[statesman]Bill Gates visits UT computer science students

Bill: "This is how much $ all of you have, this how much I make in a day"




http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/02/21/0221gates.html
Bill Gates visits UT computer science students
Microsoft founder says there's a need to focus on software

By Kirk Ladendorf
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, February 21, 2008

When you are the founder of Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. may be a business irritant, but the lack of top-notch computer science students is also a pressing problem.

Computer science enrollments are down in the top schools across the country since the start of the dot-com crunch seven years ago, which is part of the reason Bill Gates, the world's richest man, was speaking to a packed house Wednesday morning at the Texas Union Ballroom on the University of Texas campus.

Gates, 52, exhorted computer science and electrical and computer engineering students to pursue careers in software development, which he says will push the ongoing digital revolution, enable scientific breakthroughs and even help the world's poor.

"The availability of technical talent is Microsoft's top concern," Gates said. "We want to recruit the brightest students, but the number of people going into the field has gone down a lot."

Not only are the numbers of computer science majors declining, but Microsoft and other companies have a tough time hiring many because of the tight limits on temporary visas for non-U.S. citizens in technical fields.

"In all the top computer science departments, the majority of the students are foreign-born, and these people, with the way the visa thing works, they are all told to go back and create jobs in other countries now that we have given you this great education," Gates said. "The irony of the situation is just unbelievable."

Gates is making a tour of top universities as he prepares to wind down his full-time job at Microsoft to spend more time on philanthropy. He will remain chairman of the company, but this summer he will give up his full-time job as Microsoft's chief software architect.

J Strother Moore, chair of UT's computer sciences department, said he expects Gates' visit to campus will have an impact.

"He raises the profile of the department so that more students are interested in computing," Moore said. "That is a critical problem. I am hoping that, just by shining the spotlight on the campus for this morning, he will attract more students into this field."

Moore said UT's computer science enrollment is less than half of the more than 2,000 students that the department had in the late 1990s. The root causes, he said, are the dot-com bust and reports that many technical jobs in the U.S. are being outsourced to India, China and other countries.

Microsoft does 85 percent of its research work in the United States, and Gates would like to keep it that way.

"We'd like to create it where we have plenty (of technical talent) to hire in the U.S.," he said. "But if we are short of U.S. engineers, we have to create all those jobs elsewhere."

Gates remains bullish on the continued growth of the world's digital revolution that is expanding to mobile devices, including cell phones.

That continuing march will demand new computer skills, including new ways in which humans interact with computers through speech, physical motion or other actions.

Gates encouraged UT students to think creatively about new ways that technical advances can help the poorest one-third of the world's population rather leaving them further behind.

His own awareness of the deep problems of the poor in dealing with disease, lack of education and food shortages, sprang from his travels in the 1990s.

"I was in Africa in the early 1990s and had a big trip there in 1995. That was when Melinda (his wife) and I started talking about how we could give wealth back to society."

There is a lot of wealth to give. By some estimates, Gates is worth $59 billion.

"We had made the decision that we didn't think that it was best to have a large part of it go to the kids. We knew we wanted to have a foundation. But it was then that we really galvanized around the lack of focus on these problems and there was a role we could play in helping out with some problems, in particular, (treating) disease."

Gates believes the U.S., along with other developed countries, must continue to provide aid to the poorest nations. He disagrees with academic William Easterly, who argues in his book "The White Man's Burden," that most of the $2.3 trillion in aid that has gone from developing countries to the poorest counties during the past 50 years has been wasted.

"Aid has worked super-well in lots of cases, so the idea that we should save our money and not do aid, that, to me, is outrageous," he said. "Whether it is famine relief or new vaccines or increased literacy, aid has had a huge impact."

Gates plans to have his own impact, and he says it is in this country's interest to keep spending on foreign aid.

"I don't think the benefits to the U.S. of being ungenerous are all that large," he said.

 

did you show up for this?

did you ask him if he bought a macbook air?