Mixed Signs On the State of IT Education

snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis comments on the mixed state of IT education in the US, which sees some students graduating with computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code. And while some institutions are emphasizing the value of teamwork in their curricula, an approach that fosters specialization in lieu of uniform standards, others are simply advertising their 'success rates' in graduating students. 'Education is a marketplace, and if you have the money and want to buy, you can find someone willing to sell,' Lewis writes. In other words, 'If you want a degree that indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers, you can get one.'"

Comments

Or you could get an MSCE

[h4rr4r]

An MSCE is much cheaper and it also indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Degrees are overrated.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but any "qualified" Indian employee won't just have every possible certification from Microsoft, but they will also have every certification from Sun, Oracle, RedHat, Cisco, and even some from long-dead companies like DEC and Apollo that never even offered certification.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

An MSCE is much cheaper and it also indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers.

A previous employer of mine rejected all resumes listing MCSE certification. Having an MCSE cert does say something about you, but probably not what you think it does.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Fluffeh]

When I have people applying for roles here, I have found some rather funny perceptions, in the way that we look at a degree and the person with the degree looks at their degree.

For me, if someone is applying for a role and they have a related degree, I assume that they probably know a little about the theory behind it, but have no clue in terms of how the real world functions. For those with certificates, I generally have an even lower opinion.

Most kids fresh with a degree assume they know just about all there is to know about that field.

The amusing part comes when they find out that even with their degree, they basically come in at the bottom rung of the ladder - a large number seem to think that because they have a relevant degree, they will start off in middle management or a team lead role.

Degree or no degree, when you come to work here, you pretty much start at the bottom and have to prove to everyone that you are actually capable of doing the job we hired you for. That often means working under people without degrees, but ones with years of experience in the real world. For a lot of kids fresh out of uni, that's a bitter pill to swallow it seems.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Mad Merlin]

An MSCE is much cheaper and it also indicates you know nothing about computers without having to actually know very much about computers.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[sortius_nod]

Pretty much. If I have a co-worker with an MCSE I tend to be very sceptical of their abilities.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

A previous employer of mine rejected all resumes listing MCSE certification. Having an MCSE cert does say something about you, but probably not what you think it does.

Wow, that really sounds like someone I want to work for.

People who judge others based on any education, degree, cert or lack of either, are usually people who suck to work for. They know next to nothing themselves, have no confidence in their own abilities and base their self worth completely on previous "accomplishments" like what college they attended or what degree they have.

Also, programming isn't IT. The lack of proper definition is one of the main problems with the industry.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to comment, as much as the MCSE gets knocked around. If you actually DO the coursework you WILL know lots about the software and networking computers of computers beyond the average joe. I've known programmers that DON'T KNOW much about anything when it comes to PC's and they can program alright, it's the effort you put into understanding that determines whether you end up knowing anything or not with anything anyone does.

If you just binge and purge for the tests and don't really have an interest in computers then yes you will not know much about computers. But I still have all my old MCSE course materials with TCP/IP essentials, and if anyone told me MCSE taught you nothing about computers I'd have to slap them silly.

While many aspects of MCSE can be memorized this does not mean the course contains no knowledge worthwhile like most people seem to think.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[nomadic]

Most kids fresh with a degree assume they know just about all there is to know about that field.

Huh? That hasn't been my experience. Most fresh-faced college graduates in my experience tend to be extremely nervous and well-aware of their lack of experience.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

In all seriousness, has this improved??

I've known a few MCSEs. Some of them didn't understand how subnets worked. Others could explain TCP packet headers and NetBIOS protocols correctly. I at first assumed that the good ones knew what they were doing before taking the tests, but they'd actually learned their stuff in the coursework.

I remember the explosion of tech schools in the Nineties... Maybe the MCSE got a bad rep because of the certification mills rather than the worth of the cert itself.

So how did the ones that couldn't explain a subnet mask or iSCSI or DNS manage to pass the tests?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[tsm_sf]

Applicants to Assholes Inc. tend to be self-selecting.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Calsar]

I've actually seen this more from people who don't have a degree. I've had several people apply for jobs that think they are geniuses because they taught themselves to program. I should have kept an email one of them sent me a few years ago after I told him he didn't have the skills to be a senior developer. He went off about how how he starting programing when he was 15 and how awesome he was. By the way WTF and STFU are not proper acronyms for business correspondence. All the top developers in the company started programming when they were teenagers, then they went on to get degrees, and then they still need at least another 6 years of experience before I categorize them as senior level. Some people have 20 years and they still never make it to senior level. The only exception I've seen is a kid who started working for me when he was 16 and worked 30 hours a week while he finished out high school and then college. He actually had 6 years of experience by the time he graduated.

I can usually get an idea of skill level by talking to people, but occasionally people are just good talkers. So I have a coding test. I give them a simple set of requirements and set them down in front of an IDE and have them write an application. The requirements are to display a list of users with add, edit, and delete capabilities. The test takes an hour and it doesn't have to compile or be complete. I'm just looking for how people approach it. I've had people actually complete the application in an hour using XML as a data store, others may get a few classes written, some people produce nothing or cut and paste something from the internet that makes no sense. This weeds out the talkers from the doers very quickly.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Fluffeh]

Huh? That hasn't been my experience. Most fresh-faced college graduates in my experience tend to be extremely nervous and well-aware of their lack of experience.

I should have specified it in my post I guess, while my background has been in software development, I work under the business side of my company at the moment in a solution and business application role, so the majority of degrees we deal with are business (logistics mainly) based. It probably does make a significant difference in attitudes.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

These days getting a MCSE, CCNA, A+ is part of getting an IT/IS degree at many colleges.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[scamper_22]

We just went through an interview cycle.
It was bad...
I'm not a great software engineer... but I'm a decent one.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was go through these resumes. Everyone seems to know the game. I compare there resume to mine, and yeah.... I couldn't tell the difference.

Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping. It wasn't a trick question or anything. I was blown away. I had a literal WTF going on in my head. Are universities that desperate for funding and grad numbers, they will pass anyone.

The other spend 10 years at a bank doing ASP.NET development. The first question I ask people... is what topic would you like me to ask you a question on? So I ask him what little I know of web development... (impersonation, authentication, how do get a message box up...)
I was amazed at how you spend 10 years doing development and not learn anything.

Another I thought would be a good guy to train. He had 5 years at Nortel... seemed like he had hardware exposure. Lots of fancy words on his resume... nothing behind it.

We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!

I almost feel the pain HR and recruiters must go through. I'm sure somewhere in the bank of resumes we get are some good candidates... how we'd find them... no idea.
To an extent, I saw it coming as software is viewed more and more as a commodity job. Top talent is not going to enter the field. Top talent has gone back to traditional medicine, legal...The industry could burn through some of the older better trained talent from the old days... but those candidates are dwindling in number. I'm still in Canada, and all we have left are 45 year old ex-Nortel people and the last bits of talent from the tech boom of the late 90s.

And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers.
Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals.
You can't replace a good lawyers with a team of secretaries and a requirements analyst either.

But I digress in my frustrations :P Maybe the industry just needs some good consolidation and the good people can form good teams again.
And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[somenickname]

I think it depends on several factors. 22 year old kids with a bachelors in CS from a state school are usually bright eyed and eager to learn. If they come from "prestigious" tech schools and "settle" on a company that isn't a household name, they are usually aghast that they aren't everyones manager a year into the job as they've over-engineered every piece of software they've been tasked to write and treat even seasoned veterans as if they don't know what they are talking about.

Also be wary of anyone with a Masters in Computer Science getting their first industry job. Be sure to grill them about why they aren't getting their Ph.D. Often it's because they were good enough to get to the Masters level but couldn't get into a Ph.D. program. Those kinds of people often end up being overly expensive dead weight as they try to turn their job into their own personal Ph.D. program.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Fluffeh]

I really liked the end of your post. It's so true. You can't slot it different people into different roles and just expect them to work to the same levels, and you certainly can't expect that a C grade person will work as well as an A grade person.

And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.

You can. Learn to network. Go in, do your best. Don't be afraid to take extra work to get things done. This will earn you kudos with everyone. As you work with these people, try to determine who the A grade guys are and who is the next level down, and then the next one down again and so on. Now, when you need something done, ask the good guys for help, but try to make it as easy for them as possible. Go out of your way to make their job easy if you are the one asking for the favor. Be sure to return favors when they ask for things in return.

Pay attention to the little things. Need a half hour of someone's time with a solution? Bring them a coffee. Arrange meetings where it will be easy for the OTHER person to be. Above all, treat them like PEOPLE, not resources - even if you outrank them.

That sort of little shit, that stuff REALLY gets noticed by others. That's when you get your "good people" work together.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[scamper_22]

"You can. Learn to network. "

I hear that. If there's one thing I'd have changed about my university life, it would have been better networking. During that time, I had a stutter, so it didn't come naturally to me.

But it's constant improvement. Doing presentations, toastmasters... talking to various groups at work...

C'est la vie.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of developers and skills are you specifically looking for, and how hard is it to get a work visa in Canada?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Bert64]

People are in it for the money, the industry is flooded with people who have no real interest in the subject and learn the absolute minimum they need in order to get a decent paying job... Couple that with a severe shortage of people who really know what they're doing, and management who knows very little about the subject, you end up with thousands of extremely low skilled people finding themselves in a job.

You also have, at least in the IT field a lot of people who are somewhat socially inept but very good when it comes to technical matters. These people often lose out to people who while better able to present and sell themselves, really don't have a clue when it comes to the job at hand.

I have to deal with this every day, completely incompetent people who have managed to convince non technical management that they're gods gift.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Bert64]

They know nothing about the subject themselves (and may not generally need to), which is why they have to rely on something they can understand. Unfortunately people take advantage of things like this, and will get in with bogus certs and no real knowledge.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Darinbob]

I noticed a big lack of "quality" recently. Thought we'd get a bunch of bright hopefuls with the economic downturns, but I've been finding some pretty mediocre applicants. Resumes look good, they talk a good game, then a simple programming task and they fall apart. Simple stuff, like inserting an item into a doubly-linked list. They say "oh, I haven't done anything like that before" or "I usually expect a library to handle that" as if those are excuses. I kept trimming the question down more and more as it took too much time for them to puzzle it out.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[PCM2]

We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!

I never went to university but I did understand (the gist of) everything you talked about in your post. I'm a self-taught programmer, since about 1982. I learned everything pretty much the hard way.

On the other hand, I recently took a couple "computer science" classes at my local community college, just to add some easy (but impressive-looking) A's to my transcript. I understood everything that the instructors were talking about there, too. I just often didn't understand how they were saying it. I'd think, "Well, that almost made sense... but maybe they should have explained it this way..." When my fellow students asked questions, I could tell they weren't getting it, either. The instructors' answer was for them to go back, study the book, and spend more time in the lab. In other words, they were supposed to just learn it all the hard way, like I did, but do it in one semester instead of spread over several years of elementary through high school. And I tell you, it was reflected in their grades. Many did poorly. The ones who got A's were the ones that could successfully complete the exercises in a textbook (with help from the computer lab tutors where necessary). And that was that. On to the next class.

(Oh, and just to give you an idea... if I'm remembering right, CS101A was a C++ class, but it never once mentioned object orientation and had students write all the exercises C-style. And as for sophistication, I don't think it actually got as far as introducing the concept of an array, let alone anything like a struct.)

Now, you might be thinking, "well, that's community college for you." But I live in the Bay Area, where community colleges are actually pretty high quality where serious classes are concerned. Many local campuses have special arrangements where they essentially act as feeder schools for immigrants and other people who lack U.S. high school transcripts but who want to get into Berkeley and Stanford. A large number of Berkeley students go this route. I had a friend who took higher math classes at my community college and later had to re-take a few at a Cal State campus, because her original classes didn't transfer, and she couldn't believe how much easier the State versions of the classes were.

What I'm suggesting here is that computer education departments do not seem to be held to the same high standards as math, chemistry, or physics departments. The classes definitely seem to be treated like "workplace skills" classes, rather than a serious discipline and a path to higher education. Perhaps the problem is simply that last year's crappy, poorly-educated MIS graduates are the ones teaching today's undergrads? Whatever it is, having met the students and seen their frustration trying to learn CS concepts in a traditional class setting, I am not surprised that they make for poor hires once they graduate.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[IICV]

And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers.
Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals.

This is what sickens me the most about our current copyright system.

Once a grade A programmer writes some grade A software, it doesn't go bad. There is absolutely no reason for it to be trapped in some corporation's walled garden - that company's need is fulfilled, there is no reason not to set it free except to screw their competitors. Apparently, the need to screw your competitors takes far more important than the idea that there's absolutely no need to invent the wheel five times over.

I mean, just imagine where we would be if all software were absolutely in the public domain (overriding any contracts) five years after the first public sale. As long as at least one person managed to save or sneak out the Windows 2K source code, we would have had the Windows 2000 and Office 2000 source code for five years now. This would have have pre-empted the whole Microsoft OOXML debacle; by now, Wine would be effectively Windows compatible, and companies like Stardock would probably be selling their own enhanced versions of Windows.

I can see basically no downside to it - all those copies of Windows 2K and XP and Vista and 7 would have still been sold, after all. The only difference is that the public domain would have been enriched in our lifetimes, with the work of our peers.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Loki_666]

This is a fair point. I'm a programmer (self taught early age and learnt other languages later) but i'm certainly no developer. Professional experienced developers would either laugh or cry if they saw some of the code I write.

Still, i'd rather have someone like me than someone with an MCSE. I remember one girl who loved to proclaim that she was an MCSE but one day called me to help her because she didn't know how to install Win NT4 Server.... WTF? (I wasn't an MS guy, I was Novell certified).

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Peach Rings]

What worries me as a student is that I'm one of the quality ones you're looking for, and my resume looks identical to all of the chaff. Is there some secret password I can put in the footer or something that lets recruiters know I'm not one of the idiots? :)

To use someone else's example of linked lists, I could work through a doubly-linked list insert routine immediately when the idea of a list made of Node objects was introduced to me. In pseudocode because I didn't actually know any programming language. And I came up with the idea of a doubly-linked list before the prof even introduced it. How do I put that kind of thing on my resume?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[lukas84]

I just hope you're not a Windows shop.

I have an MCSE (and most of the certificates MS offers) for a single reason - my current company needs them for the MS partner program, so i get paid to do those exams and keep them current.

There are a lot of people who cheat using braindumps or similar methods, but if you know your stuff and can read fast they're easy and you can be out in 30 minutes.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of my 4 years exp developer (with bachelor) co-worker who asked me what was this "boolean" I was referring to.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

I also made the observation that my fellow students were horrible at most problem solving - there was maybe one of thirty who seemed to have some solid skills in any area, even amongst those taught for a long while.

Part of the problem surely is that the field of computer science is extremely vast and extremely complex - much more so than anything else. Education would have to start much earlier and be much more well-funded to result in comparative practical competence to, say, studies of Architecture or Medicine do.

Now, for how you as HR can find some of the best - well, in my experience, you need to look for the hobbyists. The people who like to play with emerging technologies that don't come with a GUI clicky thingie, and have been doing so for a while. But you'll at least find somewhat competent people who likely be able to learn well, given the opportunity. If someone is able to learn Scala or how to set up some distributed database or such on their own, runs Linux or Solaris or somesuch, and wrote some little programs for their own use before, they're probably amongst the best you can get.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the ISP/Carrier area, and personally I bin resumes with no certifcations (juniper/cisco etc), or no degree, or vocational certificates. It tells me you're not willing to learn anything, or can prove an expected level knowledge.

Yes, dump test king monkeys do exist in the certification game, that's not the certifications fault, but you'll catch these guys out in the interview process.

security: Snobbery (Class!)

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[stygianguest]

Just a small note. In Europe it's perfectly normal to only do a Master's. It is the degree you get after 5 years of university. Most people going to industry won't bother doing a PhD, as it costs 3-5 years and generally doesn't pay off.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Aceticon]

Nowadays, if you want good, experienced people, you have to go for freelancers (aka contractors). Certainly this is the case in places like London and most of Europe, not sure about Canada. The recession changed that for a bit (when lots of freelancer went permanent 'cause they couldn't find contracts) but that time is past.

The reason for this is that there are only two real career upgrade paths for techical people beyond a certain level of expertise:
- Management
- Freelancing
(there are too few Technical Architect positions and few companies actually have Technical Analysts as part of their development process).

so all the exceptionally qualified techies which are ambitious and driven but don't want to go into management end up freelancing simply because it's the only way to increase your income at that point.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[TheRaven64]

Not sure about the funding in the rest of Europe, but in the UK anyone moderately competent can get funding to do a PhD, which means that they get a non-taxable stipend for the three years that works out close to after-tax amount of an entry-level graduate salary. They also get very flexible working time (turn up when you feel like it, or don't bother, as long as you occasionally write some papers) and a huge travel budget (I claimed around £3000/year of expenses during my PhD).

In contrast, it's quite rare to get funding to do an MSc. You have to pay tuition (often around £5k - more than for an undergraduate degree), as well as all of your accommodation costs and you don't get any expenses budget.

At the end of a PhD, you've spent three years being paid to have fun. At the end of an MSc, you've spent one year paying to work hard. People who choose the latter category might make better employees, I guess...

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[TheRaven64]

He went off about how how he starting programing when he was 15

Wow, I started when I was 7 with BBC BASIC. By the time I was 15, I knew a few dialects of BASIC, PL/M[1], C, a bit of Java and C++, and a smattering of Pascal. Do people really think 15 is early to start programming these days? By then, they should have had at least a year of it at school, if not two or three.

[1] I've forgotten most of the PL/M I knew now (although the convoluted build process makes me really thankful for modern tools), but I still miss a few bits of it when I use C. A low level language should expose the capabilities of the architecture, not dumb them down to the level of a PDP-11.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[TheRaven64]

Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping

I taught an introduction to C course a couple of years ago to second-year students. They had already done three modules (25% of a year) on learning Java, and a number of other modules with courseworks that they had to write in Java, so I taught it as a 'C for Java Programmers' course, taking a look at all of the ways that C and Java differed.

One of the things I was talking about was the relationship between variable scope and object lifecycle. After a couple of minutes, I noticed that they all looked confused. It turned out that, in spite of a year of learning and using Java, no one had ever explained the concept of scope to them.

Part of the problem is that no one at a university wants to teach the introduction to programming modules. They are boring, not related to anyone's research, and a lot of students discover that they aren't really suited to computer science, so they're depressing to teach. They therefore get palmed off on someone who probably doesn't really understand the fundamental concepts behind programming, so can't teach it properly.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[TheRaven64]

I've never taken an MS certification, but I did read the material for the TCP/IP MCP (not sure if this still exists - it used to be that doing one module got you an MCP, doing lots got you an MCSE) when I was 15. It covered a lot more detail of the upper layers of the network stack than I got from the networking module in my degree (although missed all of the information theory). Then I looked at some sample exam questions, and they all seemed to have been taken from the introductory material. None of them tested understanding of anything beyond the very, very, basic stuff, and most of them focussed on the 'which button to press in Windows NT' aspect (I skipped those chapters) than the 'actually understanding TCP/IP' aspect.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[wct097]

I personally would refuse to hire anyone claiming 10 years of ASP.Net development experience.... prior to 2012.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[stygianguest]

Indeed, there are still quite a lot of differences all over Europe. In France the entry level salary is _way_ higher than a PhD salary (speaking from personal experience, 25% difference). Extra benefits in terms of travel very much depend on your supervisor (usually there is no personal travel expense budget). On other accounts it is quite similar to what you describe.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

in the UK anyone moderately competent can get funding to do a PhD

Citation required! I am very familiar with the UK university research system, and I have to call BS on this.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[hellop2]

"CS101A was a C++ class, but it never once mentioned object orientation and had students write all the exercises C-style"

Since you only took "a few classes" you must have never taken CS102, where they teach the object oriented stuff.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[arth1]

For me, if someone is applying for a role and they have a related degree, I assume that they probably know a little about the theory behind it, but have no clue in terms of how the real world functions. For those with certificates, I generally have an even lower opinion.

It depends on the certification too. If someone has a CISCO CC?? certification, you can assume that they know how to configure Cisco routers and switches, if you tell them what you want. The certification exams have them do that more than once, in different ways. And hiring someone with the higher Cisco certifications gives you a discount on Cisco products too.
But whether they know much about non-Cisco stuff or troubleshooting vague symptoms isn't a given. And often, you need the network admin to tell you what's the desired configuration for a purpose, and not the other way around. Which a certification doesn't measure ability to do.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[eharvill]

Still, i'd rather have someone like me than someone with an MCSE. I remember one girl who loved to proclaim that she was an MCSE but one day called me to help her because she didn't know how to install Win NT4 Server.... WTF? (I wasn't an MS guy, I was Novell certified).

I see this all the time as a "VMware" guy. I have to work with SAN, Network and Systems (Linux & Windows) admins all the time. I am appalled at how little knowledge these people have in their area of "expertise." I am a generalist by nature, but I swear I could be the lead engineer of these respective departments in 3/4 of the places I walk into. It's sad really.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[rhsanborn]

Unfortunately, there is also a huge disconnect between what colleges teach, and what is required for students to be successful after college. Very little of what you spoke about is taught at a lot of universities. It doesn't mean these students won't eventually make good programmers, but they need something to translate the theory they've learned into somethings that's applicable. It's really daunting.

I've worked in IT (no development) throughout high school and college. All of my "programming" is scripting, and small utility programs that, I now realize, would be destroyed in a code review. And the avenues to learning to be a better programmer aren't terribly clear. I've taken to reading books on good design now, and I'll swing back around to my language books again. Then I'll need some practical experience, and everyone recommends open source projects, but even those are daunting when a young, inexperienced programmer tries to contribute code to a project where the other developers have been programming for 20 years.

So, maybe that 3rd year student will be great in another year when she has spent some time in a production environment and had some practical experience. Unfortunately, short of the universities adapting their curriculum, I don't think we have many other choices to produce new programmers besides slogging through with some bright, young students, who maybe need a little guidance.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[eharvill]

That being said, I guarantee you can find dozens, if not hundreds, of job postings looking for someone with 10 years of ASP.Net development experience!

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[RadioElectric]

It depends whether you want to work in an area that they need people to work in. PhDs in more technical areas seem to attract pretty few qualified applicants (a major "qualification" often being UK citizenship, as the funding is often restricted in that way). Obviously a PhD in "the tactile qualities of fluffy bunnies" will be a much tougher one to get selected for, as there will be much more competition.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Not sure about the funding in the rest of Europe, but in the UK anyone moderately competent can get funding to do a PhD, which means that they get a non-taxable stipend for the three years that works out close to after-tax amount of an entry-level graduate salary.

I'm in Cambridge, UK, and though I work in industry I still have plenty of ties to the university. I'm afraid I don't recognise the picture you are painting.

In the current academic year, the basic research council funding for a PhD is £13,290.

Under the current tax system, that is equivalent to a gross salary of just under £16,500.

The average starting salary in IT was probably higher than that a decade ago, and much higher if you're talking about working in London and/or working for a big name company that goes after the academic high-flyers.

I also think various friends who are doing PhDs, several of them in Computer Science, would laugh at your description of "spending three years being paid to have fun". Relatively few of my friends have actually completed their PhDs within the "normal" three-year/ten-term window, and many have found themselves writing up and jumping through the final hoops for several months afterwards, while trying to do a full time job as well; funding doesn't extend just because the research/write-up does!

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[TheRaven64]

I also think various friends who are doing PhDs, several of them in Computer Science, would laugh at your description of "spending three years being paid to have fun". Relatively few of my friends have actually completed their PhDs within the "normal" three-year/ten-term window, and many have found themselves writing up and jumping through the final hoops for several months afterwards, while trying to do a full time job as well; funding doesn't extend just because the research/write-up does!

I completed my PhD (in Computer Science) in 3.5 years, during which time I was also writing (and being paid for) a regular column and doing various bits of freelance work. Because the PhD stipend doesn't count as taxable income, the first £4K or so of this extra income was tax free. Now, I believe, the first £6K is. I also wrote my first book (not counting the few chapters I'd written in another book as work for hire) while writing my thesis, otherwise I'd have finished in 3 years, but the advance covered my living costs for the extra half year.

I could probably have completed faster if I'd focussed on the work, but I changed areas a couple of times, spent several months doing work that I didn't put in my thesis, founded an open source project, became an active contributor in another, revived the university's wine society, sang in the choir, and spent quite a lot of time playing badminton, as well as writing regularly.

It's not hard to complete in 3 years if you don't slack off all the time. I did, so I just missed the target.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Machtyn]

How do I put that kind of thing on my resume?

You don't. You really can't. That kind of explanation is good in a cover letter. Cover letters seem to be a lost art. It shows two things, how good you are at communication and the content shows what kind of person you are/can be.

Is there some secret password ...

I would say yes there is: Put a link to your portfolio. If you are a coder, you probably have some programs written, even if it was for an assignment. If you are QA or business analyst type of person, get some examples of your documents and analyses online. Put it up on a website and put that link in your resume... put it in your cover letter (better place for it, I think). If you've been involved in any open source software dev, put a link to it and show that your name pops up in their archives as having written this stuff.

YMMV obviously. If you apply to a closed source type business, they may not look kindly on your community effort (the pricks). For the most part, though, the tech managers will appreciate it. Small to medium size businesses will very much appreciate it (as the hiring manager and tech manager will likely be the same person).

Also, your market may be better suited for going the contractor route (contract to hire type stuff). I know it is in my town. If so, you will generally have a face-to-face with the person who is motivated to get you placed. They have contacts with the tech people who are hiring. If you say "look at my website and see my code", they'll tell their contacts "we've got a live one here, you want him/her!"

I still consider myself a beginner developer and not that great. But what I've seen on thedailywtf.com and from my fellow students (when I was in school) was pretty sad, I could do run-arounds (plus I'm a dedicated and hard worker). I was definitely top 10% in my class when it came to the coding classes. (Now the math classes were different... and we had a lot of math.) I'm being fairly successful right now as a software QA type person with really good general knowledge in all things computers (from software dev to systems knowledge).

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[morgauxo]

It does?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Hyppy]

I can't emphasize enough your point about avenues to learning. There is no "one true path" to becoming a good developer. The trail thats there, though, requires so much backtracking and circular knowledge dependencies that it's often an exercise in frustration. If I had points, I'd mod you up. This will have to suffice.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[morgauxo]

How refreshing. Why don't more employers use coding tests? Actually programming something and talking sharp in an interview are such different skills; I really doubt they even use the same part of the brain. I think too many people get hired on interviewing skills alone and I doubt it's just this field. Good interviewing skills should get one a great position in sales but that's about it.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[oh-dark-thirty]

Poster child here for what you have described...I freelanced for almost 9 years after the last company I worked for closed (the owners cashed in and retired to a golf course in FL). I didn't get rich, but I was happy. Things started slowing down a couple of years ago, and after reading the tea leaves I got a real job as a working (as in, I do real work, like coding) IT Manager for one of my former clients. Having said all that, I do not have any certs beyond a degree; just 25+ years of solid experience with business systems. I can't tell you how many people in my programming classes were clueless yet somehow managed to graduate, and this was in the early 80's! I guess not much has changed.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[morgauxo]

Microsoft isn't selling NT4 anymore. I doubt they teach much which they can't make money off of.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[elrous0]

Well, business majors are another breed. They're usually all convinced they're Gordon Gekko by about junior year at university. They think they're the sharks, when they're really still just the castrated guppies.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[elrous0]

Wow, that's the equivalent of someone responding to a post of /. with "What is the 'Star Trek' everyone keeps mentioning?".

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[eliz_beth]

In my past life I did tech support for a multitude of customers. There was minimal if any documentation, the job really depended on the employee being fast on their feet, fast learners, and have a good variety of experience to troubleshoot the day to day problems. One round of hiring we interviewed multiple candidates for the position. I quickly developed a very simple question that would literally tell me all the basic information I needed to know to make a valid decision. My question? How do you clear out temporary files and/or cookies in Internet Explorer (we did a lot of this due to our systems and is something anyone who uses a computer and especially wants in the tech field should be able to do) How many ways ARE there to do that? (Quite a few actually and I accepted anything valid) We had people interview with CIS degrees who could not answer the question. We had people with prior help desk experience and even work study in their computer labs who could not answer the question. Really now. REALLY no one teaches kids basics like that? How do you get a degree and can't clear our cookies? How do you work in a lab and not know how to do this? The guy who go the job was the one that when I asked him my question he was shocked that I asked something so simple- it was a look of "What the frell- why is she asking that because really WHAT???" and then he provided a couple of different ways. I was almost more worried that he wouldn't take the job because he had serious questions as to what kind of place is it if that's what we ask in an interview. I'd never been so happy to see someone so surprised in my life.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Voyager529]

While I realize it's a bit of a semantic debate, realize that a five year sale window would have been a huge issue for Microsoft - Windows XP was the only version on store shelves between 2001 and 2007, so Vista would have been released in barely an alpha state to make sure that paid XP wasn't literally competing with public-domain-released XP.
The other problem is how to incorporate patches: would XP SP2 be public domain from 2001 or 2004? If 2001, then the bar of what constitutes a point-release would inevitably go down as companies do their best to keep a sellable piece of software on the shelves. If 2004, then every patch would reset the timer, unless patches are individually timed.
I think the better version of what you're talking about would be a three-release sunset. i.e. XP, Vista, and 7 have been released, 2K becomes public domain. It gives manufacturers incentive to improve the current offerings for free to stay competitive. Feature Creep is curtailed, but new sales are inhibited until a new version comes out, giving incentive to make their product better than the one that's getting released into public domain.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[jim_v2000]

You actually don't have to know a lot about computers to be a system admin or a programmer.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[computational super]

A previous employer of mine rejected all resumes listing MCSE certification.

This sort of "reverse snobbery" really irritates me. It's one thing to say that it's somewhat unfair to reject somebody that doesn't have qualification "X" (a certification, a degree, whatever) without giving them a chance to prove themselves, but it's something else to reject somebody just because they do - but I guess it's a good way to weed out employers that you'd be better off not working for.

Having an MCSE cert does say something about you, but probably not what you think it does.

What's that, that you're willing to explore multiple avenues to improve yourself? That you realized that you already knew far more than you needed to know to pass a trivial certification exam, so you went ahead and got it so that potential employers could see that, at a bare minimum, you at least knew that as a starting point, so they didn't have to waste time asking you trivial questions in a job interview?

I don't have an MCSE, but I do have a couple of Sun Java certifications, because my employer wanted me to get them. And you know something? I actually learned a thing or two in the process.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Loki_666]

Duh! This was years ago.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[evilsalvo]

We just went through an interview cycle. It was bad... I'm not a great software engineer... but I'm a decent one.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was go through these resumes. Everyone seems to know the game. I compare there resume to mine, and yeah.... I couldn't tell the difference.

Two of our candidates had masters degrees in computer science. Couldn't even talk about variable scoping. It wasn't a trick question or anything. I was blown away. I had a literal WTF going on in my head. Are universities that desperate for funding and grad numbers, they will pass anyone.

The other spend 10 years at a bank doing ASP.NET development. The first question I ask people... is what topic would you like me to ask you a question on? So I ask him what little I know of web development... (impersonation, authentication, how do get a message box up...) I was amazed at how you spend 10 years doing development and not learn anything.

Another I thought would be a good guy to train. He had 5 years at Nortel... seemed like he had hardware exposure. Lots of fancy words on his resume... nothing behind it.

We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!

I almost feel the pain HR and recruiters must go through. I'm sure somewhere in the bank of resumes we get are some good candidates... how we'd find them... no idea. To an extent, I saw it coming as software is viewed more and more as a commodity job. Top talent is not going to enter the field. Top talent has gone back to traditional medicine, legal...The industry could burn through some of the older better trained talent from the old days... but those candidates are dwindling in number. I'm still in Canada, and all we have left are 45 year old ex-Nortel people and the last bits of talent from the tech boom of the late 90s.

And now we have a talent shortage. And you can't replace a grade A engineer with a grade C project manager, a grade C product manager, a grade C requirements analyst, a several grade C programmers. Nothing gets done. It's like taking all the C students you had in high school and seeing if they can somehow solve the complex calculus problem. Some jobs just require high caliber individuals. You can't replace a good lawyers with a team of secretaries and a requirements analyst either.

But I digress in my frustrations :P Maybe the industry just needs some good consolidation and the good people can form good teams again. And maybe... just maybe... we can get back to having senior engineers, and real mentors, and training people.... ah the dream world I live in.

scamper are you from ottawa/kanata region? Care to comment on what has happened in the region in the last ten years? What kind of requirements/resources does your project require.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of a test should be a standard at all skills based jobs.

Question though, how do the candidates that pass the test get pass the mindless HR interview?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[FoolishOwl]

The requirements are to display a list of users with add, edit, and delete capabilities. The test takes an hour and it doesn't have to compile or be complete. I'm just looking for how people approach it. I've had people actually complete the application in an hour using XML as a data store, others may get a few classes written, some people produce nothing or cut and paste something from the internet that makes no sense.

I do not understand how it's possible that someone could have a CS degree and have trouble with such a test. That sounds like an assignment I had in a one-unit class on shell scripting, that assumed no prior programming experience.

I've been sweating bricks because I've spent the last year and a half working towards the sort of certificate that people here apparently despise. I'd originally planned to get a CS degree, but I just couldn't get through Calculus II. So I've been worried that I won't have the computer science background expected for entry level system administration. And yet, I keep reading accounts of people with degrees I don't think I'm capable of attaining, being unable to complete assignments that are easier than things I was assigned in introductory courses.

And to be honest, that also matches my past experience in the workplace -- people would have great qualifications, qualifications that I didn't think I could ever attain, and yet didn't seem to actually know much, or even express any interest in their field.

It's easy enough to bluff your way to a humanities degree -- I was an English major, and I saw plenty of that -- but how are people bluffing their way through advanced mathematics and computer science?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[RedHelix]

Anectodally, I'd say there absolutely is a difference. I completed college in 2008, intensely aware of that fact that although I took courses in FreeBSD, mySQL and such that I would get eaten alive by anyone who works professionally in Unix-like OSes and databases. I'm surprised to hear business students feel differently about their field of study.

The solution in my case was to be vocal about how little I know - though I do know a lot- and my desire to yield to and learn from people with experience.

"When I need to find something out, I just go out and find somebody that knows more than me, and I go and I ask them. Sometimes I ask pretty hard."
Marv, Sin City

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[RedHelix]

Some colleges are becoming more cognizant of the fact that not everyone who works in computers is necessarily a full-time programmer.

My college started offering a 'Network & Information Systems' major the year that I started. Basically a big fat injection of Unix-like operating systems, NOC engineering, databases, and even a big chunk of programming thrown into the mix. No Calculus. Other colleges are pursuing this trend as well.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[eihab]

Good interviewing skills should get one a great position in sales but that's about it.

Not really. You need to have great coding skills, but you also need to have exceptional interpersonal skills.

As programmers, we document and automate processes, sometimes these processes describe things that are out of our comfort zone or knowledge (accounting, business, engineering, medical or advanced maths).

We need to be able to communicate effectively and understand the aspects of a project before writing a single line of code.

If you lack the personal skills to be able to ask questions of stakeholders you will forever be categorized as a code monkey requiring a manager to relay information and ask questions for you or a team lead to design the system and tell you what to code.

If that's the kind of position you're shooting for then, sure, suit yourself. But for a Senior/Lead position (or to start your own business) you must have great interpersonal skills and great coding/design skills at the same time.

It's not really that hard either. People are not that hard to figure out, you just need to "debug" them and observe how they interact with you/others and emulate behaviors that seem to work.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Blakey Rat]

To use someone else's example of linked lists, I could work through a doubly-linked list insert routine immediately when the idea of a list made of Node objects was introduced to me. In pseudocode because I didn't actually know any programming language. And I came up with the idea of a doubly-linked list before the prof even introduced it. How do I put that kind of thing on my resume?

Just put a sentence at the bottom that reads:

"Complete braggart, and better than you."

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[breeze95]

I think it depends on several factors. 22 year old kids with a bachelors in CS from a state school are usually bright eyed and eager to learn. If they come from "prestigious" tech schools and "settle" on a company that isn't a household name, they are usually aghast that they aren't everyones manager a year into the job as they've over-engineered every piece of software they've been tasked to write and treat even seasoned veterans as if they don't know what they are talking about.

Also be wary of anyone with a Masters in Computer Science getting their first industry job. Be sure to grill them about why they aren't getting their Ph.D. Often it's because they were good enough to get to the Masters level but couldn't get into a Ph.D. program. Those kinds of people often end up being overly expensive dead weight as they try to turn their job into their own personal Ph.D. program.

A PhD is for teaching so if you don't desire to teach then a PhD is a waste of time, money and resources. Not everyone desires to teach or be heavily involved in theoretical research, but they would like to have a bit more theoretical and practical foundation and for those people the Masters degree is appropriate since it's a terminal degree.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if their spelling is better than yours?

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[hellmitre]

If anybody knows Beej, of Beej's Guide to Networking in C, (http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/), he was taught at Chico State by a guy named Tyson. Tyson is the only teacher they can get to teach the programming and algorithms II class (211, previously 112), and also happens to be the best teacher in the entire computer science department. He also teaches compiler design and software engineering. He's done more to keep any students in the computer science department than any other teacher, bar none. And they fired him a few years ago, for getting in the way of the state-school bureaucracy. The school then received around 3,000 emails and letters from students, demanding that he be reinstated. He's got tenure now, and keeps the giant stack of printed emails in his office. He's the man.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[techhead79]

did you consider she was just trying to watch you flex your muscles as you lifted up that floppy and inserted it slowly into the drive? Girls have to get a guy's attention some how you know.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[FoolishOwl]

Someone recently told me that SFSU, the four-year school I had been planning to attend, had just such a program. It does make a lot of sense.

I do think there are some serious problems with the models of higher education we're following. As I said, I was an English major twenty years ago, and for one thing, I think humanities majors take far more humanities courses than is useful even for an academic career, and everyone else takes too few humanities courses. But that seems true of most fields.

Part of what really puzzles me is that it seems as if most people who have degrees, retain almost nothing of what they studied. I don't know if it's that most people are cheating their way through college, or that people completely forget all that material they spent thousands of hours studying. I was reacting to the examples of programmers, but I've met former classmates from humanities classes who can't seem to remember anything, either.

The other part that really puzzles me is mathematics. On the one hand, nearly everyone I've talked to agrees that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way mathematics is taught. I found Lament of a Mathematician very persuasive on this point.

But on the other hand, what I can't fathom is how, when I was in a math course, I'd see the other students racing through transformations of an abstraction based on an abstraction based on an abstraction, requiring mastery of all the underlying transformations of abstractions -- an intellectual task surpassing anything else I've ever encountered. And yet, these students seemed to have no curiosity about the subject, and when I'd run into them in other classes, they'd be scratching their heads over much simpler problems.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[xiong.chiamiov]

I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but the Transitive Grace Period Public License requires releasing of source code after 12 months. It's an interesting idea that I've seen around a few places.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[techhead79]

"look at my website and see my code", they'll tell their contacts "we've got a live one here, you want him/her!"

Um, no. HR isn't going to understand anything you put on your website. The manager that interviews you might not understand it either. The developer that interviews you isn't going to waste their time learning some new app that has absolutely NO impact on their current work load other than to possibly get you hired. In fact you'd be very very lucky to ever get anyone to look at your code and in most cases they'd use it as a reason to rule you out as an applicant. There is nothing you can put on a website that honestly says "I wrote this"...at most it says you know how to copy and paste. The only exception would be if you created something unique that can't already be found in countless textbooks or in any web search...and if you did create something unique then you'd probably be Interviewing on that project alone and not on something that has no relation to your code.

Throwing a bunch of code at someone that is going to hire you on isn't going to get you hired on. It may even give them a reason to nit pick your coding style as it probably wouldn't follow their standards anyway. It's a nice little thing to be able to include but seriously don't expect it to make a difference.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't doubt you, but I'm not sure what you're describing is typical, either in terms of the PhD or in terms of the success you've had with books.

It's also worth keeping in mind that while comparing PhD funding to a starting salary gives some frame of reference, it's not terribly realistic by the time your 3+ years are up: I had more than doubled my salary in that time, for example, and having a PhD is unlikely to get you much of an increase on the basic starting salary at most places. Even if you did get paid something close to a starting salary to enjoy yourself for 3 years, you would still be 3 years behind a salary curve that should be increasing significantly for at least 5 or 6 years once you start work, which probably works out at a six figure opportunity cost if you were going to follow a career in something like software development either way.

I guess I'm basically just supporting the original claim by stygianguest that "Most people going to industry won't bother doing a PhD, as it costs 3-5 years and generally doesn't pay off." As various friends have said, you do a PhD because you want to study a subject in detail for personal satisfaction, not because it's going to help your career in most industries (sciences being the notable exception).

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[PCM2]

At this school, CS102 was pointers, arrays, and data types. "Solving problems in an object-oriented way" didn't come until CS103. Which I'd argue is a waste of students' time -- instead of teaching them how to do something the wrong way and then teaching them something else later, just teach them to write objects the first time. For the first couple of classes they're just going to be copying code from the book anyway. They don't need to know the whole history and theory of object orientation to structure basic exercises as proper object-oriented code.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, because a friend of a friend of mine(also a Waterloo student) landed a job with Yahoo using just this technique...

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I tried the acting suprised trick when I was asked basic programming questions and it didn't work... oh well.

In either case, I'm not sure about the details of your job description, but you have to realise that not everyone even uses internet explorer. You must also realise that university degrees are not intended to teach you arbitrary UI/computer commands.

Re:Or you could get an MSCE

[illtud]

I can usually get an idea of skill level by talking to people, but occasionally people are just good talkers. So I have a coding test. I give them a simple set of requirements and set them down in front of an IDE and have them write an application.

I realise that I'm replying weeks late, and that nobody will read this, but I'd just like to support your point. I interview for about 3 junior developer posts a year, and shortlist those who appear to meet the requirements. I add a paper pseudocode exercise that shouldn't tax anybody who makes the shortlist and I'm continually suprised how many are totally stumped by it. Anybody who takes the CV (US: resume) at face value should take note.

Lesdyxia?

[Pezbian]

Sure you don't mean "MCSE"?

Re:Lesdyxia?

[h4rr4r]

oops, there goes my funny mod.

oh well.

Re:Lesdyxia?

[Pezbian]

's okay! U feel betr soon. I maed u a cookey...

Re:Lesdyxia?

[h4rr4r]

but you eated it?

Re:Lesdyxia?

[Pezbian]

Nope. Scanner did.

Re:Lesdyxia?

[Anonymous Coward]

I put the "sexy" in "dyslexia"!

No kidding

[DrugCheese]

I don't think I've come across a person with a programming degree yet that I'd call a programmer. But they sure know how to use MS Office!

Re:No kidding

[lennier1]

A programming degree? Did they come from some kind of bible college?

You can buy a piece of paper

[Frequency Domain]

but it won't take long for prospective employers to discover that it has utility only if it is perforated and comes on a roll.

Re:You can buy a piece of paper

[Greyfox]

Yeah, but you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to actually fire someone? Most companies will only push the useless programmers around a lot and hope they quit. If they can bluff their way through an interview, they're pretty much set for life.

Re:You can buy a piece of paper

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

"but you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to actually fire someone?"

Sorry, but USA is not France.

Re:You can buy a piece of paper

[iwannasexwithyourmom]

ahahahah that's an awesome quote!

What?

[dangitman]

And while some institutions are emphasizing the value of teamwork in their curricula, an approach that fosters specialization in lieu of uniform standards

Wouldn't "teamwork" have the opposite effect - emphasizing uniform standards over specialization? A more individualistic approach would encourage specialization more, one would think. Also, the whole premise seems a bit off. "IT" encompasses many things, programming is not involved in all of them.

Re:What?

[shimage]

I believe the idea is that an individualistic program requires that individuals know everything, whereas those in a team can specialize since your team mates will handle the things you can't.

Re:What?

[h4rr4r]

What IT job involves no programming?
Here even the Helpdesk folks automate stuff via simple scripts and even some fairly basic C++ programs.

Re:What?

[dangitman]

What IT job involves no programming?

Hardware assembly/repair, database entry, web content (via CMS), training, project management, CEO, CTO. The list is nearly infinite. I'd go out on a limb to say that the majority of IT jobs probably don't involve any programming.

Re:What?

[h4rr4r]

None of those I would call IT.

Those are mostly management and data entry. The only exception is the hardware assembly/repair and that is just a factory job, not IT.

Re:What?

[dangitman]

None of those I would call IT.

Then you have a very unusual idea of what IT is. It is work relating to technology used for information. Even a librarian in a library that doesn't have any computers counts.

Those are mostly management and data entry.

The management of an IT company has nothing to do with IT? Data entry has nothing to do with IT? How do you use IT if you don't get the data in?

The only exception is the hardware assembly/repair and that is just a factory job, not IT.

People who make house calls to repair someone's PC is somehow a "factory job"? You're not making a lot of sense.

Re:What?

[h4rr4r]

I might indeed have an unusual idea of what IT is.

A librarian is not in IT, they are just librarians. They have lots of information not much technology.

Management of IT companies has little to do with IT, most of the managers no nothing about IT. they manage like in every other firm by the numbers or by the idiotic book their kinds likes this year.

Data entry is to IT like fry cook at mcdonalds is to the culinary industry.

People who make house calls may indeed be in IT. I did not consider that what you had meant, I envisioned refurb depots.

Re:What?

[dangitman]

A librarian is not in IT, they are just librarians. They have lots of information not much technology.

They have heaps of technology. Their entire world is based around the printed word, which is one of the most revolutionary technologies ever invented. They know algorithms, like the Dewey decimal system. They know databases.

Data entry is to IT like fry cook at mcdonalds is to the culinary industry.

Right. A fry cook at McDonalds is definitely a part of the culinary industry.

You seem to be conflating "chef" with "member of the culinary industry." The problem is that "IT" is such a useless term, particularly these days, when nearly every job involves some level of IT.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The OP seems to have a very closed mind view as to what IT is. I think the word is called elitist and I bet he probably doesn't do well on a team. /cue the "I'm a project leader with 20 years of yarg yarg yarg. "

Re:What?

[sjames]

Most of the hardware people I know at least know a bit of programming. It's a useful skill for a project manager so they can at least review and understand the work being done. Data entry is not traditionally considered IT (just because it's data and you use a computer doesn't make it IT, sales people do that too). True enough for web content and often for CxO

Re:What?

[sjames]

And yet librarians study library science, not IT. Data entry (10 key) has always been lumped in with typists and secretarial, not IT.

Re:What?

[dangitman]

And yet they all fall under the umbrella of IT. Who would have thunk it? A profession can fall under more than one category! Amazing, I know.

Re:What?

[dangitman]

just because it's data and you use a computer doesn't make it IT,

Why not? It involves information and technology. Perhaps they should have called the field something different if they meant something more specific?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is that he's not the only one with such view.

Re:What?

[sjames]

By your criteria, the cashier at McDonald's is an IT professional as is the meter reader, 411 operator, and the UPS delivery driver.

If you flush a toilet are you a plumber? For that matter I suppose you'd also be either a urologist or a proctologist. Possibly a druggist if the cops were at the door.

Does chewing your food make you a dentist? A nutritionist or a gastroenterologist perhaps?

Perhaps they should have called those fields something different if they meant something more specific!

Or perhaps you should realize that all language can be contorted until it is useless and that it's more practical to go with the common meaning. OTOH, if your goal was an insightful stand-up routine, don't quit your day job!

Re:What?

[dangitman]

By your criteria, the cashier at McDonald's is an IT professional

I never said "IT Professional," but yes, they are involved in IT. Nearly everybody is, it permeates all of our lives. Which is why we should use more meaningful terms like "programmer" or "software developer" or "database administrator." The term "IT" is malformed and useless.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, now hang with me for a second here, you could stop being such a pretentious asshole. Wouldn't that be grand?

Re:What?

[sjames]

Clearly, you are a farmer.

Re:What?

[david_thornley]

In my compilers project, the class project was a team effort. On finding I was the guy who'd actually done assembly language coding, I had one thing to say: "You do the parser".

Re:What?

[luis_a_espinal]

None of those I would call IT.

Then you have a very unusual idea of what IT is. It is work relating to technology used for information. Even a librarian in a library that doesn't have any computers counts.

Uh, no. Those would be users interfacing with an IT system.

Those are mostly management and data entry.

The management of an IT company has nothing to do with IT? Data entry has nothing to do with IT? How do you use IT if you don't get the data in?

Again, those are users of IT systems. You can argue they are the reason for an IT organization to exist, but that doesn't make them part of IT. They are part of the business organization that has IT as the backbone. IT people are those that make IT happen, the ones that keeps the backbone running for users to put data in and pull data out. You are confusing a business organization with IT organization (with the later being a component of the former.)

It'd be very rare to find an IT position that does not require any active programming. Maybe with tier I support... and even then it happens that tier I support people have a background in IT/MIS/CS or a 2-year technical degree. And that is why there is so much attrition in tier I support. Barring a moron or a student trying to make ends meet, no one with that type of background and an ounce of ambition can work helping people plug their mice over the phone for more than a year or two.

In general, you'll find people doing all type of programming at different levels for their tasks. Scripts for pushing updates, scripts for automating, oh I dunno, printer monitoring, scripts for testing, scripts for calling tethereal or snoop for troubleshooting network shit, MS office automation, etc. Programming is ancillary to their support functions, and could in theory do their work without it. But anyone competent in any IT function would look for some form of programmatic automation of some of their tasks.

The only exception is the hardware assembly/repair and that is just a factory job, not IT.

People who make house calls to repair someone's PC is somehow a "factory job"? You're not making a lot of sense.

Here, I agree with you. PC repair is not manufacturing. It's assembling, diagnosis and troubleshooting and analysis, core things in IT functions.

It's not just the diploma mills

[JThaddeus]

There are diploma mills that crank out such types for exorbitant fees--Phoenix U, Strayer, etc.--but I don't think the big names are exempt. I once met a University of Maryland College Park grad (B.S. in computer science) who didn't understand pointers and who couldn't grok hexadecimal math. These shortcomings notwithstanding, she was enrolled in their graduate program.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[R3d M3rcury]

I once met a University of Maryland College Park grad (B.S. in computer science) who didn't understand pointers and who couldn't grok hexadecimal math.

Obviously a real computer scientist.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

Except a CS degree at UMCP requires coursework in C, so her lack of knowledge is rather surprising.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Kilrah_il]

I think that 5F% of the people don't grok hexadecimal math, but I agree that C.S. grads should be better informed.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Deadron]

A lot of these issues seem to tend from the language of choice in today's colleges. That language being java which is memory managed for you. To alot of the older programming crowd who have used C for years this can seem like a huge flaw and it can be depending on the field. However, alot of programming these days is Web programming and in Java/C# where these skills are uneeded so it is not necessarily such a huge issue. Also, all a Computer Science degree really teaches you is how to learn. There are so many different languages and specializations it is IMPOSSIBLE to learn all the details about everything so you just have to grasp the ability to expand your horizons when needed.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the pointer she was skilled with.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[TheRaven64]

The thing I find most entertaining about this is that half of the weird things that real computer scientists are mocked for doing in that post are now part of mainstream computing. Give it to someone in a few years, and they'll maybe not know what Ada is, but they'll look at most of of the other things and say 'is there a different way?' with a puzzled expression.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[wct097]

As a senior developer who has been developing for about 12 years now, I'd have to google 'hexadecimal math' should I ever need to understand more than the basics. Likewise, I rarely, if ever even think about pointers. For that matter, I've only used bitwise operators a handful of times in the last 12 years, most recently when writing a program that manipulated the userAccountControl field in Active Directory. Then again, by the time I finished my BSCS with Strayer U, I'd been developing for 6 years, learning more in the first two years on the job than I did in school for my AAS and BS combined. Education just gives you the tools and a little knowledge to get going. A CS degree doesn't let you bypass the entry level positions where your real education begins.... it'll only help you obtain that position. Roughly 50% of my peers have no degree, with only 25% having a BS. One of the most capable IT coworkers I have, has a GED (and a CCIE). That said, when it comes to hiring new people.... if you don't have experience, you're not getting an interview for an entry level position without a degree.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

That may just be the U. of Md. My previous company was trying to hire two programmers, and we got a lot of UMD CS graduates (DC area). After about half a dozen, I tracked down their course catalog and plotted out an educational track that would get a CS degree without ever having write a line of code. Not only was it possible -- it as actually easy!

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[jimbolauski]

There are diploma mills that crank out such types for exorbitant fees--Phoenix U, Strayer, etc.--but I don't think the big names are exempt. I once met a University of Maryland College Park grad (B.S. in computer science) who didn't understand pointers and who couldn't grok hexadecimal math. These shortcomings notwithstanding, she was enrolled in their graduate program.

To be fair most kids today can't do 10base math without a calculator either.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, all a Computer Science degree really teaches you is how to learn. There are so many different languages and specializations it is IMPOSSIBLE to learn all the details about everything so you just have to grasp the ability to expand your horizons when needed.

You can also be a fantastic Computer Science student and a horrible programmer. While I can't speak for all universities, in my neck of the woods the science in computer science actually had meaning. Other than three architectural courses, the degree focuses heavily on the logical underpinnings of computing.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

err.. Being an employee for Phoenix U and working on the IT side, we are not a diploma mill. We are held to the same academic standards as the big names, there are no exceptions and it takes just as long here to get a degree as it does at the big names. Faculty who teach are actively working in their respective fields, and often times teach at so called 'traditional' big name Uni's. Now that's not to say that technical staff here know anything, hell I wonder half the time how upper management got into their positions as there are some that know squat about what goes on tech side within here.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment is *complete* nonsense.

UMD requires programming in both required 100 level CS courses (Java), one of the required 200 level courses (C), and two of the required 300 level courses (C, OCaml, Java, Ruby, Lisp).

In the 400 level courses you can pick mostly theory and math classes if you want, but they limit how many classes you can take in any one area, so you're pretty much forced to take at least 2 classes that involve /some/ coding, even if it's just small lisp programs implementing algorithms.

Every student has taken at least six courses involving programming by the time they graduate.

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[treeves]

I'm curious now. I'm not a programmer though I once did learn some BASIC, Pascal, and FORTRAN (in that order)(gives my age away no doubt) and fiddled around with programming my HP-41C and HP-48SX.
To add hexadecimal numbers, would you convert them to decimal, add them, and then convert back to hex, or is there is some shortcut, or memorized approach?

Re:It's not just the diploma mills

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually a UMCP grad. Unfortunately, the department seems to have bizarre admissions standards for grad students. About 30-40% of them seem to have little to no background in computer science, and the admissions standards seem to be below the graduation standards for their undergrads.

Not sure why, thats just the way it is.

They pretty much filter out the weeds by the time you get to graduation. I wouldn't worry about it.

Well then

[Pezbian]

I guess we know what that certificate certifies.

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Coding and computer-related degrees

[lyinhart]

I'm not sure how Computer Science courses are at other educational institutions, but my school's Comp Sci program didn't focus much on programming at all. Everything was largely theoretical and we never did much programming at all. If you wanted to fine tune your coding skills, you'd have to do it on your own, or even better on co-op or internship.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[RichMan]

The problem with missing coding skills is you also miss the dependent skills

a) debugging
b) refactoring
and the one they never get to
c) reuse/rework/repurpose
which leads to a greater appreciation of
d) documentation

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem with the computer science field. It's really two fields. Computer science which is more abstract and what your school focuses on. The other is software engineering. Those are the two broadest fields I can think of and even they have a decent amount of overlap.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some comp sci. courses at the University of Victoria in Canada and you sure had to code well to get through, including pointers. It is not a Ivy League school but the theory was that in order to code well, you have to be able to code fast under pressure.

But I thought we had out sourced all of this coding stuff to India? Only managers and sales people and lawyers are left, unless you enjoy working for less money those are the things you do.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[MachDelta]

Anecdotal, but in my intro CS course we did quite a lot of programming. Simple programming, but programming nonetheless. Almost all of the labs involved creating or debugging some kind of simple C++ program. Everything else we covered in the course (particularly the first half) was supplementary: circuits, logic, pseudocode, bin/hex/dec, etc.

It seemed to be a fairly popular course, but before long almost half of the class had dropped out upon discovering it wasn't a cakewalk (at least for non-geeks). The remainder of the class had a B+ average. Funny that.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[catmistake]

Really, the problem isn't with the Computer Science field at all. Computer Science is a subset of the study of Mathematics. The problem is with the field of Information Technology, i.e. the field of Computer Practice. The number of IT programs at universities has probably expanded, but many are masquerading as a C.S. program, but in reality Computer Science is ill equiped in either case to fill the field of IT, whether it's theory or software design (it's never really been engineering), I would compare it to expecting medical schools to somehow fill all the roles of the entire medical field, including orderlies, nurses to physicians assistants and pharmacists.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[lcllam]

The theory does help when writing code, though. At least the code doesn't look like a bunch of cut and pasted examples. It also helps in optimizing and what CS people refer to as 'elegant' solutions to complex problems. I'd say the theory helps one become a better, more 'complete' coder than one is, without it. I don't think the OP is grumbling about the lack of coding experience. See my other post for my take on the matter.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[mgblst]

Went to a University in Australia, almost every course had a programming component. Computer Hardware, Mathematical Programming, Compiler constructions, operating systems. For one subject, Advanced algorithms, we had to write the same program in 4 different languages. That was a half a year subject.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[TheRaven64]

Or, to put it more simply, wondering why a computer science graduate can't program is like wondering why a physics graduate can't build a jet engine.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[rhsanborn]

Which is not what administrators and professors view as Computer Science. That is the realm of a trade school, as opposed to the academic discipline. Aside from some mentions of the above items in a software engineering course, I don't believe any of those items were covered in a single college course I took, and I don't think the professors would feel bad about it either. They intend to teach you Computer Science, and not Computer Programming.

As a purely selfish request, do you have any recommendations of sites, documentation, or books that cover these topics well? As a soon to be grad, I'm finding myself quite daunted by the gap between what I learned in college, and the things that are required in a production development environment. Note: I am reading through Code Complete, 2nd ed. right now.

Re:Coding and computer-related degrees

[xiong.chiamiov]

I'm not sure how Computer Science courses are at other educational institutions, but my school's Comp Sci program didn't focus much on programming at all. Everything was largely theoretical and we never did much programming at all. If you wanted to fine tune your coding skills, you'd have to do it on your own, or even better on co-op or internship.

I always find it amazing that, no matter how much I rant about all of the things my department could do better, we are seemingly far above most other unis. We started programming the first (or perhaps second) day in class, and have very few core classes that don't require coding (I spent at least 10 hours a week programming in my algorithms class).

Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job as

[Joe The Dragon]

Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job as the school part most of the time is far from that work on the job is like.

The basic problem with certification programs...

[msauve]

Every certification test I've ever taken measures, not knowledge, but rote memorization. Seems that the tests are created by people with no understanding of the subject matter. Questions are created by simply taking material literally from the study material, context and real-world applicability be damned.

As long as you can remember the study materials (especially the company specific terminology) long enough to get through the test, you pass. Understanding/knowing anything useful gets you nowhere.

Then people would have to do their own work

[xzvf]

Without teamwork, the majority of the team would have to do its own work. Now you find the dude in class that truly loves coding and technology, leach and get a good team grade. But what do I know, I was a poly sci major. Of course I've found that prisoner's delima, nuclear deterrence and brinkmanship are far more useful in IT than silly computer stuff.

Re:Then people would have to do their own work

[dangitman]

Without teamwork, the majority of the team would have to do its own work.

But with a team, you find a bunch of people with different abilities, so you are able to do a wide range of things. Pretty much the opposite of specialization.

Think of a sports team. You don't want the whole team to be specialists in the same thing, you want a team of people with different skills who can work together.

Re:Then people would have to do their own work

[Anonymous Coward]

Without teamwork, the majority of the team would have to do its own work.

But with a team, you find a bunch of people with different abilities, so you are able to do a wide range of things. Pretty much the opposite of specialization.

Think of a sports team. You don't want the whole team to be specialists in the same thing, you want a team of people with different skills who can work together.

There's an understanding fail.

A team encourages specialisation because a team of diverse specialists will have the strengths of all those specialists without each indavidual needing to be good at everything. So if your teams are made of average people a team of average specialists will almost always beat a team of average generalists (the average specialist being good at one things and weaker in other areas, whereas the average generalist is medioker in all areas). Thus if you work in a team enviroment you are best served by finding a valuable specialty and focusing on it heavily, whereas in an indavidual enviropment you are best served becoming a jack of all trades as you will not be able to rely on others to cover your weaknesses.

Re:Then people would have to do their own work

[dangitman]

A team encourages specialisation because a team of diverse specialists will have the strengths of all those specialists without each indavidual needing to be good at everything.

But that won't work unless you have at least one generalist to unify them, because all the specialists will be talking past one another.

where do you get these degrees?

[shimage]

I would expect that employers would quickly discover which institutions are crap and which ones aren't which makes the diploma worth more-or-less what you put into it ... But then I am in a relatively small field with a degree from a relatively well-known institution.

Re:where do you get these degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

ITT

Re:where do you get these degrees?

[Pezbian]

*Nods*

Learned more in high school with my IE teacher mentoring me than I did at that triumph of marketing "college". When your class is full of forty-somethings who blew their backs out at the steel mill and need to be taught which end of a soldering iron to hold, as opposed to people who aren't there just because "I heard electronics pays well" that's a pretty big clue you've been had.

I feel dirty.

Re:where do you get these degrees?

[shimage]

Sounds like a worthless degree, which brings me back to my original assertion: schools that produce worthless graduates are selling worthless degrees.

Re:where do you get these degrees?

[Pezbian]

*nods again*

Even though it sounds like you're calling me worthless there, I'd agree with that sentiment if it weren't for the training I did pre-ITT and my lifelong passion for "fixing broken stuff". When an eight year old learns how to solder, it means something.

Having ITT on my resume opened few doors for me. It took years to get a proper job related to my field, but every experience from lowly solder monkey to SMT line operator to rework cell lead to full-on tech has been worth it since it helped me trace some nasty process issues that were costing some serious money.

Re:where do you get these degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

no..the initial screen is just "degree from accredited institution?".. Check.. send for interviews.

Re:Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Enter...

[Anonymous Coward]

MBA-MOT (Management of Technology)...

HR looks downtech schools that have more work done

[Joe The Dragon]

HR looks down on tech schools that have more work done that is like what is done on the job while the big schools that have way less and lots more non tech / non core filler are placed higher.

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[h4rr4r]

No, the big schools just make you do both. They also often require co-ops. ITT on the other hand will show you the windows way to do it and teach you no theory or basics. This means you can solve that problem but not figure out how to solve problems.

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..about having to take the CISSP. It proves that I can memorize. That buys me nothing, but costs me something. I am surrounded by people who have passed who understand nothing about computers.

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[nomadic]

Yeah, but ITT grads tend to gravitate towards jobs where hands-on work is far more important than theory. I think the for-profit technical schools serve a valuable niche, or could if they weren't almost universally overpriced to the point where they're not worth it for anyone.

It's getting better in some places

[AdmiralXyz]

I just wanted to provide a counterargument to the gloom-and-doom scenarios that are probably going to permeate this page: I'm studying for my CS degree at an Ivy League school right now, and the University actually just completed a major overhaul of the requirements for CS, which I think are a major improvement. I know Slashdotters love to complain about how useless college graduates are when they first enter the workplace, but I'm optimistic that I can be at least somewhat handy when I end up getting a job.

The biggest change is that you're now required to declare a concentration, ranging from pretty specific (Database Programming), to very general (Security), there are about fifteen of them and you can create your own with approval from your advisor. This means that everyone is still required to take the theoretical courses (which are useful, no matter what the curmudegons say: I'm a way better programmer than I was before I took algorithms and lambda calculus), but now has time to do tons of practical programming in their field of choice: many of the lecture classes now have 1- or 2-credit electives alongside them which are nothing but semester-long practical projects (for one course in particular, we actually have to find someone not affiliated with the CS department, who needs software written for them, and write it, with our grade dependent on the client's satisfaction- definitely not an academic cookie-cutter project), and in many cases these are now required rather than optional. In addition, while the low-level CS classes (which are taken by all kinds of people across the University, not just CS majors, and so sort of have to be dumbed-down) are junk like PHP and writing Swing GUIs with Java, we have to fight it out with C and Ocaml in many of the more advanced classes.

Again, before a million people complain about how naive I'm being, I'm not saying I'm going to walk out with my degree as a world-class programmer or that I won't have plenty to learn in the real world, I'm just saying that this trend towards easier programming languages and more hand-holding isn't occurring everywhere. And yes, most schools aren't the Ivy League, but if the market demands curricula like this from higher education, it will trickle down. There's hope yet.

Re:It's getting better in some places

[h4rr4r]

Yet, your little sig shows how ignorant you are.
Both of those are real world tools used by many in your chosen field to do actual work.

Re:It's getting better in some places

[ron-l-j]

And this is costing how much ? I go to a private school for network development and had to write C code in the second week. I am not a programmer.

Re:It's getting better in some places

[Bender0x7D1]

Just a quick note writing PHP and writing Swing GUIs is not "junk". They are important tasks that need to be done and, contrary to popular opinion, are done a lot better by skilled professionals.

Also, I'll chime in and point out that having an undergrad emphasis on "security" is horrible. Security is HARD and you need a solid foundation in operating systems, networking, databases, web programming, programming languages and a lot of other areas. If you are requiring security classes instead of those other classes, you are doing the students a disservice.

Re:It's getting better in some places

[xiong.chiamiov]

You won't tell us which uni this is? Relevant to our interests, I think.

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[h4rr4r]

Honestly, I think most of those jobs are gone. Even our helpdesk folks have a good grasp on lots of basic theory. They may not be able to build a shift register, but they could tell you how a netmask works or why spanning tree is important.

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[h4rr4r]

I should mention one is a college student and disappointed graduate of ITT the other has an EE degree.

Re:Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job

[MaskedSlacker]

What?

So, what skills ARE needed in this field?

[BlueBoxSW.com]

If degrees aren't covering what needs to be taught, what ARE the main objectives that would produce the best functioning graduates?

this is where eu education system is much better

[Joe The Dragon]

this is where eu education system is much better as they have good vocational systems had real hands on work vs lot's of theoretical stuff and big class at most US schools and it to bad HR looks down on the tech / vocational schools hear in us and even more so on people who may have 2-4 years doing jobs get passed over for some with 0-1 years on the job and 4 year BS that may not even be in tech.

It's the opposite of the old complaint...

[damn_registrars]

Now we are complaining that people with

computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code.

Previously we complained about

computer-related degrees despite not knowing how to troubleshoot a hardware problem or even turn a computer on

So in other words, educators responded to complaints by changing curriculum. We now have some computer-related degrees that have programming as an optional trait rather than a required trait.

And on top of that, what is a "computer-related degree" anyways? CSci would seem to fit that; how about Computer Engineering? Or an IS Management degree?

Repeat After Me

[Anonymous Coward]

A Computer Science degree is not a degree in Programming.

Re:Repeat After Me

[presidenteloco]

Yabbut.. It should be a degree with lots and lots of programming and lots of software engineering process stuff and lots of crunchy math stuff, logic stuff, and data modelling stuff etc etc.

I expect good programming skill as one key outcome of such a degree. Any compsci degree program that isn't weeding out people who can't program fairly well is doing a disservice to their graduates (all of whose qualifications are being devalued) and to industry.

Re:Repeat After Me

[sarkeizen]

It is *NOT* someone teaching you how to program. It is someone teaching you about algorithms, data structures, etc...which you are expected to be able to figure out how to implement...or as one of my CS profs said: "I expect all of your assignments to be written in C. If you don't know C, I suggest you buy a book".

Re:Repeat After Me

[dbIII]

Yes, but even twenty years ago without PC access you couldn't get a degree in any branch of Engineering or Mathematics without writing a bit more code than some CS courses now require.

10 Years behind

[Anonymous Coward]

I majored in IT in order to get my associates and then switched over to Comp. Sci when I went for my bachelors. I don't like to code, it's not what I intend to do. However, it's been a prevalent requirement in my various courses and I've enjoyed it. It just simply isn't where I intended for my career to go.

Midway through my 2nd semester at university (After my associates), I became extremely discouraged by my professors knowledge and the curriculum itself. It wasn't a matter of just the curriculum being flawed or my professor being outdated. Typically it's one or the other. I just felt both were utterly irrelevant to the fields I intended to go into.

So, I went out and applied for IT jobs...and damn, I got one. I work at an extremely small shop for a mid sized company but it's allowed me to learn alot. I'm fairly savvy and pretty open minded when it comes to OS. So I managed to get primarily windows based network with some nice little freenas and trixbox action on our network when push came to shove.

I think it's simply a matter of willingness to learn on the fly. Alot of students see "Computer Science" as a thing you can take in school and just go with the rest of your life. It's constantly evolving though and you really gotta love it to stay on top of it imho.

I went to state schools (in new york). They're good...but I think it's extremely difficult to keep up with the demand of technology for educational institutions. Now, at 24...I find myself underpaid for my abilities and vastly overqualified...so I'm going back in the fall.

I don't expect to learn everything I want too, but I have much better idea of what's relevant and what isn't. So I know when to pay attention and when to go through the motions.

Also, before all the developers hate on me. I LIKE to code. I just couldn't imagine doing it as a job. I really enjoy web design...but after being coerced into designing a flash webpage for a charity my company is largely responsible for - I hate it. I can't deal with being forced to create things I disagree with as a whole. So I do IT and I like it. So, god bless all you programmers out there doing things in the name of end users who know...well, nothing.

I'm a bit on a tangent but I hope something relevant can be salvaged as I seem to fit the age group not represented in these comments.

Outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter anyways.. more companies are going to other countries to hire IT workers.

Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[presidenteloco]

I'm noticing a lot of supposed comp sci bsc degree holders who are very superficial in their knowledge of, for example, basic object-oriented concepts. They seem to be parroting back certain terms like polymorphism, encapsulation etc without really understanding what they are or why the might be important.
Also, everyone says "java" skills, j2ee etc but has no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean.

All this bespeaks cookie-cutter exam-passing types of knowledge and a seeming lack of i-depth experience with the problems and issues encountered when doing serious system creation with software.
 

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[musikit]

I got to say... 10 years of programming experience in C/C++/Obj-C/Obj-C++, Java, and Fortran with MS SQLServer, MySQL, Postgres, Informix, and Oracle I had never heard or used this term. I had to google it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mismatch

I guess I would have failed your interview question as well.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ceoyoyo]

"has no idea what, for example, the term 'object-relational impedance mismatch' might mean."

I have to say, having gone through a real CS program (quite a while ago now) that covered everything from assembler to algorithm analysis and theoretical proofs, "object-relational impedance mismatch" set off the buzzword warnings.

A Google search confirmed my impression. The problem it describes is (sort of) real, but the term is idiotic. The kind of thing they'd put on one of these newfangled multiple guess CS exams.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

that's because comp sci isn't about creating software systems. that would be the "software engineering" major.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I don't know what that "object-relational impedance mismatch" thing means. It sounds like garbage. If I was asked a question about it, I would tell the interviewer that it is the stupidest question I've ever heard. I have 10 years of experience in OOP and so I know a fair bit about it. You need to take a step back and look for skills rather than jargon.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[presidenteloco]

Actually, in the interview, I gave the candidate the choice of explaining what one of the following terms meant, roughly:

"Object-relational impedance mismatch"

"Polymorphic collection"

And it was 0/2 pretty much across the board.

I think what we have here are people who know how to drive cars, but don't know how to build cars.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[presidenteloco]

Yeah, well back in my comp sci degree days, we hewed software systems out of stacks of punch cards with our bare hands.

Just kidding. I missed that by maybe five years.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody with sense knows that there's a million questions that can be asked in this technical field that can stump the brightest of candidates. Looking for stumpers is your horrible mistake, it's not about what YOU happened to google before the interview.. but I bet it makes you warm and fuzzy.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[barjam]

Not knowing the term is arguably forgivable but not knowing anything about that problem domain is not. If the job was writing database apps and you were not able to describe the issue and discuss strategies in which you dealt with the issue on past projects I would not hire you.

On the majority of the sytems I have worked
on the layer dealing with this issue ends up being a large portion of the line count of the app.

On my previous contract the app (I did not write it) was 1 million lines of code of which 850,000 was tied up in the "orm" layer. This was due to the client picking a relatively popular orm generator library (nettiers).

So being ignorant of this problem domain can be quite a problem.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[Daniel Dvorkin]

no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean

The proper answer to the question "What is object-relational impedance mismatch?" is "It's an old bug in versions of Buzzword prior to 3.6. But they fixed it with a new release of the PHBspeak library back in ... oh, 2006 or so."

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ron-l-j]

Why not give your applicants a problem to solve ? As a prerequisite before the interview.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[keeboo]

Also, everyone says "java" skills, j2ee etc but has no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean.

For a moment I though you were joking mixing expressions from different fields.
I remember asking the trainees (studying electronic engineering, mind you) for a flux capacitor and things like that in the past.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[firstnevyn]

They can be useful if you make it more open ended and in determining someones thought processes for problem solving. ie given a problem you've got little hope of having an established answer for what would you do? Using google is often the right answer. (unless you're applying at a competing search company)

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[TheRaven64]

You used Objective-C and C++ and all of those databases, but never used Enterprise Object Framework or Gemstone, or their open source equivalents? Did you even use CoreData once for a toy application? If so, you should have come across the term. If not, then I doubt that your experience is as great as you imply.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[TheRaven64]

You did a theoretical Computer Science degree, and it didn't cover the relative expressiveness of object databases and relational databases, nor the problems involved in attempting to define an isomorphism between the two models?

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[wmbetts]

heathen!

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[jim_v2000]

(Computer science doesn't necessarily cover rdbms in depth.)

That said, it's entirely possible to learn how to build a SQL database + web application on the job, like I have, and be able to make it work well, but have no idea what the official lingo is for much of the process.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[jim_v2000]

It doesn't help that arrogant employers refuse to entertain the idea that their employees may need to learn a few things on the job.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[TheRaven64]

It doesn't cover RDBMS in detail, but it should at least cover Codd's relational model, and you can't really explain that without putting it in context and comparing it to hierarchical, network, and object oriented models. If you haven't covered these, then you've missed a huge chunk of computer science.

If you understand object and relational data stores then the only thing that is missing is to know what the term 'impedance mismatch' means in this context. It's pretty widely used in computing, including in computer science journals, to describe the case when two abstractions are not quite compatible. You might not have covered this in a computer science degree, but you'll have seen it if you've read a few journal articles in the field.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ceoyoyo]

We didn't use terms like "object-relational impedance mismatch."

I guess we tried to use electrical engineering terms in electrical engineering and not in computer science. Interfacing an object-oriented programming model to a relational database is an example of a pretty standard translation problem between systems (or languages, or any number of other things) that crops up all the time in CS.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[tarlss]

Dude, WTF?

Maybe here's the problem.
SPEAK ENGLISH!

Instead of using buzzwordalicious phrases like "Object-Relational Impedence Mismatch!"

You should probably say "Problems that crop up due to trying to translate RDBMS into Object Oriented Models"

This is exactly what I'm doing now. I recalled your term because it's basically compiler-speak. I bet people started using that because that was just an error message that your programs barfed out from time to time.

I think most people haven't heard these words because honestly, they're pretty much cumbersome and unpronounceable. I couldn't say that to...well, any other human being with a straight face and expect him to know what the hell I was talking about.

It's pretty much the symptomatic problem of trying to take a complex idea and boiling it down to a set of meaning words. I mean, come on, people are NOT HASHMAPS!

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[shutdown -p now]

The point is that, if someone has actual experience in this area that is worth something, he should probably recognize the term, because - like it or not - it's a very widely used one.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ceoyoyo]

I think you replied to the wrong post. You've made my exact point with a little more emphasis though.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ceoyoyo]

Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we weren't talking about experience but about knowledge of the subject. If I were teaching that particular subject (as I was taught it), or interviewing a potential employee, I wouldn't care a bit about whether the student/applicant knew that stupid term or not. What I care about is whether he or she knows what the problem is and what to do about it.

Here's an example of the way the test (or interview) used to go:

"Describe some common problems constructing an object oriented interface for data stored in a relational database, and general strategies for solving each problem."

Now:

Object-relational impedance mismatch is:

a) the cognitive dissonance that occurs when your mother makes you take out the garbage
b) the complex-valued equivalent of electrical resistance
c) an almost correct answer
d) the correct answer"

Most of my CS profs probably would have just given a simple database schema and told us to write an OO interface for it. If you run into trouble, solve it. Who cares what you call that particular sticky patch.

See the difference? Not knowing the term has no bearing on whether the student or applicant actually has useful knowledge. In particular, students may well not be taught the latest buzz words making the rounds in industry.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[musikit]

the Obj-C and C++ portions of the code typically didn't have access to the database as it was usually client/server programming with C/C++/Java/Obj-C on the client communicating to a PHP/Python or rarely a C++ back end in charge of the business logic. And no i never came across the projects you reference.

I think my point is not everyone can know everything. You shouldn't be testing if someone got exposed to a keyword or a project. you should be testing weather someone has the ability to understand and use a concept.

bad analogy time...not all carpenters have used stucko, but can they understand how to use it?

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[shutdown -p now]

I disagree that not "knowing the talk" is not a deficiency. It is, because you will have more trouble communicating with your colleagues. And there is a big difference between this month's buzzwords, and well-established terms. I hope you won't argue that someone who claims to know OO well should at least also know the word "polymorphism", for example, and its meaning in this particular context?

Still, actual problem solving is definitely more important. A man who doesn't know what a linked list is, but can come up with one if he needs it for a particular task, is more valuable than the one who knows what it is, but can't even write a function to insert an element.

In practice, though, it often correlates. People who are good at problem solving are usually also passionate about their job to some extent, and, consequently, they know the lingo. You don't even have to ask for it, specifically - they'll whip it out themselves when they tell you about all the awesome things they've seen and done.

And, yeah, exceptions are there. But they aren't common. The other way around - knows the lingo, but can't do shit - is depressingly common, though.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[randyleepublic]

The problem is very real. The term "impedance mis-match" is only accurate in a pretty loosely analogous manner, however I can't come up with anything better. Maybe, MAYBE, telerik has a solution, but I haven't tried it yet. The last two I tried, devExpress, and Cache, were a joke, although Cache could be god's gift if those numbnuts had any clue how to provide, not just a database, but the development tools to go with it. They don't.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[ceoyoyo]

I didn't say knowing the jargon isn't a gap in knowledge. Not knowing the buzz words (and the example sure sounds like a buzz word rather than a useful term - you can probably explain the problem in plain language using fewer syllables) is probably an asset though.

Also, not knowing the jargon, or all of the jargon, is very different from not having the actual knowledge. The former can be fixed more or less by osmosis in a short period of time. The latter might takes years of experience or good education to remedy.

Re:Job applicants have cookie-cutter knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

"Impedance Mismatch" is not a newfangled term. Database researchers borrowed it from electrical engineering in the 1980s. At that time, it referred to the awkwardness of interfacing third-generation procedural languages and relational DBMSs. Object-oriented languages and their class libraries have actually alleviated the problem mightily.
--Jim Gawn
--jimgawn@verizon.net

We revamped our grad IT program to require coding

[trygstad]

In the graduate program in Information Technology that I work with, we recently revamped the degree to make coding mandatory. Incoming grad students must pass a programming placement exam or complete an intermediate level (not beginning!) software development class, currently in Java or C++. We found we had a lot of students moving to IT with undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering who had seriously deficient coding skills so they were not able to make an adequate contribution in system and network security and voice over IP course projects.

We've always had a fairly robust coding and scripting requirement for our undergrads, who have to do introductory and intermediate Java, introductory C++, UNIX/Linux shell scripting in BASH or Perl, and Javascript. In the undergraduate program we cover all of the core elements of the Information Technology profession as defined by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society:
IT Fundamentals
Programming
Human Computer Interaction
Databases
Networking
Websystems
Information Assurance and Security
Professionalism

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[Xacid]

Funny thing is that I work with a guy who has been with us for about 2 years supporting our systems and still can't pass his network+...

While I mostly agree I do prefer to see someone with some sort of certs, even if it isn't a direct correlation of transferrable knowledge. What I do see out of it is someone not only willing to learn, but is capable of learning (as opposed to the guy I work with who can be a pain to show new things). It definitely shows you know a *basic* understanding of the information in many aspects.

I met another guy who got his degree from one of these supposed technical schools and didn't know how to navigate any of the basic tools in win (traceroute, ping, nbtstat, etc) let alone *nix, but thinks he's the king of networking.

The best people I've met are those with straight up work experience and a couple of certs here and there.

Whats the best.

[Murdoch5]

The MSCE shows you know how Microsoft works and that means nothing. Getting all the Cisco level cert's means you know how to read and pass a test and that means nothing. The best IT professionals teach themselves and come up with solutions that aren't in a textbook or in a slideshow. The best IT schooling is the one your give your self.

I've been taught by people with Masters in the IT field who know less then high school students and I've worked with people off the boat who put Gates and Linus to shame. In IT you know it or you don't and the best way to show it is to make a name for yourself.

The ability to keep learning.

[khasim]

If degrees aren't covering what needs to be taught, what ARE the main objectives that would produce the best functioning graduates?

You'll see it all over. People with "20 years" of "experience" who really have 1 year of experience 20 times over.

Next up would be the ability (and desire) to dig to FIND problems. Not just "it compiles" or "it doesn't crash".

After that would be the ability to think in pluralities. Anyone can handle a single system with a single purpose used by a single user. Can you scale to multiple servers? Multiple users? With multiple services?

And finally, maintenance. Design your design ... to make maintenance easy. Implement your design ... to make maintenance easy. Design and implementation are fun. Maintenance is a bitch. Now people are using it and it is "business critical" and you only have a maintenance window of 1 hour at 11pm on Sunday.

Even if you are NOT perfect at all of the above ... at least be aware of them and WORKING to improve your abilities in them.

Should IT require an education ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Should IT require an education ??

If products and services are well designed, then it should be like reading time, driving a car, finding a book in a library, etc.

We have created an incredibly poorly designed infrastructure that requires a technician class knowledgeable in arcana to run it. Why cant we just make stuff that works ?

Thats not to say we don't need a *small* priesthood to make it work, but 99.99% of people shouldn't have to care.

How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer degrees have always been more of a red flag rather then an endorsement. Far more often then not someone with an actual degree got it because "programmers make a lot of money". Those with actual talent for the industry rarely bother wasting time and a great deal of money on a degree.

Computer people, regardless of specialty, need a talent for debugging far and above anything and everything else. If you can't investigate, research, and diagnose a problem then you shouldn't work in computing. From programmers and architects to system admins and managers, debugging is the #1 skill required. Absolutely nothing else matters whatsoever if that isn't there. Nothing. Zip.

And they just don't teach it in school.

Oddly, the only unifying aspect to good software people I've found is a strong background in music. Their field of degree, if any, hasn't been a fitness indicator of any real value. That isn't to say all musicians are good computer people, but (nearly) all good computer professionals are musicians.

Re:How is this news?

[keeboo]

but (nearly) all good computer professionals are musicians.

Then I'm doomed. Even my fart is off tune.

Re:How is this news?

[firstnevyn]

That's a facinating correlation. when I think about the team I'm in. the really good people do musical theatre or choirs. (including me ;) )

Human Nature

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always been amazed by the "baffle them with bull" types. They always rise. Look at our politicians. Talent appears to be a hindrance!

Re:Or you could get an... MCTS

[mcferguson]

Oops, MCSE does not really exist anymore. Microsoft's new certification lines are "MCTS" and "MCITP". And if those are a joke (the TS line is pretty easy -- ITP somewhat more challenging), then I'm sure the Linux certs, in whatever form they come, are equally useless or useful in determining your level of knowledge. Hell, even someone with 5+ years of "work experience" may be a complete joke... but you've got to go on SOMETHING, right?

What training is required for "Advice Line"?

[Animats]

The original article is almost devoid of facts. What training is required to speak for "Advice Line"?

It's not at all clear what training is required for IT today? The Cisco "Rack Test"? How to fix broken Windows systems? J2EE programming? Linux server administration?

CS is even tougher. Robotics? AI? Machine learning? Graphics? Digital logic? "Cloud" programming? There are too many narrow niches. Pick the wrong one and you're toast.

How about 'Operations' degrees?

[lcllam]

I believe the degrees that focus on technical skills and theory are not what the OP is commenting about. I've noticed there's a huge number of 'degrees' out there that are based on Operations, and not Engineering and Technical Skills. These typically have buzzwords in their titles and should be classified as such (Operations), and not confused with the 'pure' science and technical degrees.

In my country, the local universities churn out a number of dodgy-sounding 'degrees' such as Management Information Systems, Business Information Systems, etc. I actually have no idea what these are, but there's a preoccupation here with sitting in a desk in an office, versus doing the work. They sound 'managerial' and give the freshie a skewed viewpoint in that they expect to be leading teams of engineers and IT departments, all the members of which could probably talk them under the table in a technical conversation.

Seriously, I'm presently looking for great engineers to grow my practice, but everyone I talk to seems to want Google pay without Google technical skills. They want to be project managers and team leaders, yet confess they're 'not very technical' in the phone interview. They also have no answer to my follow up on how they expect to lead a team without understanding the work at hand. I've believed that great engineers manage themselves, with a good eye on the realities of the project and the customer interests. The 'project manager', if not having engineering background, is most likely redundant. No, please don't give me the 'engineers don't have time to manage themselves'.

My question to everyone is this: At what point did the engineers allow themselves to become the grunts of the industry?

Re:How about 'Operations' degrees?

[Hyppy]

In my country, the local universities churn out a number of dodgy-sounding 'degrees' such as Management Information Systems, Business Information Systems, etc. I actually have no idea what these are, but there's a preoccupation here with sitting in a desk in an office, versus doing the work.

Not dodgy at all, they're just not your normal CS-type degrees. Those are fairly geared towards ERP software, which requires a fairly decent knowledge of basic systems administration and DBA skills in addition to a full undergrad business education. If you've ever worked with SAP/Peoplesoft/etc, you'd have an appreciation for the guys that have to deal with that stuff.

Re:How about 'Operations' degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I've worked with SAP/Peoplesoft before. This is at most one or two courses in CS.

You can't have it both ways...

[pankajmay]

A lot of you are complaining about the lack of coding skills, as well as lack of theoretical knowledge.
The sad part is that more often than not excellent coders are not the best theorists -- some top coders get so involved with a particular language or technology, that they are effectively locked into it and vice-versa.

As mentioned earlier in one of the replies to this post -- IT and CS seem to be two siblings with diverging goals.

There are very few people who are both excellent coders as well as well-versed with theory and reality behind.
The truth of the matter is that these people have either worked very hard or have accumulated this expertise over long years of experience. So, to be honest -- you cannot really expect an AVERAGE fresh BS graduate to be highly honed in both.

I don't think many recruiters come with reasonable expectations themselves. (In interest of fairness - I am a masters student in CS, and I am from India)
Many come in ready to find someone who is tailor-made all-in-one panacea for their jobs.

Sure there are some students out there who feel entitled, but there are definitely people out there who genuinely intend to learn, fit in, and improve themselves.

May be the change needs to be mutual, not just on the colleges' end, but Recruiters and Companies also need to realize that there are distinct categories of CS graduates out there. If the job requires someone with both skills and you are having a hard time finding one person for it - then may be you need to split the job into theory-centric and code-centric part. Hire the best theorist out there and couple him/her with the best coder. Recruit them in such a way that they work together well -- and pair them for the tasks.

I am aware that many recruiters become jaded and form prejudices against classes of candidates (you can see many examples of that above) -- and may be there is some truth to that, but has it really been looked upon objectively?

Intro Java

[Anonymous Coward]

This is code written by another in my class emailed to me asking for help. Yes I'm not bothering with the formatting.

import java.util.Scanner; // program uses class Scanner public class Addressbook { public static void main( String args[] ){ int counter = 0; while (counter 5){ System.out.println (counter); counter+= } } { Scanner mil = new Scanner (System.in); System.out.println ("Enter your name: "); String name, addr, donation; name = mil.nextLine(); System.out.println ("Enter your address, city, state and zipcode: "); addr = mil.nextLine(); { System.out.print( "Enter first integer: " ); // prompt Scanner input = new Scanner( System.in ); int number1; // first number to add int number2; // second number to add int sum; // donation sum of number1 and number2 System.out.print( "Enter first donation: " ); // prompt number1 = input.nextInt(); // read first number from user System.out.print( "Enter second donation: " ); // prompt number2 = input.nextInt(); // read second number from user sum = number1 + number2; // add numbers System.out.printf( "Sum is $%d\n", sum ); } } // end method main } // end class Addressbook

What I find even scarier...

[sarkeizen]

Is not the state of undergrads, sure I'm shocked when I come across one who can't write a simple join in SQL or write the proverbial 'fizzbuzz' program but from the Co-Op students I interviewed most recently the majority seemed competent. I do notice a lack of understanding of theory and hardware. I'm always amazed how these grads know squat about how computers actually work - it reminds me more of mainframe programmers who because of the degree of separation from the actual machine didn't have the slightest idea how their programs actually ran. With regard to theory I've often given applicants the opportunity to describe to me how they would approach implementing a function that is self-referential. The answer everyone gave: Recursion. From there I had to kind of remind them that such a program would recurse infinitely. Even the smartest person I interviewed who tried to go out of their way to convince me that they would write the function "tail recursive" so recursion wouldn't cause the program to fail. Missed the idea that an infinitely recursing program tail-or-non would produce no output. However much of that is excusable as long as this is an entry level job...

What I find insane is the number of people with post-graduate degrees - yes Masters and even PhD's in CS who are just as bad. Mind you some of these people have their undergraduate degree in a completely different discipline e.g. Art. Which is pretty rare in any other science.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[Anonymous Coward]

With regard to theory I've often given applicants the opportunity to describe to me how they would approach implementing a function that is self-referential. The answer everyone gave: Recursion. From there I had to kind of remind them that such a program would recurse infinitely.

function factorial(argument)
    if (argument eq 0) return 1
    return argument * factorial(argument - 1)
end_function

print factorial(0) => 1
print factorial(1) => 1
print factorial(2) => 2
print factorial(3) => 6

Did I miss something in your statement that makes the example invalid?

Re:What I find even scarier...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think someone needs to go back to school. A self-referential function is a recursive function. Such functions must eventually exit or memory will be exhausted. All functions can create output.

Tell me your name again, so I can be sure not to hire you.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[savanik]

I do notice a lack of understanding of theory and hardware. I'm always amazed how these grads know squat about how computers actually work

I graduated about ten years ago from my college with a BA in Computer Science the knowledge to design, from transistors, a minimal-instruction processor, program it in assembly, and design a high-level language for it, in that assembly. I also never learned to code from a library, work with a modern language, or function in a team.

To date, I have used my knowledge from my degree precisely twice - once to take an overly-long Excel IF(IF(IF... statement and reduce it via a binary tree because Excel limited you to 7 nested IF statements, and the other time ... I forget exactly what, but it was about as earth-shatteringly important. My current job consists largely of doing (or generating) paperwork to prove to our clients that my company is complying with its contractual obligations, with the occasional system administration bit thrown in. Usually to generate more paperwork.

The reason CS students aren't learning what companies need is because the schools aren't teaching it. The most valuable thing you take away from the university is proof that you'll put up with four years of crap for an award you can hang on your wall.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[llamapater]

i like comp sci problems but i don't formally study it so I'm not sure i have the definition of self-referential function right but i wanna try it I'd do a factorial like this factorial (unsigned int arg) //i don't wanna make a negative number check { if arg == (0 || 1) return 1 int output while (arg > 1) { int cache = arg -1 output = arg*(cache) arg = cache } return output } (i am an IT undergraduate who only knows some java don't hurt me >.> ) oh and here's why that other function wouldn't work since he didn't explain function factorial(argument) if (argument eq 0) return 1 return argument * factorial(argument - 1) end_function lets use 2 because it's short 2 isn't 0 alrighty so arg-1 is 1 1 isn't 0 alrighty 1-1 is 0 oh we've got a zero lets pass back a 1 1 isn't 0 alrighty 1-1 is 0 oh we've got a 0 lets pass back a 1 ect

Re:What I find even scarier...

[llamapater]

oo oops i didn't pay attention to preview and didn't notice it didn't do the new line right >.> well that's unreadable

Re:What I find even scarier...

[Anonymous Coward]

With regard to theory I've often given applicants the opportunity to describe to me how they would approach implementing a function that is self-referential. The answer everyone gave: Recursion. From there I had to kind of remind them that such a program would recurse infinitely. Even the smartest person I interviewed who tried to go out of their way to convince me that they would write the function "tail recursive" so recursion wouldn't cause the program to fail. Missed the idea that an infinitely recursing program tail-or-non would produce no output. However much of that is excusable as long as this is an entry level job...

Since the question you asked is to How to approach implementing a function that is self-referential.

Before anything, I would actually start by saying that any self-referential function has to be used in a scenario where the problem can be successively sub-divided into smaller equivalent problems (for example: parsing a tree).

The first thing you will need for such a thing then is to decide what the stopping point will be. In other words, what is the base/trivial case? This is the sub-problem who solution you know trivially, so you know that your self-reference calling will halt somewhere.

Now the next thing would be to decide the work that needs to be done to reduce a super-set of the problem to a sub-set equivalent problem. (This would be the work done in the body of the self-referential function)

Then the next thing to consider is how will the self-referential function aggregate its intended output data. Note the function may or may not aggregate its data according to its use. (This will be the operation that will place the call to the function with a subset of problem, in context of operators and operands.) (For example: Computing sum of all elements in a tree.)

Finally, after the work done in the function, you will have reduced the problem to its sub-set. Now comes the syntactic sugar of placing the call to itself with the subset of data to be processed.
---

I hope that is an accurate analysis you are looking for.

The problem is not enough of them READ classic literature in Computer Science, and they do not work on functional languages like LISP and Prolog.

I am a masters student in CS.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[sarkeizen]

Just some ambiguity in the term. Sure a factorial can be implemented using recursion but in doing so you need to specify a termination case.

I usually ask candidates to evaluate something like this: f(x) = 1/(1+f(x))

Here we have no explicit termination case. Which is a much more interesting problem to solve as it forces the candidate to work out solutions like various approximations or implicit termination cases or even just re-factoring the whole problem.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[sarkeizen]

Wow, that's pretty impressive. If that had come up in an interview I'd be on the floor.

Usually (as I mention above) I've given a specific problem i.e. f(x) = 1/(1+f(x)) but what you describe is a great description of solving the general case. The above function has a shortcut too as I'm sure you will notice.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[sarkeizen]

I would put it another way...

Recursion is an implementation technique for self-referential functions. Back to my now thrice mentioned example: f(x) = 1/(1+f(x))

This is a self-referential function but recursion can only implement functions of this form as estimations. You could make some assumptions about implicit exit conditions like the precision of your variables but I could always restate and specify arbitrary precision.

The point of the exercise it go get people to *think* about a problem. You can't just write this with recursion since no exit condition is specified. So then you need to talk about estimations - and what degree of accuracy is adequate or try to re-think the problem as a whole.

I don't think I need worry about applying for a position under you any time soon. You on the other hand....

Re:What I find even scarier...

[TheRaven64]

While most of what you say is very well reasoned, one minor nitpick:

functional languages like LISP and Prolog

Neither of these is a functional language. Prolog is a predicate logic language; it does not include functions, and so can not be a functional language. Lisp is the ultimate multi-paradigm language, capable of supporting procedural, functional, object oriented, and various other programming styles. Haskell and Ocaml are examples of functional languages, Lisp and Prolog are not.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[Paiev]

f(x) = -1/2 +/- sqrt(5)/2

Am I missing something here? This looks like a sixth grade algebra problem.

Re:What I find even scarier...

[sarkeizen]

No you're not missing anything - most technical questions given in interviews are not very hard. The reason is the same as to why we ask for things like a fizzbuzz program rather than ask people to write a window manager. We're trying to distill some information about problem-solving and technical expertise in a limited amount of time. It would be trivial of course to create a problem that you couldn't do without the aid of Wolfram-Alpha. :-) Here would be my list of acceptable answers and my analysis of them as an interviewer:

i) You could solve it the way you have done. This hints at a persons ability to a step back and refactor the problem into a more easily solved form. This was the rarest case in my last group of co-ops. Only one out of eleven interviewed in my last round even suggested that there was a "math" answer that could "work out nicely".

ii) Write an approximation function with an appropriate error function. This shows a grasp - not only of math but that real-life problems often have inexact solutions. Knowing how to write an error function is good because it recognizes that in making an inexact solution it's good to know just how inexact you are being.

iii) Some kind of "brute force" where you iterate a finite number of times.

After they answer I say "Good, what's another way of solving this" and then "What are the relative merits of each?", "Can you give me general situations where you might use the same approaches you used in this problem"...

and so on...

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[Darinbob]

MS cert tests are worse, they measure rote memorization of marketing material.

Re:Or you could get an... MCTS

[Bert64]

Vendor certs are typically worthless and extremely easy... Microsoft, Cisco, RedHat etc are not educational institutions. The primary goals of their certifications are not to educate people, they are designed to sell more products... The more people "certified" to use your products out there, the more likely companies are to buy your products.

Re:Or you could get an... MCTS

[ppanon]

Actually the RHCE involves a practical exam where the boot configuration of a system is buggered up in a number of ways and you have to fix it within a time period. It's not particularly difficult to fix but it does involve investigating a problem to identify the causes and resolving them. i.e. you actually have to understand a bit about the boot sequence and do more than just rote memorization and regurgitation of a sequence of answers to a series of questions (which is how you get certified people with no understanding of the subject matter) . They were probably inspired by the well established and respected advanced Cisco exam that also includes a practical test.

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[ElderKorean]

...

I met another guy who got his degree from one of these supposed technical schools and didn't know how to navigate any of the basic tools in win (traceroute, ping, nbtstat, etc) let alone *nix, but thinks he's the king of networking.

...

We had one guy start with us to do some industry volunteer work - just troubleshooting simple problems.

He was studying a computer networks course and was 6 months into that.

I had to show him how to get to a DOS prompt in Windows XP... Then he asked me what ping did?

He apparently later decided that computers weren't for him.

Re:Or you could get an... MCTS

[xQx]

Good point.

I've been reluctant to get an MCSE or CCNA because of the number of 'Multiple Choice Selection Experts' and paper CCNA's I've met.

Nice to see Microsoft have gone and changed the initials to obsolete the qualifications that everyone holds (2008 MCSE is now MCITP to stop NT4 MCSE's from getting any value from their letters in the future) ... That said, I've never met a CCIE who I thought didn't absolutely know their shit.

I've met a CCIE or two who have all the social skills of a /. stereotype, but when it comes to networking, I rate it higher than a Ph.D.

Re:Or you could get an... MCTS

[Anonymous Coward]

Most CCIEs were CCNA's at one point :)

As they say 'Gotta learn to crawl before you can walk.'

Re:Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job

[hmmm]

Have we become part of a Turing test?

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[SCHecklerX]

The RHCT and RHCE tests beg to differ.

Teamwork

[morgauxo]

"And while some institutions are emphasizing the value of teamwork in their curricula"

I think my university could have emphasized teamwork more. I came out with the ability to code whatever was needed in a few languages or to pick up new ones fairly quickly but working on a project with others was a definite gap in my abilities. I only had one project where I had ever done that and it was a very negative and lopsided experience. Understanding another person's code and adjusting between different styles when coming into existing projects with existing teams is much harder imho than just completing some programming exercise from scratch and alone. I am much better at this now but still find myself struggling in that area daily.

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[Hyppy]

You're lucky. I've yet to meet a helpdesk guy who would be able to comprehend that "255.255.255.0" is not the universal subnet mask. At least they're better than the majority of IT-related management.

Re:Time to drop the need BS to get a low level job

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have to agree with him. A BS means nothing these days, it just means you're not a complete idiot and you can follow instructions. It doesn't show that you can solve and apply your knowledge to a problem...and that is what the field is about. All a BS shows is you know how to memmorize things. Having a real world project under you belt is different by just about every measure.

A lot of colleges know this so they decide to force the students to go through a final course that requires you to build a project for a client. The problem is, just like with every other team coding project...one person does all the coding while the others just write up the documentation. That isn't how it works in the real world and that's what developers are expecting getting out of college that they'll jump into a job that allows them to delegate all their work to someone else.

The ONLY way to ensure someone has the knowledge that they claim to is to have repeated real world experience on their resume. Projects, open source projects, clients with few people working on the project. If a team of 5 people wrote a web interface using Drupal...you can bet only 1 of them barely understands anything and the rest are just complete idiots.

Let's face it...this isn't an easy field to gage and colleges are making it far harder by making classes easy on the students. You can't even hire an "A" college grad and expect an "A" coder. A BS is almost as meaningless in the real world as a certificate. The only problem is we have to many middle management types that got an MBA in the field that knew a little about computers hiring on developers that have no clue cause hey they have a BS right? The facts are simply a BS doesn't mean jack shit like it does in other fields. An A student is not an A coder.

It's not the University it is the student

[cowdung]

I hear a lot of complaints about Universities here. But the original article talks about a student that worked her way through college relying on her classmates to do all her work. The reality is that you can fool just about any system and you can always be mediocre. This is not necessarily the fault of the school, but of the student herself!!

Other people here complain that new grads don't know how a debugger works or what the object relational impedence mismatch is.. but when I think about it I think most of these terms are what people learn when reading stuff on the internet or from books. Not necessarily from classes. When I went to school, there wasn't much web programming going on yet.. so it is impossible for the University to have taught me about such things. But today I know because I continue to read.

So I wouldn't base a hiring decision of a junior person on whether they know or don't know a fixed set of skills, but rather try to gauge what skills they HAVE successfully acquired and whether they have the capacity to learn.

For example, many people may know how to join tables together like this: select * from t1, t2 where t1.id = t2.id
But not like this: select * from t1 inner join t2 on t1.id = t2.id

If the person is applying to be a college professor this may be a show stopper.. but as a programmer I can just show him the new way and in 5 mins he should be able to pick it up.

Different people get different skills out of college. It is important that they show they have some skills and that they can learn. But to expect them to know that it is good to step through your code with a debugger (a la Steve McGuire) or to have experience in estimating code is a bit unreasonable because College assignments rarely have time to emphasize such aspects of professional life.

A junior programmer is someone you are hiring as an apprentice! But a CS degree proves to be invaluable over time because the person as she gains experience starts correlating what she learned w/the real world work and can go over it again and become a better developer over time. Also, a CS graduate can often look at a paper and learn something new (the wonders of skip lists, the marvels or randomized binary trees, random cache eviction) and understand the theoretical pros and cons better than someone that doesn't have those skills.

Re:It's not the University it is the student

[JustNiz]

I've seen this first-hand. My CS degree course (class of 1993, University of Reading, England) had about 25 guys and 3 girls. It was amazing to see how all 3 girls shamelessly manipulated the nerdy guys into doing all their assignments for them just by sitting on their laps and other lame sexual innuendo.

For the entire course, I don't think any of the girls did much if any of their own assignments. Consequently they never learnt anything about software development or how computers actually worked. They all missed most lectures, yet somehow they always got reasonably high marks on coursework, (which inevitably looked just like the work also being handed in by the nerds they were currently abusing).

It was refreshing to see them fail badly in the final exams as for the first time they couldn't rely on someone else, but they still had enough good coursework scores to graduate with degrees that would lead a potential employer to incorrectly think they knew anything about computers. I was very disappointed that the uni didn't seem able to detect and weed out such people that think sex and plagiarism would get them a CS degree rather than their own hard work. I think a large part of the problem was that the course prof was a woman with a large emphasis on positive discrimination to get more women (even incompetent ones) into computing.

I still feel the bias and failure of the supposedly good university I attended devalues my own degree that I had to really work hard for.

Isn't IT all being offshored/inshored anyway?

[walterbyrd]

Seems to me that US employers have shown a strong preference for foreign workers. Less than 25% of people who work at IBM were born in the USA, and Bill Gates testifies before the US congress, all the time, saying the US needs to raise H1B caps.

Why bother with any kind of tech degree, when you will just have your job offshored anyway. Either that or you will be training your H1B replacement.

Re:Isn't IT all being offshored/inshored anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

May be it is because of generations of American kids growing up with this spoon-fed fear of Math.

The fear of math is so pervasive here that all kinds of negative social connotations are associated with it (geek, nerd and the associated stereotypes)

And I have news for you - CS is Math.

Re:Isn't IT all being offshored/inshored anyway?

[walterbyrd]

I guess that's why the US has done so poorly in technology, while the "best and brightest" from India do so well?

Care to compare Nobel prizes? It's my understanding that there are single high-schools in the US that have produced more Nobel than the entire nation of India. This in spite of the fact that India has about four times the US population. Compare the number of Nobel prizes from Berkeley to the entire nation of India.

Care to compare major technological break-throughs? Man on the moon, heavier than air flight, nuclear power, etc? How about just major advances in computer technology?

Care to compare tech companies? US has: Apple, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, GE, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, HP, Intuit, Adobe, etc.

Care to compare universities like MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, etc?

Re:Isn't IT all being offshored/inshored anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... India also got its freedom from colonialism in 1947 -- almost 250 years later than US.

The US has had more time and resources to invest in its institutions.
Look I am not saying that this has been the case historically -- US is a great country and offers great opportunities -- but this recent trend is what is leading for companies to hire more H1B people.

India has 4 times the population of US and also historically a population that has been wretchedly poor. The reason why India hasn't overtaken US yet is exactly that reason - population. It bogs down any achievement by a huge denominator.

But it doesn't mean that people in India are any less intelligent than US. Hell - they prefer to come to US because the opportunities for them to develop their innate talents are aptly rewarded in US unlike India where the immense competition for limited resources (it is also 7 times smaller than US in size) -- diverts any intellectual pursuit towards a fight for resources for survival.

So scale back on that rhetoric will you? And oh by the way -- sure you have MIT, Berkley and Stanford -- but lets look at the top faculties in these institutions... You will find many Indians and Chinese there.

Do not fear these people -- they are equally a part of America and many of them have consciously chosen to swear allegiance to US. They pay taxes, work hard, and succeed.

So may be you need to look at your own lineage - realize that you are no different from them - your ancestors came here not too long ago too, and maybe work hard to compete, instead of complaining like a sore loser.

Re:Isn't IT all being offshored/inshored anyway?

[luis_a_espinal]

Seems to me that US employers have shown a strong preference for foreign workers. Less than 25% of people who work at IBM were born in the USA, and Bill Gates testifies before the US congress, all the time, saying the US needs to raise H1B caps.

Yeah, and most of those work in the US. I'm sorry but seeing an engineer from India working in the US is not offshoring. We see a lot of foreign-born engineers working here because there is a demand for them. We do not produce sufficient engineers here, and whether people like it or not, many of those produced here suck. To be fair the same is true with an overwhelming number of engineers in India (as many companies have badly found out when trying to offshore.)

Why bother with any kind of tech degree, when you will just have your job offshored anyway. Either that or you will be training your H1B replacement.

Only inexperienced fools believe that. We offshore call centers, we offshore *some* development and IT support so that we work around the clock. I've worked with plenty of offshore teams (good and bad) and with companies that offshore (good and bad). There is nothing, nothing, but nothing that suggest, even remotely suggest the entire engineering disciplines will be replaced by offshoring.

Seriously, rub a pair of neurons together and tell me, how the hell are hospitals, insurance companies, or the military going to offshore their IT and software development efforts and assets? And what about the small company that has its IT group of say, 10 people. This is the typical small setup which constitutes a big chunk of IT work. Do you think they can offshore? Are you capable of grasping the impossibility of it?

Yeah, there are companies that offshore entire projects unsupervised... and they get bitten in the ass. Common offshoring that works to the benefit of US and foreign companies is when 1) you have qualified team leads offshore guiding efforts locally, or 2) qualified leads that are LOCAL leading the effort offshore, or 3) a combination thereof.

If you are so afraid of offshoring, shit, specialize, get an advanced degree, prove your worth, constantly improve your skills, be versatile and adaptable.

Been hearing this shit about offshore replacing since, what, 95? Didn't happen. It ain't happening. It just doesn't work that way. This reminded me of the clueless morons who used to tell me that studying computer science was a bad idea because computers were going to write their own programs and crap... and that got that info from watching Tron or something.

Let me know if you believe in unicorns too!

What employers want

[walterbyrd]

What really matters is what employers want. This blog post will explain what I mean:

http://techtoil.org/doku.php?id=articles:news_and_commentary

Re:The basic problem with certification programs..

[RedHelix]

Leave certifications to CPR and Scuba Divers.
Let's not forget that vendor certification is a spectacularly profitable source of income. A 2-3 day vendor boot camp is comparable in cost to weeks of lectures, labs and homework assignments of a college course. That is of course fine, it is your money to spend. Where I take issue is where individuals start appending certifications to their Outlook and forum signatures like it's a goddamn PhD. I've shown MCSA's how to change the BIOS boot order and CCNA's how to burn a CD.

To me, certifications in how they apply to the individual shows that the rote memorization is there, but the passion is not.

NEWS FLASH!

[tarlss]

Crusty Old Guys think New Guys Can't Hack It.

This sort of thing crops up every once in a while on Slashdot about how stupid recent college grads are. I mean, can't we go back into the old days when the REAL Geniuses like Archimedes and Newton grokked physics WITHOUT electricity! Or Indoor plumbing!

Fact is that new people haven't been grinded through the mill of real life. Eventually the worthless programmers will get fired and go work at a diner in Jersey.

Quite frankly, I've never had to manually translate hexidecimals or manage memory, but I'm still doing a great job doing what my job entails, putting together web applications in Java.

Most often memory management and binary and other low-level skills come about because of the necessity to conserve memory/increase performance. That's fine when it comes to game programming HF stock trading or other performance intensive apps.

But different jobs require different things. If it's more about getting multiple user friendly views of data, and providing an infinitely mutable codebase for such UIs, then performance takes a backseat to easy-reading, maintainability and extensibility.

A lot of the questions people are amazed can't be answered on-the-fly in an interview are easily learned/picked up from Google. I initially had no idea what a variable scope was, than I googled it..and I was like..you mean..just plain scope, right? I'm not sure it's wise to base your interview questions on things that 10 minutes of googling will solve.

Rarely will it ever be a necessity for your PROGRAMMER to memorize things, as long as he is capable of taking whatever you ask, learning it in a short period of time, and coming back with a solution.

CS education

[Anonymous Coward]

( CS != IT )

Re:HR looks downtech schools that have more work d

[drsmithy]

They may not be able to build a shift register, but they could tell you how a netmask works or why spanning tree is important.

Then they probably won't be working on your helpdesk for long once the economy picks up.

And here sits little 'ol me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, here I am, no degree in anything, no certificates, and I make a great living providing IT services to small businesses self employed. I don't advertise, I don't even have a website (yet). I contract out to several HUGE IT service companies as a field tech, yup, you have heard of them, and I make more than most of their engineers do on the same projects.

When the economy tanked, my business shot through the roof. Two of the best years EVER.

So yup, the whole situation is really ironic. But I'm not complaining. :)