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Internships in the Post-DotCom Era?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-the-college-students-out-there dept.

aetherspoon asks: "Reading the Internship at Microsoft story, I was wondering what paid jobs were actually still out there for CS majors in the industry. Coming from a CS major who has a stack of 'We're sorry, but...' letters sitting on his desk, I know that I have not had much luck in this area. Are there any places left offering good paid internships?"

4 of 602 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Graduate study in Something Else by ObviousGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Also, it may be beneficial to get out of the sciences altogether and study Something Else. There's a whole world out there of other things besides computers, and you can major in some of them in college.

    A coworker of mine was just saying the other day that he can't believe he wasted so much time studying CS in school. Now he's got a skillset limited to computers (he's a really good programmer), but nothing marketable outside of that. Frankly, he could have studied basket weaving in college and still learned enough to be a good programmer from on-the-job experience.

    To be a programmer, you just need to get a foot in the door. That means you just have to have some exposure to programming and CS topics, not a full-blown major.

    In short, study what you want, but don't expect a major to open doors for you.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
  2. PhD not a good way to get a job by flyguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Getting a pHD in cs is a good way to become over qualified and have a harder time getting a job than you did before you had the PHD, unless you were previously devoid of skill and unable to get a job in the non-academic world and are happy pigion holeing yourself into an academic niche.

    Instead I would suggest doing a degree in a different field, hopefully a complementary field and moving yourself into a niche which few other people are qualified to compete within. For example, Bioinformatics. You combine a degree in say genetics and computer science and you've opened a lot more doors than if you had just completed a masters or phd in cs.

    1. Re:PhD not a good way to get a job by JRHelgeson · · Score: 5, Interesting
      A PhD in Computer Science is the most worthless degree if you are planning to get a job in the IT industry. The only thing a PhD is good for in the computer industry is doing research and being a professor at a university.

      My brother got his PhD from the University of Minnesota. He is now a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. He teaches 3 classes a year, and the remainder of his time is performing research and writing papers. He does get paid very handsomely for it, I must say.

      Outside of Academia, a PhD in Computer Science is not a very valuable degree.

      However,
      I once had an employee that had dual masters degrees in Geology and Information Systems. He got his degree in Geology, then realized that he couldn't feed a family as a geologist (unless he wanted to feed them rocks) So he got his MIS degree. He couldn't find a job ANYWHERE (so I hired him :)).

      It wasn't long before I got him in touch with someone from Texaco Oil Corp. where we got him an interview and now he is working for Texaco, making 6 figures, helping them develop new methods for using computers in searching and drilling for oil.

      So, my advice would be that if you get a second degree, use that degree to get you into the IT industry in a particular field you're interested in.

      --
      "Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

      --
      Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
  3. Re:Contiune your education... by WzDD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I love slashdot for insular comments like this. Wait, no I don't. But I do look at it with a certain fondness.

    Seriously, though. Almost 100% of the computing population run commercial closed source software on a commercial closed source operating system. They browse the Web using a closed-source browser, read email using a closed-source client, write documents with a closed-source wordprocessor. Microsoft is definitely going to lose market share to OSS, but if you and they were honest they'd admit that they never *had* that market share in the places that matter for OSS. Just look at the rise and rise of Apache, for example. You'll be hard-pressed to find Microsoft citing a potential OSS threat to their desktop environment, for example. And it's been the "year of Linux on the desktop" according to various OSS luminaries for how many years now? Perhaps four.

    Even among geeks, there's a not-insignificant move to a closed-source OS - Mac OS X - simply because it's cool. What's been happening is a huge increase in support for open *standards* - HTML, XML, all the old Internet standards - because they allow interoperability.