Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:05:41 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: CS establishment finally admits it--American programmers are doomed To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Points to be made: * Now even the computer science academic establishment is finally saying that the American programmer is on the road to extinction, due to use of foreign labor. * The CS academic establishment should have recognized this long ago and taken appropriate action, but was beholden to the industry's money, and thus had to support the industry's pro- foreign-labor political positions, not to mention academia's own aggressive promotion of attracting foreign students to their graduate programs. * The CS academic establishment never realized that the reductions in CS university enrollment would be this severe, and now they are panicking. * Yet they still don't get it, and offer "solutions" which won't work. I have been saying since 1998 (even 1993) that the use of foreign labor would eventually kill the programming profession. Over the years, "foreign labor" has mainly come in the form of bringing in H-1B workers from abroad, but more recently we also see foreign labor being used overseas, i.e. offshoring. H-1B still seems to be the larger problem of the two, but either way, Americans don't get the jobs. I have also predicted that eventually young people would realize that CS jobs are going to foreign labor, and thus the young people would not major in CS anymore. But up until recently, the CS academic profession has been unwilling to face these issues, which have now changed from predictions to real problems. Who in the CS academic profession SHOULD be listening? Arguably, one group that should have been on top of this problem long ago is the Computing Research Association (www.cra.org), a consortium of most university (i.e. PhD-granting) computer science departments in the U.S. One would think that the CRA member universities have the most to lose: If CS undergraduate enrollments drop due to the bad job market, the departments lose funding. Moreover, without a healthy base of undergraduate CS majors, the departments can't support as large a graduate program. Meanwhile, the bad job market eventually hits people with graduate degrees, and the student population in graduate school starts shrinking too (including the foreign students, who used to come to grad school on the expectation that they will later get U.S. jobs but now are increasingly seeing that prospects are poor in the U.S. and good in their home countries). That in turn means that the departments cannot obtain (or even use) as much federal research funding as in the past, a major problem; grad students and research funding comprise the basis of academic empires. (See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ForeignGradStudents.txt) And the CRA has clout that it could use if it wanted to. It holds its biennial Snowbird meeting for computer science department chairs, and could alert them to the problems. CRA's leaders interact quite actively with Congress and the White House, the latter through the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. ("PITAC is our latest success story. High-level White House support"--Wm. Aspray address to 2002 Snowbird conference, http://www.cra.org/Activities/snowbird/2002/slides/cra.pdf) So the CRA _COULD_ do a lot about the problem if it were willing to do so. So why has the CRA _NOT_ been listening? The answer is very simple: It is forced to toe the industry party line on the issues of H-1B and offshoring. For example, consider University of Washington Computer Science Dept. chair Ed Lazowska, who until recently served as CRA chair and was named by George W. Bush to PITAC. As I noted in my law journal article, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf The Web page of the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington, a leading supporter of industry's labor shortage claims, showed the following as of March 16, 2000: $1.5 milion from Ford Motor Co. in research funds; ``several million dollars'' in equipment from Intel; $500,000 from Boeing for an endowed faculty chair; another $500,000 chair from Microsoft; another chair from Boeing; and finally, $3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for two endowed chairs. Department chair Ed Lazowska, who has been an outspoken supporter of the H-1B program, personally benefits financially from a cozy relationship with industry too. According to his personal Web page, http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/, he is ``member of the Technical Advisory Boards for Microsoft Research, Voyager Capital, Ignition, Frazier Technology Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Impinj... I would add that Lazowska is now one of the holders of those Bill and Melinda Gates endowed chairs. And the CRA board has representatives from Microsoft, IBM, etc. So, not surprisingly, the CRA has been ACTIVELY SUPPORTING the industry's drive for expansion of the H-1B program and offshoring. So, in a "whistling past the graveyard" fashion, CRA just hoped that the hemorrhage in enrollments would not occur. When they did start occurring, they hoped that the hemorrhage was temporary. But during the past year, it finally became impossible to deny what should have been clear long ago: Programming--the mainstay of the job market for CS grads--is fast becoming extinct as an American profession. The young people see the handwriting on the cubicle wall, and are voting with their feet, running to other majors. In other words, the very industry policies which the CS academic establishment felt forced to actively support have now become the cause of a looming decimation of CS departments nationwide. It's a remarkable irony. And a painful one, to the academic tech chauvinists. A UC Berkeley study conducted by Dean Richard Newton and presented at this summer's Snowbird conference investigated WHERE the students are running to. To the horror of these engineers, who tend to look down on the non-tech fields as being intellectually inferior, the students fleeing CS are turning to majoring in psychology and history! But the students know that the new paradigm is that even if a CS grad does get a job, it is likely to be nontechnical anyway, say of the sales and marketing variety. As one student put it so well to me, "If I'm going to end up with an Econ-type job, I might as well major in Econ" (and not have to stay up to 3 a.m. debugging programs for CS classes). As recently as 2002, the biennial CRA conference speakers were pretending that the bad job market for CS was "clearly a short-term dip," due to the stock market. (See Aspray reference above.) But now, the CRA finally admits it: The programming profession has no future, as seen in this excerpt from the enclosed article: Q: Let me then ask about the offshoring issue, because a lot of people would look at it and say, "It doesn't make sense to get into computer science and then to become a programmer." Right. It does not make sense to become a programmer. But there is a lot more to computer science and computing than programming, and that's part of our challenge. There is this stereotypical image that computer science education leads to heads-down programming jobs, and it's those heads-down, isolated-from-the-problem jobs that are going to some extent offshore. I think the trend of pure programming jobs will continue to go offshore, because in many ways, our computers and communications technologies enable that to happen. Most readers of that article won't notice a key part of Foley's comment above: There is this stereotypical image that computer science education leads to heads-down programming jobs... No, it's not an "image." Before the advent of the H-1B program, it was the reality. But ever since the advent of H-1B, the percentage of students getting programming jobs has gotten smaller and smaller, and the numbers being shunted into "Econ-type jobs" such as customer support and marketing have grown higher and higher. It is FOREIGN LABOR, PROMOTED BY THE CRA, WHICH CHANGED COMPUTER SCIENCE FROM AN ENGINEERING TO AN "ECON-TYPE" PROFESSION. Next question is a followup: Q: What are the kinds of computer science jobs that make sense for the future--that are going to be, to some extent, offshore-proof? The key is big-picture design--what you would call system architecture or system design. It's understanding end-user needs and translating them into the detailed specifications, designs and architectures that can and will be shipped offshore. It's what we call the user-facing, or customer-facing, aspects of computing, which is sometimes characterized as "computing plus X." We are emphasizing a lot more with our students that they need to understand something besides computing--like business, biology, chemistry, mapping, geography, information retrieval or history. Like anything in addition to computing, because the big win with computing is that you use computers to do things. And to be a creative computer architect or computing systems architect, you need to understand "X" as well as computing. More whistling past the graveyard. The first paragraph in the response is absurd. One can't get into "big picture design" without having years of programming experience. Yet Foley is ceding the programming job market to India and other foreign countries. It follows that the "big picture design" is also going to be done abroad. I've been making that point for years--you need to have a base for those high-level jobs, and without that base, you can't fill the high-level jobs. Interestingly, Tom Weakland's column in the Sept. 13 issue of Computerworld offers a related anecdote: A company that typically hires people into its IT department from undergraduate university programs almost learned a lesson about unintended consequences the hard way. This firm has historically promoted its top performers from programmer to IT manager to IT executive. It was considering outsourcing virtually all of its application development, but then it realized that such a decision could result in a lack of IT managers three to five years down the road. Now it may scale back its offshore plans. The second paragraph in Foley's response above uses a term bandied about a lot at the Snowbird conference, "CS+X," meaning that CS majors could make themselves employable by studying a supplementary field, say economics. (They also talked about "X+CS," meaning teaching more CS courses geared to nonmajors, a reasonable policy.) Clearly CS+X won't work either. If the job is primarily programming, it will still be done by foreign labor; if the job is primarily economics, then once again, the student comment, "If I'm going to end up with an Econ-type job, I might as well major in Econ" applies. Foley just doesn't get it. Note this one: Q: Is the 9/11 issue related to foreign students? Yeah, that's mostly the foreign-student issue--students not being able to get visas or choosing to go to other countries where they know there is less of a hassle. As I've pointed out before, this "official line" is incorrect. Fewer foreign students are coming to the U.S. for education in computer science for the same reason that fewer American students are majoring in that field--the job market in the field is terrible, and even Foley admits that the change is permanent. It's amazing that people like him can so easily ascribe an economic reason for the downturn in American CS students but not see the same thing for foreign students. Somewhere someone (probably the American Immigration Lawyers Association) said "It's 9/11," and all these department chairs follow like sheep. Well, as people said in the 1992 election, "It's the economy, stupid." See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ForeignGradStudents.txt for details. Q: At the graduate level, you have mentioned that you hadn't been seeing the quality of American student candidates that is needed to get into these programs and succeed. Is that something related to not attracting the best and the brightest of the American students, or is it something about how Americans don't have the same proclivity or skill in computer science as, say, people from India or China or Taiwan? We do not get into computing or into technology as many of the best and brightest as we need. I don't think it's all about proclivity and skill. I think computing is seen as a hard discipline, and I do believe that we do not get into computing or into technology as many of the best and brightest as we need. One reason is that technology has historically been, to some extent, an upward-mobility path. Americans aren't pursuing grad school for a much simpler reason--it just doesn't pay. Average lifetime earnings are lower if one gets a PhD, largely because of the five or six years of having essentially no income while in grad school, during which time one could be making a lot of money in industry instead. See comments by Eric Weinstein in http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ForeignGradStudents.txt On this one, I object to the question, not the answer: Q: That's interesting. So it is tending to attract immigrants? Ouch! Foreign students are NOT immigrants. The F-1 student visa is officially designated as a non-immigrant visa. When a student in a foreign country goes to a U.S. consulate in that country to apply for a student visa to the U.S., he must sign a form stating his only intention in the U.S. is education, and that he does not intend to stay in the U.S. permanently. Though in C, most foreign students do have an advance intention to stay in the U.S. permanently, it is very wrong to call them "immigrants." The article follows below. See also my earlier related postings, in http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive, with titles beginning with CSAcadFuture and CSEnrollmentDrop. Norm http://news.com.com/Fixing+a+busted+IT+research+system/2008-1008_3-5374992.html Fixing a busted IT research system September 21, 2004, 4:00 AM PT By Ed Frauenheim Staff Writer, CNET News.com James Foley is worried. As chairman of the Computing Research Association--a group made up of academic departments, research centers and professional societies--his job at CRA is to improve computing research and education. But Foley sees troubling trends in the nation's system for nurturing and training new information technology scientists. The number of doctorate degrees awarded in the United States has dropped not only in computer science and engineering, but also in noncomputer science and engineering fields in general. And top U.S. undergraduate computer science departments are seeing enrollments fall. Some industry analysts argue that the country already has a glut of Ph.D.s. But to Foley, also a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, the educational declines may very well contribute to an economic malaise. He wants to excite youngsters about computers, in part through better-trained teachers. Foley would also pump up federal research funding and give young scholars independent funding. CNET News.com recently spoke with Foley about computer science education, the flow of programming work offshore and how the computer science profession in America can weather the trend toward offshoring. Q: The number of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the United States has been falling, from 27,300 in 1998 down to 24,550 in 2002. How big a deal is that decline? A: One way to look at is in the context of what other countries are doing. The per capita production of engineering students in the United States is a lot lower than in other countries, including Korea and Japan and China and Finland. The per capita data is a little dangerous because we have different bases, and the U.S. has a big population compared to Korea. But on the other hand, compared to China, our population is small. So there is a larger base of smart people to draw from than in the United States. That just says that there is going to be a potential long-term issue. A major part of our economy has been built on scientific advancement--computers, telecommunications, planes, the whole Internet and increasingly, the bio-world of medicine and life sciences and genetics and genomics and all that. So if other countries are increasingly stronger than we are in the technical base, the economic results of the technical base are going to fall behind after a while. So I think it's a big deal because of the potential threat to our economic strength. Q: What about the argument that it's hard for a lot of Ph.D.s to get good jobs these days, and also that there is a long period of time in which science Ph.D.s aren't getting independent funding. Isn't that a sign that the United States has a glut? There is this kind of disconnect in life sciences, physics and chemistry, in which you have to do a post-doc for three or six years before you get a faculty position, which is not the case in computing. We need to provide direct funding to new graduates rather than having them working under the wing of the more senior scientists. In computer science and related fields, that hasn't been necessary, because there has just been the demand for computer science professors. I frankly cannot make sense of it, because there was a great ramp up in funding for the National Institutes of Health--from seven years ago to two years ago, it doubled--and a lot of that money goes into universities for research. I've got to conclude that the money is supporting lot of post-docs but is not supporting a lot of new faculty positions. Q: Is that an unwise approach? The argument has also been made that we aren't paying good-enough salaries for some of these federally supported scientists. Do we need to have more fully funded scientists? We need to provide direct funding to new graduates rather than having them working under the wing of the more senior scientists. There are a lot of benefits to having a senior mentor guide you. But that creative urge and that thinking out of the box is particularly strong early on, and we should be encouraging it by giving direct funding to new and recent Ph.D.s--which does happen in computing, by the way. Q: The number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in computer science and computer engineering in the United States and Canada, according to CRA's survey for last year, totaled 877--up 3 percent from 2002 but was still the second-lowest since 1989. What does that say to you? During the boom days of the late 1990s, some students were being distracted by dollar signs in their eyes. I think that we had this phenomenon, in which fewer students were going to graduate school. If you say the average time to get a Ph.D. is in the six to seven-year range, that would go back to then--let's say '96 to '97, when the boom was really starting up. The good news is that the number of students passing their qualifying exam, which is the first step toward a Ph.D., has been going up in the last couple of years. So that's a positive sign for the future. Numbers have been down in a time when computing and information technology are more and more central to everything that we do, not just in our everyday lives, but also in research. In research spanning from computer sciences to life sciences, medicine, physics, chemistry and health care, computers are more and more central. So here we are with a technology that has been recognized as increasing productivity and therefore national economic competitiveness. And what we are seeing is fewer Ph.D.s. So that's a problem. And we are seeing a smaller or a flattened-out government investment in computing research, and that's also a problem, given what we know about the importance and centrality of computing to economic competitiveness. Q: Let me ask you about a comment I heard from Peter Lee, associate dean at Carnegie Mellon University. He said one of the problems in computer science is that the field has been, in some ways, a victim of its success. Computers have become so practical to daily life that the big questions surrounding them have kind of taken a backseat. The field hasn't promoted the idea that these machines can help us improve our intelligence or move us ahead. Do you think the field has been imaginative enough? I think that we have, over the last five to 10 years, been too worried about short-term things. And I am going to lay that back at the doorstep of the review process of proposals at National Science Foundation and also on the tenure process, which puts a lot of emphasis on publications. Q: This fall, there are just less than 200 undergraduate majors in the electrical engineering and computer science departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's down from about 240 last year and roughly 385 three years ago. Does that concern you? Could you comment on what's happening at Georgia Tech along those lines? It does concern me. At Georgia Tech, enrollments are up a few percentage points, after in the past having had the same kinds of declines. And I believe that at other schools, there is kind of a mixed story. It's somewhere between beginning to see the end of the decline and actually seeing the end of the decline. Q: So you expect an uptick in the future in undergraduate enrollment? I think we will have an uptick. Q: Why? We have had kind of a perfect storm in computing in a negative sense over the last 3 years. We had the dot-com crash, we had 9/11 and we had the big offshoring hullabaloo, all of which in one way or another have had negative effects on enrollment in computing. Q: Is the 9/11 issue related to foreign students? Yeah, that's mostly the foreign-student issue--students not being able to get visas or choosing to go to other countries where they know there is less of a hassle. Q: At the graduate level, you have mentioned that you hadn't been seeing the quality of American student candidates that is needed to get into these programs and succeed. Is that something related to not attracting the best and the brightest of the American students, or is it something about how Americans don't have the same proclivity or skill in computer science as, say, people from India or China or Taiwan? We do not get into computing or into technology as many of the best and brightest as we need. I don't think it's all about proclivity and skill. I think computing is seen as a hard discipline, and I do believe that we do not get into computing or into technology as many of the best and brightest as we need. One reason is that technology has historically been, to some extent, an upward-mobility path. Q: That's interesting. So it is tending to attract immigrants? That's right. And, we don't have as many economically disadvantaged folks in the United States as we once did. So that's one element, though I don't think that's the whole story. Law, medicine and business, in some ways, are seen as more interesting. The other element of it goes back to education and high school--this is a pretty well-documented problem--with having low-qualified science and math teachers in high school. So if math and science are being taught by individuals who are well-meaning but don't have enough of a background, then they are not going to make it be as interesting and exciting as it can be and as it is. The intellectual and emotional excitement that helps kids decide to go to school in science and technology won't be there. So that goes back to how we spend our money with high-school education, incentives for teachers, pay for teachers and all that. Q: Let me then ask about the offshoring issue, because a lot of people would look at it and say, "It doesn't make sense to get into computer science and then to become a programmer." Right. It does not make sense to become a programmer. But there is a lot more to computer science and computing than programming, and that's part of our challenge. There is this stereotypical image that computer science education leads to heads-down programming jobs, and it's those heads-down, isolated-from-the-problem jobs that are going to some extent offshore. I think the trend of pure programming jobs will continue to go offshore, because in many ways, our computers and communications technologies enable that to happen. Q: What are the kinds of computer science jobs that make sense for the future--that are going to be, to some extent, offshore-proof? The key is big-picture design--what you would call system architecture or system design. It's understanding end-user needs and translating them into the detailed specifications, designs and architectures that can and will be shipped offshore. It's what we call the user-facing, or customer-facing, aspects of computing, which is sometimes characterized as "computing plus X." We are emphasizing a lot more with our students that they need to understand something besides computing--like business, biology, chemistry, mapping, geography, information retrieval or history. Like anything in addition to computing, because the big win with computing is that you use computers to do things. And to be a creative computer architect or computing systems architect, you need to understand "X" as well as computing. Q: Taking the temperature of computer science and computer science research, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic? I am very optimistic. Wearing my hat as chair of CRA, I am seeing a lot of universities understanding this needed change in emphasis, which has been going on at some schools for quite a while.