Trained as a physicist I became acutely aware of what mismatches in the academic job market look like and, particularly, how smoking hot fields can become burned out fields in just about the time it takes to complete a PhD.
(Some physicists told me about how quickly Ken Wilson's application of RG to phase transitions went from the the next big thing to old hat, for instance.)
When I can bear to read editorials in CACM I see the CS profession has long been bothered by whipsawing demand for undergraduate CS degrees. I've never heard about serious employment problems for CS PhDs and maybe I never will because they have a path to industry that saves face better than the paths for physics.
Maybe we will hear about a bust this time. As a cog in the social sciences department, I used to have a view of a baseball diamond out my office window but now there is a construction site for a new building to house the computer science, information science and "statistics and data science" departments which are bulging in undergraduate enrollment.
Trained as a physicist I became acutely aware of what mismatches in the academic job market look like and, particularly, how smoking hot fields can become burned out fields in just about the time it takes to complete a PhD.
(Some physicists told me about how quickly Ken Wilson's application of RG to phase transitions went from the the next big thing to old hat, for instance.)
When I can bear to read editorials in CACM I see the CS profession has long been bothered by whipsawing demand for undergraduate CS degrees. I've never heard about serious employment problems for CS PhDs and maybe I never will because they have a path to industry that saves face better than the paths for physics.
Maybe we will hear about a bust this time. As a cog in the social sciences department, I used to have a view of a baseball diamond out my office window but now there is a construction site for a new building to house the computer science, information science and "statistics and data science" departments which are bulging in undergraduate enrollment.
Will there finally be a bust?