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Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by rmason on Thursday January 05, 2012 @05:40PM (#3430929)
When I was a freshman in college the degree they warned us against pursuing turned out to be the hottest job market four years later.

My major where they predicted four jobs for every grad turned out to be four grads for every job.

So by contrarian thinking architecture is probably the best degree you could pursue.

Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by moocow01 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:14PM (#3431066)
Ding-ding-ding! Correct answer. Now lets see where are we in the cycle... technology boom ... oh yeah, real estate must be up next
Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by kingnothing on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:51PM (#3431190)
Technology should always be "booming", right? Until the ubiquity of computers, technology was the move from writing to typing, or from manual labor to machines. Then computers came around and allowed for yet another level of automation. Since software is currently the best industry for lowering business costs, we should continue to see a strong market until something supplants computing. None of that speaks about financial bubbles and busts because software is a real industry that provides real value, unlike the recent real estate financial bust which was based on speculation.
Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by moocow01 on Thursday January 05, 2012 @06:59PM (#3431215)
What are your thoughts on the amount of speculation in the software/tech market right now? Also real estate is very much a real industry that provides real value (like a roof over one's head)
Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by leoedin on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:19PM (#3431281)
Technology is always booming, but individual technologies aren't necessarily. The startups that Hacker News promotes tend to be largely SaaS productivity apps. I would be surprised if there isn't a bubble in that area. I recently noted that a startup with the sole purpose of providing other startups with "coming soon" pages has $800k of funding. How on earth can they expect to become profitable after sinking 800k into a very niche service. There can't be that many startups in need of a "Coming soon" page, can there?

In the victorian times, the technology booming was railways. There was always a market for railways (until the car came along, but that wasn't really for another seventy years), but the real issue was the number which they built. There was passengers, but not enough to support the frantic investment that people were making (it was, after all, the next big thing!). This is where I see the VC backed SaaS startup investment market going. Frankly, there cannot really be a market for every SaaS app we see traipse through here with $10m of backing. The real question is, how long until the failure rate becomes high enough that people panic?

YCombinator has the right idea. Start with a small seed, build a good app and perhaps only once you have something launched, start looking for more investment. A website can generally lead to profitability either by being loss making but really, really popular, or by having revenue from day one. What worries me is the websites that have very little revenue from the beginning, and yet are attracting multi million dollar investments. That cannot last.

As an aside, we're thankful for those rail investments now - the UK not only has a very large railway network, we also have a very large bicycle path network built on ex-railway lines!

Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by brudgers on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:50PM (#3431559)
Contrarian thinking isn't a substitute for research. Here is the AIA's 2005 compensation report:

http://www.daapspace.daap.uc.edu/~stedmabn/profprac-base/hot...

The 2008 synopsis is here: http://www.areforum.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=5...

Keep in mind that this was during the boom, and the average department head made less than $100k a year - that would typically be someone with at least 10-15 years of specialized experience and willing to take on personal liability for architectural designs under their seal until the statute of repose (varies by state from seven years to forever).

Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by davux on Thursday January 05, 2012 @07:09PM (#3431249)
Can you mention what the two degrees were? Maybe you've implied something but I'm not seeing it.
Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by rmason on Thursday January 05, 2012 @10:05PM (#3431751)
Engineering is what they warned us to avoid. This was right after the great aerospace layoffs of 1970.

Journalism is the 'hot' major they encouraged. Personally I think college career advice is similar to relying on 14 day weather forecasts here in Michigan.

I had no interest in computer science because I had no desire to wear a white coat in a frigid data center and find hanging chads in punchcards. Yet a few years after graduating I bought one of the first IBM PC's and was using Compuserve and coding in dBase within a year.

Most people graduating from college today are going to have four separate careers during their working life. You need to keep the habit of lifetime learning because the world will change in many interesting ways.

Re:Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture by itsmicks on Friday January 06, 2012 @01:17AM (#3432242)
I seem to remember a lot of media coverage in the early 90s when I was younger about how almost all software engineering would be outsourced. Definitely played into my thought process years later when I majored in architecture ;-)