Tech jobs boom like it's 1999 - USATODAY.com

This is great news for students of computer science and related disciplines.

However, as one that was working in the IT industry through the 90s and through the turn of the millenium, one must ask -- are we going to repeat the past? Is this going to be another bubble, causing a overabundance of IT employees in, say, 5 years or so? Well, I do not see that happening. Let me explain.

My justifications are based on working in the industry for 11 years followed with teaching computer science at three different institutions since then. First, as an academic discipline, computer science is surely the most dynamic field there is; this has presented a challenge to higher ed. Many colleges failed to survive dismal enrollments over the past 5-7 years. Moreover, many of those that have survived are failing to keep themselves relevant, allowing themselves to teach outdated skills using even more outdated technology. Even if the student interest reached what it was in the late 90s, on average, I would say that the majority of institutions out there offering bachelors and masters programs in computer science do not have the infrastructure in place to handle the increased enrollments, thus causing the students to consider alternative paths.  Fortunately, enrollments in computer science programs have and will continue to rebound nicely over the next several years. The glut of students running into IT after their degree will not match what we saw in the late 90s simply because we do not have the academic infrastructure and placement in computer science in this country like we had in the 80s-90s.

A second problem (and a bigger problem, in my opinion) is the lack of adequate STEM education in secondary education. We might have much larger enrollments on our doorstep. But, will they be coming in with the same mathematical foundation that they did 15 years ago? My observations are not giving me high confidence that this will be the case. 

I appreciate the fact that in my current position, we meet on a semi-regular basis to review our curriculum. As a department, we bring our experiences and observations of the industry to the table, and discuss what needs to change in the curriculum. Sure, we might conclude that, for this year, we are OK. And that is fine. But, one reason I chose to come here was because my institution values the importance of being dynamic.  We strive to do what we can to ensure that we maintain a certain level of relevancy across the curriculum. Of course, the counterpoint to that is that we must maintain stability in the curriculum. And, there are various factors, both internal and external, that enforce this. But, for individual instructors, I believe that it is essential for us to consider what we might be able to alter to ensure the students have the best chance to learn what they can to get the best jobs and get into the best graduate schools. I am quite aware that, as a selective private liberal arts college with a good engineering school, we are getting very good students with well-above average STEM skills. I am aware that we will not face some of the issues that many other colleges will, though even the best schools are not immune to the continual decay of quality STEM education. I'm much more concerned for our field as a whole, outside of my little academic bubble. I spent many more years outside of this bubble than inside it, and have strong reason to be concerned.

We have a great opportunity before us to embrace the surging interest in CS and get our higher education programs in place to handle it. This is important, not only for higher education, but for ensuring the technological placement of our country. If we hope to regain some of this country's lost respect and placement with respect to technology, this is something we all need to work hard at. I don't care whether you are at a community college, a bottom tier state school, or a prominent R-1 research university. There is a golden opportunity on the doorstep of computer science. I know so many of us are weary and tired. We have had countless budget issues, merging of departments, threats to close programs, many of which were carried through. We have every reason to be weary, and yet every reason to shake off the past and do what we can to make it right.

With that said, I have comparative few answers, and many questions. I'm researching the options...

Data mining your gut

A study has been conducted recently by EMBL that involved a large-scale data analysis of, well, the DNA of your gut. Yes, at first glance, you might think that this is not exactly computer science, that is, until you understand the methods.

The article from the NY Times is a decent summary of the work: Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types

The research team had an enormous amount of data to work with after getting DNA sequence fragments from tissue sampled from the guts of 22 people. They then mapped the fragments to the genomes of 1,511 species of bacteria that have a reference genome publicly available. Doing a clustering of the results among these 22 people revealed an interesting pattern -- all bacteria fell into one of three clusterings over all people they analyzed.

It will be interesting to perform a much larger sample of people to see if this pattern holds. I'd also be interested in seeing if there is any relationship between these clusters and the rate of occurrence of various diseases. Finally, the study suggests that they may have discovered some species of bacteria that were unknown to date. That's not very surprising, given that every one of us hosts 100 trillion microbes. There's a pretty good chance that some of our microbes are generating some interesting mutations over time.

Once again, we have another example of data mining helping medical researchers discover more information about us.

Tech sector faces "serious and pervasive'' skills shortage

It's not just the U.S. that is suffering from a lack of people with skills in the IT sector. Canada also is suffering.

We need to see students returning to pursuing IT degrees with a rate that matches the rate they ran away during the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Currently, the derivative is going in the right direction, but the rate of increased enrollments in our programs will do little to fill the ever-increasing career opportunities for good computer science majors. We have a dire need for not only more CS majors, but more math and science majors in general, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Our need for more majors is not so much for the survival of our programs in academia anymore. More importantly, our need for majors is for the survival of the prominence of the IT sector in this country. I fear that the position of the U.S. as a major technological player will continue its decline against many other countries. Many countries saw the opportunity and substantial importance of STEM education needed for our students today, right from K-12 and certainly well through higher education. Did the U.S.? Have we learned from our mistakes? What are we doing today to increase awareness and improve the education of these important skills?