According to Prof. Bill Dally, chair of the computer science department at Stanford, Wall Street’s collapse may be computer science’s gain.
The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.
“Many thought they could make more money in hedge funds,” Dally said. He said students are returning to computer science because they like the field and not because it can necessarily make them rich.
That’s right. Those kids better not believe they’ll get rich with a computer science degree.
If the dot-com meltdown wasn’t enough, offshore outsourcing also scared away students from technology. In 2004, Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., summed up the offshore trend this way: “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.” Fiorina is now an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain in his bid for the White House.