A Slashdot posting pondering the stupid assertion that geeks have “gone mainstream” drummed up a major backlash. As scary as it is, yes, I’m going to link to Slashdot again: This comment about what it means to be a true geek is pretty good. The definition of “geek” is not someone who is “good at computers,” meaning they can fix Windows and the like, or someone who plays with lots of gadgets and can wire your home theater setup. Those are attributes that geeks may have, but the definition of a geek is someone who participates in hobbies that others consider eccentric or not socially mainstream. The idea of a “mainstream geek” is an oxymoron. Geeks are a lot of things, in a lot of fields, but mainstream they ain’t, and can never be.

In a similar mode, this explanation of why enrollment in CS majors has drastically dropped is spot-on: I had a lot of contact with CS majors who were really clueless about technology and clearly were not in the program for a love of computers and programming. I think it is the same today with many people in the bio-med and economics fields. They may have convinced themselves that it is their calling, but its pretty clear that the reason so many more people are going into some of these fields and abandoning fields like CS and other sciences like physics is because that is where the jobs and the money are. I mean, seriously, there can’t be that many people who really want to be bioinfomaticians.

CS as a field isn’t dying, its just that programming jobs and the like are no longer where the money is, as those jobs are all outsourced and off-shored. The drop in majors is a natural market reaction, and the people who are legitimately interested in the field (and less concerned about short-term financial success) are the ones who are staying. I mean look at me — I didn’t do an American Studies major for with the expectation that I could jump into a high-paying career. Not to look down on people who go for popular majors, and not to say that practical people are in any way wrong for taking the course they do, but I think there is something more pure about pursuing a major you enjoy or a subject you are passionate about rather than something that is just going to give you money without the same return in happiness.

Why did I do AMST? Many reasons, but a lot of it was that I got to take courses in journalism, in the study of law, in American culture, markets, history, literature… I could have been CS or some other major, but I did AMST because it let me take classes that were neat and that I enjoyed, and, equally important, it gave me time to pursue other interests that I probably won’t ever get to do again in my lifetime — being on a Mock Trial team, working in politics through student government, and co-editing a newspaper. I consider those experiences far more valuable than a few extra courses that would have propelled me immediately into a high-paying job doing investment banking, or something equally dull.