Is computer science a dead end in the workforce?

In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman’s character is offered a single word of advice for a guaranteed future career: plastics. Had the film been set in the early 1990s, the word may well have been “programming.” Even long after the dotcom bubble burst, companies such as Google are actively seeking recruits with advanced computer science degrees. The future is bright for programmers — or so we’re told. And yet, some analysts now suggest the picture is not as rosy for recent computer science grads as some would have us believe.

According to the latest data from the U.K.’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), computer science graduates in the United Kingdom now have the hardest time finding work of graduates in any subject, with an unemployment rate of 17 percent. It should come as no surprise that legal and medical students fare significantly better — the latter having a jobless rate of practically nil — but the HESA data suggests that new students might be better off pursuing foreign languages, marketing, or even creative arts, rather than computer science.

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While the situation in the United States may not be so dire, in truth few companies share Google’s zeal for academic credentials when hiring new developers. Many are willing to accept self-taught programmers, particularly if they have other skills relevant to the business. Some have implemented in-house training programs to allow employees from other disciplines to transition into software development roles. And as development tools themselves become more sophisticated and accessible, even workers with little formal knowledge of programming are trying their hands at creating applications. All are ominous signs that demand for computer science education in the job market may be on the wane.

I should have been an English major To be sure, an advanced degree in computer science from a prestigious university such as Cal Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, or Stanford is still a valuable asset for any job-seeker. Companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft, which compete on the highest levels of the computing industry, rely on doctoral graduates for the groundbreaking R&D that forms the basis of their cutting-edge products.

Smaller companies with less ambitious goals, on the other hand, may have little need for such specialized expertise, particularly if they aren’t in the business of selling software. For such companies, even a four-year degree in computer science may be only a partial qualification. With offshore outsourcing now a mature market, a growing number of businesses see little benefit in retaining entry-level coders at home, preferring to hand off rote coding and algorithm implementation to partners in China, India, Russia, or elsewhere.

Surprisingly, however, even in countries where educated labor is cheap and nuts-and-bolts coding is the norm, a computer science degree is no longer a guaranteed meal ticket. According to Sridhar Vembu, CEO of India-based Web software vendor Zoho, “We noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades and the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance.”

Indian universities have often been criticized for emphasizing memorization over creativity and practical problem-solving, leaving graduates poorly suited for the real-world job market. But Vembu earned his doctorate at Princeton, and some education experts believe his assessment could apply equally well to American higher education.

“Our national system is, ‘Do you have a degree or not?'” says Martin Scaglione, president of workforce development for ACT, a nonprofit education and career services company best known for its college entrance exams. “That doesn’t really measure if you have skills.”

Which skills and how to get them? Just what skills define a good programmer is a subject of much debate. Some computer science graduates enter the workforce with a thorough theoretical understanding of software development but little practical experience. Others spent their college years hammering away at C++, Java, SQL, or other specific tools, but failed to gain any working knowledge of the higher concepts. And either type of programmer might lack the communication and teamwork skills necessary to become a top-performing employee.

At Zoho, Vembu is experimenting with a unique, homegrown approach to recruitment. Instead of hiring degreed workers — who might have already picked up bad habits — he starts with high school graduates and molds them into programmers. Often his candidates have no previous computing experience. Many don’t even speak English. But once they’ve completed a two-year intensive study course developed at Zoho, Vembu says, they’re fully prepared to work at any IT services company.

While a program as ambitious as Zoho’s might work in India, where poverty is endemic, it would be impractical in the United States. Still, many American employers are trying a similar, ground-up approach to developer education. Rather than hiring new programmers to staff software projects, they recruit internally, often tapping employees with little or no previous coding experience to transition into development roles. Although the learning curve can be steep, such internal hires have the advantage of domain expertise and knowledge of business processes and objectives — skills that could take green programmers even longer to master.

Aiding this transition is the proliferation of highly abstracted application frameworks, business process modeling tools, and rapid application development environments, all of which reduce the need for hard coding expertise. In many cases, a U.S.-based product manager can work with stakeholders to gather application requirements and establish goals, leaving most of the heavy lifting to outsourced developers. The ability to act as liaison between coders and business managers is more important than a hard computer science background.

So will a computer science degree soon become a dead end in the workforce? Unlikely, as long as innovation remains the driving force of the knowledge-based economy. Still, the evidence suggests that pure computer science will increasingly be the domain of academia and research, with advanced degrees becoming the norm. Those with four-year degrees will want to back up their education with management and business skills, not to mention keep looking over their shoulders — there may be high school students already nipping at their heels.

This article, “Is computer science a dead end in the workforce?,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Neil McAllister’s Fatal Exception blog and follow the latest news in programming at InfoWorld.com.