother talked me out of going to school for programming, and a decade after I graduated high school that’s what I ended up doing anyway, realizing it was going to lead to better prospects.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this - whenever I try to explain it to someone they look at me like I'm crazy. In the late 90s and even early 2000s the common wisdom with guidance counselors and even local recruiters was that programming and software design were dead end in the U.S. I remember one article literally said "the bud is off the blossom". I wound up majoring in electrical engineering instead of computer science as a result.
It all worked out in the end, but not following my instincts at the time is one of my few regrets.