 What's happening guys? It's Shane here. So the reason that you clicked on this video is because you wanted to know whether computer science is a good major. Is it a good degree for you to spend four years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars in order to get? Because that sounds like a lot of commitment. I can't do this. Now on one hand there is a ton of hype behind this degree. After all we are entering into the age of automation and so learning these skills that you learn in computer science can be extremely valuable. I think we can be friends. Now on the other hand if you've been around YouTube lately there's a ton of noise in the computer science community saying that you don't really need to get a computer science degree in order to break into the field. So why waste four years of your life when you can just self-study and then take a boot camp that will teach you everything you need to know on the interviews and voila you're good to go. You will not laugh. You will not cry. You will learn by the numbers. I will teach you. So in today's video I'm going to go over the pros and the cons of getting a computer science degree. I'm going to tell you whether or not I think it's worth it to actually get one and I'm also going to tell you why I think computer science is the best degree when it comes to smashing the like button. Smash. So the way I'm going to go about structuring these videos is I'm going to go over the four most important factors when it comes to choosing whether a degree is worth it or not. And the four most important things to me are going to be salary, job satisfaction, demand, and then other x factors like how easily outsourced is it or how hard it is in order to get into the field. So first let's start off with salary and this is one of the only majors where you can get a degree in it and in many cases you can start making six figures or very close to six figures right off the bat. Now there are a ton of different degrees that you can get with a computer science degree but just to name a few software developers make around $105,000 a year median and then computer network architects are making around $109,000 a year median. There's also a ton of future growth potential so even if you don't make six figures right out of college chances are you will get there within your first few years. This is insanely amazing for a four-year degree and it's one of the only undergraduate degrees that can get you to that six-figure mark right away. Now like I said there's a ton of different job options out there and which one you pick is going to depend on your strengths as well as just what you like doing in general and so it's definitely worth it to do your research about this. Now pay is going to vary a lot depending on a ton of different factors from where you live, your job experience, what careers you're going into, your skills, and all kinds of different things. For example if you're willing to live in an extremely expensive area like Silicon Valley you can make a ton of money. So for example Techlead, one of the biggest software channels on YouTube admitted that at his job at Facebook and Google he made north of $500,000 a year. If you look at the website levels at FYI which is basically just a website where different computer science related professions share how much they make at different companies and they include not only just their salary but also benefits, bonuses, and stock payouts. An entry-level position at Google for instance will make around $184,000 a year whereas Facebook you're going to be making around $186,000 a year when you consider everything. And as you can see here it goes up from there until it reaches well over a million dollars a year. So if you move to an expensive area the risk is going to be a lot higher, you're going to be paying a lot more in rent but the reward is also higher as well. Without a doubt in my opinion this is the best undergrad major in terms of pay, has the highest ceiling, and it has a pretty high floor as well. This one is going to get a score of 11 out of 10 and there's only one major out of all the ones that I'm going to review that I'm going to give 11 out of 10. Unbelievable! Now second on the list we're going to go ahead and talk about job satisfaction and this one was really difficult to calculate for this particular major and the reason for that is because there's so many different options you can go into when you get a computer science degree but basically what I did here is I took all of the different computer science related jobs that I could find on Glassdoor.com. I averaged out all the job satisfaction scores and then I multiplied it by two so that it would fit on a 10 point scale instead of a 5 point scale and what I ended up getting was about a 7.7 and that might not sound very good when you first hear it but that's actually pretty dang good. That's actually one of the higher ones on the list. Oh please don't take a turn to negative time. What are you talking about? Who's getting negative? Now one thing to note here is the job satisfaction and demand sort of go hand in hand so you know let's say you end up at a company that you really don't like for whatever reason you can easily just leave them and go to a company that you like. I quit so you don't have to pay me now leave me alone. So you have a lot more leverage as an employee and this tends to go hand in hand with any type of job where there is a ton of need for a person that has your particular skill set. Speaking of demand let's talk about the insane demand that we are experiencing for software developers and people who have computer science related degrees. There's tons of job openings right now well over a million for software developers alone and that's not even counting the dozens of other jobs that you can get with a computer science degree and yet software developers still have a 21% expected job growth over the next 10 years which is absolutely insane. Now when you consider the average job growth of all jobs in general on BLS.gov is about 4 to 6% that shows you that it's about 4 to 5 times higher than the average and that's just a 10 year projection but just using common sense we are entering the age of automation those skills are still going to be valuable 20, 30 and even 40 years down the line. So for demand we're definitely going to have to go with 10 out of 10. Now next on the list we're going to talk about X factors and I'm basically going to go over this by talking about the pros and cons. So first let's talk about the pros. Now obviously if you're in the tech space you're going to be in a booming industry it's one of the best industries you could possibly get into. There's going to be a ton of opportunity for you whether you want to just get a normal job or maybe you even want to start your own business. That means that this is a very flexible degree because you have a lot of options in the future. Now like I said before if you want to go big you can move to you know Silicon Valley or New York or Seattle or something like that those are going to be where the higher paying jobs are but if you aren't as ambitious you can also just get a remote job and that means you can work from anywhere you want. If you want to work at home you can do that saves yourself a lot of money with commuting as well as buying lunches or you could get really crazy and start traveling around the world while you're working your job. It's an extremely sought after skill which means you can work in almost any industry out there they're all getting disrupted right now and on top of that a lot of the best companies out there treat their employees like royalty I'm sure everybody's heard of Google for instance I mean they just have like tons of different perks for their employees and then there's just a ton of different options for employment. If you want to you can work for a startup you can work for a really big company that treats their employees well you can do a remote job if you want to be really ambitious you can go for a more difficult like manager role or if you want to just be really chill and not that ambitious at all I know a lot of people who have gone into easier jobs that don't pay quite as well but the quality of life is even better. Now let's talk about a few of the cons because there definitely are some here and the first one that comes to mind is your job could potentially get outsourced. There are a lot of extremely bright people from India or the Philippines or other countries that are starting to catch on to this and they're realizing hey I can make a lot of money if I learn computer science skills and so there is a small possibility that your job can be outsourced. I personally don't think this is as big of a problem as some people make it out to be and the reason for that is because there is no such thing as one computer scientist doing a project. Projects require a bunch of different people and that means you have to have excellent communication skills and I think a lot of the people coming from other countries for instance aren't going to know English quite as well as somebody who was born and raised in America. Another con is that the really good jobs tend to be bunched in very specific places like Seattle, New York, Silicon Valley, sometimes you talk about Austin for instance. Another really big con is you're going to be spending a ton of time on the computer but I mean I think pretty much all of us do that anyways. And then another con is that some of the computer science jobs generally the front and you know web development type jobs can actually be gotten into without a computer science degree. So you can get into a lot of the different jobs without actually getting a computer science degree. A lot of the people in this field have math degrees, physics degrees, engineering degrees, things along those lines where you know it's still a really difficult degree. They have to know quite a bit to get into it but they're also able to break into the computer science and technology field. There's even some evidence that people are able to break into the industry without a computer science related degree although this is very rare. I did know a guy who actually dropped out of KU and he you know was in computer science and he was able to get a job at Google right after dropping out but this is an outlier example because this guy was pretty much just like a child prodigy. His dad was a really good computer scientist and he taught this kid everything he knew from the time he was like six years old. Now another con is that ageism can become a factor as you get older in the computer science field meaning you know when you're young a lot of the time you'll have to learn a new language in a few weeks or maybe a month and you have to be very adaptable but as you get older it's not as easy to do that and so a lot of the times companies will kind of phase out some of the older employees old not absolute and to combat this a lot of the computer science people will seek management positions where it's less coding and it's more oversight and that sort of thing and you know in order to do that you have to develop really good leadership skills really good interpersonal skills and that sort of thing and then although there are a lot of jobs out there the job market is relatively volatile just because it's such a new and expanding field you know you might be doing a great job at your work but you get laid off for just some stupid reason because they just simply can't afford to hire you however this could be a pro or a con because with volatility comes opportunity now for the most part with most jobs in the computer science field you are going to want to have a either a computer science degree or a degree that is very closely related to computer science again there's a few exceptions here and there but those are few and far in between overall the upside definitely outweighs the downside and this is by far one of the best possible degrees that you can get so the x factors are going to come out at a 10 out of 10 and when you average all four of them the overall score is going to be 9.425 out of 10 now it doesn't end here you know everybody is different and you want to go through the process of figuring out whether you're actually interested in this degree because if you absolutely hate coding or you find out that you're just really bad at math or something like that you probably don't want to pursue this because it doesn't matter how much money you make if you're absolutely miserable doing something then you're not going to be happy so take these ratings that I gave you maybe you change the x factors depending on you know where you live or something like that and then make another column that basically weighs how much you like this degree and also how good you are you know what kind of skills you have what strengths you have related to this degree average out how much you like this degree how passionate you are about it and then also how good you are how much natural skill you have and put that out of 10 add them all up and then divide by five and you'll get a much more accurate rating for you specifically but overall just make sure to check out my videos right here I made them just for you go ahead smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring a little notification bell and then comment down below any ideas you have this video or any comments thoughts criticisms etc and I will see you in the next one bye for now