When I entered the field out of school in 1977, the field was extremely vibrant. There were lots of new-development jobs for highly technically inclined people. Software companies were sprouting up everywhere, and you could make a career at a company where the company product was software and the owner was perhaps a former programmer.

All this has changed radically. Almost all new software development has indeed moved overseas. Jobs in the U.S. are mainly maintenance jobs, tweaking existing systems and such. You are very unlikely to work at an actual software company, where management understands or cares what you do. More likely you will do a lot of drudgery at some bank or insurance company, where the career ceiling is one or two levels above you, and where you are regarded as a “temp” with approximately the status of a 1960s secretary.

If you want to make real money today you don’t go into computer science. You go into finance or insurance or some other mainstream finance-oriented field or you get an MBA, learn golf, and schmooz your way into management straight out of school. Movers and shakers in these fields are making more money in their 20s than experienced senior programmers are in their 50s. Seems like almost everybody except Bill Gates has figured that out.

Part of the problem may be that Bill G has a different definition of “computer science” from the general public. For example my (antiquated) image of computer science is all about compiler writing and chip design, but Bill Gates was probably talking about people who can design new object models and protocols for communication between applications. The world needs at most a few hundred compiler writers and chip designers, most people understand that, so few want to aim for that kind of career.

Or perhaps Gates simply forgot that the general public’s objectives are different from his – an increase in computer science students would allow him to skim off the cream, but most would-be students want a discipline which is less of a gamble (e.g. MBA).

By the way, your CAPTCHA is far too easy – in 2004 some California computer scientists announced an algorithm which read the vast majority of CAPTCHAs in use at the time, so robots can easily spam your blog.

But I like the .wav file for visually disabled users. I’ll investigate this as an accessible way avoid the spam I get via my own site’s email / feedback forms. Thanks!