<p>I could prattle on about my life’s story, but I will keep it clean and short. I basically left college before finishing because of an insane amount of fear. To start my dad worked at HP when Carly was on her ‘readjustment’ policy. That event in our lives was beyond tough and the thought of going thru the same thing after spending years of hard study and work in school is what literally keeps me up at night. Even though I tried to fight that fear, when I was going to school and talked to some people between class periods, I would run into some CS/CE people who have returned for some MBA or other degree because they could not find a job. Then of course when doing online research I ran into the DICE forums and anyone who has visited those forums knows what they have to say about all of this.</p>
<p>So why am I here? I am hoping I could get some help fighting the fear my dad and DICE have so effectively put into my head. I want to go into making video games or smart phone apps and I want to do it with a degree under my belt. My dad is a smart educated man, but he way beyond bitter about the whole HP thing, so much so that I am on my own if I do decide to do CS or CE. And if I do decide to go back to school, my boss has made it clear he won’t clear my schedule, so I have got to find my own way to complete this degree, be it thru loans, scholos, etc. The loan thing scares me because if what I have heard is true, I would now have debt on top of poor job prospects. </p>
<p>I guess its immature of me to ask, but I want to hear from CS or CE grads (or someone who knows a CS grad) who say otherwise about this issue. I would like to hear graduates say if I am smart and hardworking, I will do great. I am smart and hard working, just easily frightened =)</p>
<p>I have a couple questions for you too. Did you ask these people after they got laid off if they wanted to stay in the CS industry? Because I get the vibe that some people get into certain industries because they hear about good jobs and $ signs. Once they get bit, they immediately want to go to something else. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to downgrade outsourcing, because that is a very real problem, although if you look at a credible source such as the BLS it tends to show a different story. </p>
<p>I know anecdotal evidence feels good for these type of decisions, but I would rather rely on a large amount of data.</p>
<p>In the early 2000s, offshore outsourcing was a huge business fad. That coincided with the tech bubble crash. So it was a bad time for those working in the computer industry.</p>
<p>However, companies that followed the fad because of cost and only cost often got the quality they paid for. (Note: call centers were also heavily outsourced, and one can often tell which companies outsourced their call centers to good quality contractors and which went for the cheapest possible.)</p>
<p>Certainly, it still goes on, but companies appear to be considering it more carefully now instead of just doing it because some contracting company in a cheap-labor country offers to do the work at $3/hour or whatever. Even in cheap-labor countries, you pay more for better quality (though at less payroll cost than in the US) – once one pays for the desired level of quality, not all outsourcing moves work out that well due to overhead of coordinating different time zones, etc. (though different time zones can be an advantage if running a 24-hour technical support team or something like that).</p>
<p>Why did you leave school, what type of job do you work in now, and how much school would you have left if you returned?</p>
<p>Smart phone applications can be the type of entrepreneurial thing for which a formal degree is not really strictly needed – if you can come up with a good idea that people will buy, self-educate the needed computer science and other information, and write a quality application, you may be able to sell it successfully (or gain a lot of recognition that can be useful to help obtain jobs if it is freeware and becomes widely known and used). Of course, there are three big ifs involved here.</p>