future with compsci degree

[dn88]

Ive heard some negative things about the future with a career in say programming or anything IT related that you need a degree in . For example you need to be learning new codes over the years because things can change at anytime(getting certificates,extra classes etc). Is it really tough to keep a job like this when youre in your late 40's 50's, or would a company rather just higher a new student out of uni. at that time?

[jbking]

The learning new stuff is part of being in a field where there are new things coming out quite regularly that you may or may not get to use right away. For example, I'm still on Windows XP for my work machines so clearly I'm not using the latest and greatest Microsoft O/S yet I develop with a mostly Microsoft stack, including Visual Studio, IIS, and MS-SQL Server for some parts. Do I get to learn some new stuff every so often? Sure, but it comes and goes in various spurts has been my experience over the past dozen years in web development. Given that the web itself isn't even 20 years old yet, it is kind of hard to try to think of anyone having done this for so long but I do know of ex-programmers that went back to school and pursued other fields like accounting in his 50s. Will that happen to me? I don't know, but right now I'm still a web developer. I do know that some people in the company are still programming with VB6 for some legacy systems so not everything is new and bleeding edge where I am. There are legacy sites still written in classic ASP here too.

While companies could hire recent graduates in some cases, there are various advantages to taking on that middle-aged developer if the company could use someone to mentor the more junior developers if the older developer knows various methodologies and practices that the company wants to adopt. In the past couple of years, I have learned a lot about a few things that were central to the project I worked and am curious to see how my future project work goes once we get into something new. Those new things include some technical stuff like Sitecore CMS but also various Agile practices like Scrum, using a story board, planning sprints, and other stuff that has been quite interesting in some respects. Don't forget that what you learn in school and what you experience on the job can be quite different. I can remember passing a programming assignment just by getting the error handling of the input part done and doing nothing about the key concept that the assignment was supposed to focus.

There is something to be said for knowing what are your strengths and what kind of stuff do you like. I like solving problems and helping people for my core passions. In university I studied Computer Science but also did enough Combinatorics & Optimization to have that as my other major because I liked some of the problems there and wanted to have a double degree. My university years were 1993-1997, so when I started I'm not sure many would have predicted the big dot-com boom that came when I graduated.

As for other negative things, mention them as I know lots of negative things but I also know many positive things about this field that I wouldn't mind sharing.

[Tony]

There are plenty of legacy systems. COBOL, a language since 1959, is still in wide use and accounts for some of the highest paying jobs in the industry. Because no one wants to work with something that old.

If your plan is to just graduate, and cruise to retirement, then you'll likely have a hard time in any industry that "you need a degree in".