Computer science still a good career

Moshe Vardi, professor of Computer Science at Rice University, visited UIUC last year, and gave a very captivating talk on the history of logic. Face to face, he is a pretty amazing speaker ... I am not "into" Theory, but I enjoyed his whole talk very much.

On Nov 6, Stanford University Forums discussed the job prospects in Computer Science. Prof. Vardi commented that

"There is a huge mismatch between perception and reality. There are more IT jobs now than there were six years ago at the height of the IT boom."

From the report,

Vardi presented results from a study on the global migration of software jobs commissioned by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society.

He co-chaired a task force of economists, social scientists and computer scientists who spent a year reviewing all the available data on the global impact of offshoring for the information technology industry to reveal computing is still a viable field of study and work.

"IT is still a good career," Vardi said. "We have nothing to fear but the fear of competition itself.""

So, in a way, this report affirms what I've been saying all along, the Computer Science industry is still strong, and will likely to remain so for many more years. I hope this will at least allay the fears many prospective BUET students have about the CSE department, and that it will dispell some of the rumors many parents have been hearing all the time.


The complete report from Stanford Univ Forums can be found here.