The computing community has an image problem. This is not news to long-time readers of this blog -- or indeed, anyone who has followed coverage of IT-related stories in the popular press. Dropping enrollment rates and dropping interest in computing are pretty good signs that that there is a perception among an increasing number of undergraduate (and probably younger) students that a career in computing isn't as rewarding as a career in some other discipline. The reasons for this perception could be many -- belief that a career in computing means long, lonely hours staring at an LCD screen; that the field is "mature," and computing a "solved" problem; that the problems aren't intellectually stimulating enough; or that the best IT jobs will get outsourced overseas. In previous posts, we've described some of the evidence out there that debunks these perceptions, yet they persist.
Fortunately, the computing community isn't standing still. As we wrote last August:
At the Computing Leadership Summit convened by CRA last February, a large and diverse group of stakeholders -- including all the major computing societies, representatives from PITAC, NSF and the National Academies, and industry reps from Google, HP, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Sun, TechNet and others (complete list and summary here (pdf)) -- committed to addressing two key issues facing computing: the current concerns of research funding support and computing's "image" problem. Task forces have been formed, chairmen named (Edward Lazowska of U of Washington heads the research funding task force; Rick Rashid of Microsoft heads the "image" task force), and the work is underway. As the summary of the summit demonstrates, no ideas or possible avenues are off the table.... We'll report more on the effort as it moves forward.Rashid and the Image Task force have been pretty busy. Rick detailed some of the Task Force's conclusions at CRA's Snowbird conference back in June (which Cameron Wilson of ACM has done a good job summarizing). One of the key conclusions, though, was that addressing this problem in a coordinated way is going to be a full-time job. And the Task Force members felt committed enough addressing the problem that they agreed to contribute their own resources to fund the position and get to work.
That position is now ready to be filled. From the job description:
The person in this position will become a national spokesperson for the computing discipline, working with executive level leaders from across the nation in industry, academia, government and not-for-profit organizations. Work will include forming strategic relationships with corporations, negotiating with academic institutions to shepherd computer science curricular reform, talking to the press, and promoting information technologies to the public. The position will plan and lead a national research and information gathering effort and use the results to define a strategy to encourage more young people to enter information technology, as well as create a greater public understanding of IT. The position will create and lead the roll out of a national awareness campaign and will be personally involved with changing the image of IT, through numerous speaking engagements, conference panels, outreach activities and written articles. This position is accountable for progress to the Task Force on the Image of IT (whose members represent such distinguished institutions as AAAI, ACM, CRA, Hewlett Packard, IEEE-CS, Intel, Microsoft, SIAM, and USENIX) and is housed in the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and ATLAS Institute.For complete details, see the full posting. Please forward the link to anyone you think may qualify....
Interesting article on Enterprise Systems IT salary survey in Monday's InfoWorld. The survey "found that although application programmers scored the largest pay increases, at almost 9 percent, all IT staff positions with applications and system responsibilities had year-to-year jumps in base salary."
Other interesting stats from the survey include:
Application programmers received the biggest salary increases, 8.7 percent over last yearSystems administrators received the smallest increase, 2 percent over last year but their annual bonuses jumped 15 percent
The survey results are being released over the next four weeks at Enterprise Systems web site. The first round of data can be found here.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) wants there to be a single source of information explaining where federal money is spent, and it appears the rest of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee agrees, approving legislation on July 27th that would require the Office of Management and Budget to create and establish a database of government spending. According to an article in the Washington Post, the database would include contracts, subcontracts, grants, subgrants, loans and other forms of financial federal spending. The bill also specifies that the data must “be searchable by agency, geography, industry, congressional district and types of funding.” Apparently, it is meant to be a Google-like search engine that would track a trillion dollars in federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans .
Other agencies have their own databases that serve the same purpose and are utilized in the same manner (such as the RAND/NSF RaDIUS and the GSA’s Federal Procurement Data System- Next Generation), but there is not one central funding database that is interoperable among all of the agencies. There have also been problems collecting data for these systems, and a centralized database under the department charged with financial oversight may help to streamline this process. This system could provide a strong analysis tool that could be used by agencies, and not simply those who audit them, to see how money is spent.
CRA's Peter Harsha adds:
While transparency in government is generally a good thing, there are some issues with the use of this kind of database. It sounds like an interesting tool for higher-resolution reviews of federal funding – “how much did institution ‘A’ receive from all federal sources?” for example (though that kind of question makes a lot of industry types very nervous…one reason the bill might not go anywhere). But for the more meta-level review – “how much is agency ‘X’ spending on computing research?” – I’m not sure it will be particularly useful. I haven’t seen a database implementation that’s able to handle that kind of query particularly well, mainly because the definition of something like “computing research” can be so variable. Last year , the House Government Reform Committee asked a version of that question to the folks at RAND to figure out using their RaDIUS database (actually, they asked how much the federal government is spending, not just one agency) and got back an answer that, depending on how you defined “information technology,” was between $2 billion and $30 billion annually. So the danger in having this sort of database, I think, is in a user / policymaker not knowing what kind of questions are answerable and what really aren’t, despite the fact that the database will be happy to spit out an answer in either case.Anyway, it’s not clear that the bill has much of a future, but we’ll post any further developments here.
New legislation has been introduced in the Senate to expand the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. While this is not in and of itself a bad thing, the correlating increase in the budget could actually hit the research agencies hard. The SBIR program is funded by a tax on federal research agencies (those doing more than $100,000,000 in R&D). Currently the agencies are required to contribute a minimum 2.5 percent of their total budget to the SBIR program. The new legislation, S. 3778 - the Small Business Reauthorization and Improvements Act of 2006, would increase the percentage to a minimum of 3 percent in FY 2007 and increase it by 0.5 percent each fiscal year until it reaches 5 percent in 2011 where it would remain until legislation is passed to increase it again.
The irony in this proposal is that it will actually decrease the amount of money the agencies can spend on their core research missions, which may have impacts on the nation's innovative capacity beyond any expansion of the SBIR program. At a time when Congress and the Administration seem to have agreed on the importance of increasing support for fundamental research as a way to improve the environment for innovation and help ensure the nation's continued competitiveness, this proposal actually represents a step backwards.
The science advocacy community is beginning to organize to respond to this new legislation. We will keep you posted here when more details on the effort become available.