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In UK, Computer Science Graduates the Least Employable
Rogerborg writes "The BBC reports that in the UK, computer science graduates are now the least employable of students leaving with a degree, 17% of them being unable to find a job within six months of graduation. Unsurprisingly, medics, educators and lawyers do better, but even much mocked communications and creative arts graduates are finding work more easily."
Take showers before going out in public. Brush your teeth twice a day. Get a haircut. Shave. Trim your eyebrow.
Heh. That means I did the right choice by NOT choosing to start a computing degree this year. I'd rather keep myself to a hobbyist-linux level for now.
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work. It's the summer (the first one we've had in three years) and so I spend a lot of time sitting outside relaxing. Not sure why I'd want a job - I'd earn less, have to sit in an office, and have someone else telling me when I had to do work (instead of when I had to have done work by).
That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.
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So 83% are finding jobs within 6 months? That sounds suprisingly good if you ask me...Better than I would expect.
I hate statistics, they're so over and incorrectly used.
ilovegeorgebush
....would be a % of how many of those graduates actually understand anything about CS, or can apply it at all. My bet is that rather than CS grads having high unemployment, there is just a higher % of 'chaff' graduates that are just totally useless - which is likely considering CS is quite a bit more difficult to 'get' and apply than many other subjects
Economics. Sorry for being obvious but I guess it doesn't make economic sense in most cases repayng years of some of the most expensive (though not the worst...) education available and at the same time paying pretty high taxes, when they can find developers in Russia, India or Ukraine at a fraction of the cost. E
They were stupid enough to choose Computer Science for a degree, so it's not surprising they can't find jobs.
I'll summarise what was in my Computer Science degree course: mathematics. I would probably have ended up with a better grade if I never touched a computer during the course.
Well, congratulations of doing so well, but not everybody can be a high payed consultant, and if everyone was writing two books we'd be overrun by books and would have to hold book burning sessions. Be glad you've got a good set of brains and a good upbringing, but stop gloating.
When I left 8 years ago, most of the best grads were in sponsorship schemes with the likes of Nortel and Marconi - and as it turned out they all left with no job to go to.
Given the number of people who came out of these courses, and given the number of brilliant grads in my dept who had no job for months at that time, what hope have the 60% who scraped by?
Mutliply that by the huge rise in these courses available from UK unis and ex-polys today and it isnt a surprise that McDonald's has a continuous employment pool.
And the ridiculous thing is that I have been involved in trying to fill a backlog in recruitment for about a year and there are no candidates with decent experience in the market (it would seem). So its all about that first job still.
All the computer science uber-gods were mathematicians, physicists and engineers by training anyway.
People who start with math, physics because it's challenging often end up in computers because it's fun.
People who aim for C.S. often seem to because they felt there would be a well-paying job, perhaps? I still can't believe you can get a degree for writing code.
C.S. Lewis' Principle of First and Second Things applies.
Mark me as a troll if you like, it won't alter the grain of truth in this...
It may well be that CompSci grads have higher expectations and refuse to take the first thing offered to them. When you hear about the salaries talked about on /., HN and Reddit, who the hell wants to take a job for £15k working for Asda as a maintenance programmer?
Another aspect is: how many CompSci grads will initially attempt to start their own consultancy or work freelance as opposed to Creative Arts grads? And what percentage of them will be successful? It's impossible to draw too much from these statistics, because they assume that all graduates are equally suited to traditional employment, and that traditional employment is what they seek. With CompSci, where you can make a living as a freelancer without needing too many contacts or a huge reputation, it ain't necessarily so...
I am, technically, a partial CS-grad from a UK university - but I deliberately choose to do Mathematics as the "major" (not a term we use in the UK, but it explains it well enough) because the CS was so dire.
Look at some of my previous comments on the subject: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1679538&cid=32509558 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1679538&cid=32508448
CS degrees in the UK are pretty worthless. I understand the difference between a theoretical subject and a practical one but CS degrees (which should be theoretical and therefore nothing to do with actual computer work) are basically achieved by implementing A*, or a KMP-search, or Quicksort, or Minimax or some other rubbish. Usually in Java. Usually as a "team effort" for at least part of it (one year of an MSc at my old uni is entirely a team-based project). Usually by way of trial and error and having no real concept of what you're doing. I can teach a 15-year-old the same things and although they would struggle immensely with predicate logic and such things, that's because it wouldn't take them 3-4 exclusive years to learn those things.
If you're lucky, the uni students can program in BASIC or Java or Python before they join the course. Some haven't even *touched* a computer before. God help you trying to get them to learn a language they aren't already familiar with. The Compilers and Interpreters course that was part of my degree lost 90% of its students in the first three weeks because it was all theoretical, based on logic, grammar, etc. And that was 10 years ago and, from everything I've seen and heard from PhD students and the like, the situation has worsened in almost all British degrees. A third-year biology student asking a post-grad where the neck is (I shit you not - not a communication failure, they spoke English, understood the word but didn't know where the neck "began and ended"). A CS grad asking what a loop invariant is. MSc's implementing Minimax on the game of draughts (checkers) in Java for a third-year project.
The course content is a waste of time. The only thing a degree measures is whether you can sit in a room for three-four years and learn what is told to you. That does *not* coincide with knowing your subject or being able to do anything practical with it. This is why the degrees, the MCSE's, the A+, the CCNA, mean NOTHING. I only work for places that have already realised this, and specifically hire on *ability*. That doesn't mean I can only do the practical stuff, I know the theory and can apply it and can bore people to death if they get me onto graph theory or coding theory without even trying. Try explaining what spanning-tree algorithms do and why they can be used to avoid network loops... most CS grads can't once they have left their graph theory courses. But CS-grads not only come out with no useful work skills, they come out with zero understanding of the underlying theory either.
I'm not sure exactly what schools are meant by 'creative arts' but in the Netherlands - and I bet in most of the Western world - art school students with a degree are have a lot of trouble finding a job at all in arts. So 83% is a fantastic score, specially considering the economic being unstable etc.
I can tell you, there are two types of people on the course. Those who were expecting an easy degree and spend their time just getting through, and those who want to do Computer Science who do better.
These stats mean nothing unless you take into account grades.
"but even much mocked communications and creative arts graduates are finding work more easily"
In realted news, mcdonalds hasnt had trouble filling job vacancies
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
The fact that they only mention "jobs" without distinction for what job level or type, and can include arts and communication skills majors in the same statistics make me think it might be a more mundane aspect to it than "CS graduates are less employable."
More likely, some 17% of CS graduates are holding out for some programming job or higher, whereas an arts or women's studies graduate quickly comes to terms with getting a job as a receptionist or even a McDonald's job. It's not hard to notice that there are very few jobs as, say, an anthropologist studying the natives on some fabulous vacation island, or as some deluxe lobbyist for women's equality in Washington. And even if one still clings to that delusion in the long run, it's pretty obvious that another source of income will be needed until such a job becomes available.
Basically in fact a lot of the CS graduates are simply competing for a very specific slice of the employment market, with a much smaller pool of jobs. And most likely are actually _more_ employable on that slice, and no less employable than an arts or anthropology graduate in the kind of McDonald's jobs most of those will get.
And that is also not taking into account that a lot of CS and EE graduates actually have an even narrower slice in mind. E.g., most want a job making computer games, and precious few want one of those boring jobs that involve databases and java and writing unit tests. Or the elder gods forbid, maintaining a cobol program on some mainframe. Not only that has driven down wages in the games industry, but there still simply aren't half as many jobs as people who want them. A lot will spend those 6 months or a large part thereof, still hoping that Blizzard or Epic or Id will hire them, and inflate that unemployment number.
And then there are those who think they're so smart, that anything short of directly starting as senior architect and/or a 6 figure starting wage, is waay below them and in fact outright demeaning. 'Cause, you know, their mommy always told them they're so smart, and besides they wrote the most compact bubble-sort in college, _and_ had a submission to the obfuscated C contest too. So they know all about how your programs should be made, obviously. And they even used "emerge" to compile a Gentoo distro once, which makes them practically kernel hackers, right? Needless to say, some of those inflate the unemployment figure too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What, you mean everyone isn't a randian superman like me? I'm shocked!
And if you were in my mother's basement too you could see the shock on my face!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People with theoretical comp-sci education don't have that much to write under competences in the cv and need to learn practical skills first. This means accepting a lower paying job to start with and many don't want that. But working up potential is much better. For me, this translated to accepting a minimum wage job(rural area, not that much choice and the employer was right) to getting paid well above average year or so later.
There are people who can go solo right after getting the degree, but they usually have worked the field before/during going for the degree however. the rest of us need a job to get our toes wet.
People with practical education are much more likely to get a job in pay class of their skill set right after school. But development options are limited.
The point is not to gloat, but to make the point that a job is not always the right course of action for someone leaving university, and especially not in a field like computer science. There is lots of work that needs doing, but a lot of it is not in the UK. The last piece of work I did for a UK company was two or three years ago, but there is no shortage of contracting work available from foreign companies that I can do in the UK.
By placing emphasis on the idea that 'now you've got a degree, you must get a job,' a lot of former students are completely ignoring other options for earning a living. As a nice side effect for the rest of the UK, because all of my income currently comes from abroad it is providing a small boost to the local economy. This would be a much bigger boost if more people worked in the same way. Rather than being unemployed and a drain on the state, people with useful skills could be bringing money into the country.
Computer science is not the only field where this is an option. For example, a number of my friends work as freelance translators. They work on a contract basis for companies around the world, but mostly in Europe, translating things into English (or American, in some cases).
The Internet means that many kinds of work no longer require physical proximity. Just because there are no jobs for these kinds of work in the UK does not mean that it is impossible for people in the UK to be paid to do this kind of work. For sure, it's not for everyone, but I'd imagine that a lot of the currently unemployed computer science graduates could work this way if they realised that it was an option.
As a corollary, the government could do a lot to make it easier for people leaving university to become self employed, in terms of tax law and advice.
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The truth is, 95% of any degree course material will never be used in the real world unless you go into research. My Quantum theory has never been needed in finance, funnily enough. I've never employed a CS graduate because the courses are full of stuff that they'll never use - AI, etc. unless they become games programmers (which they almost certainly won't). Mostly the degree type is used to judge the type of person - Maths grads are quite logical people, Science grads are practical people, Arts grads have a head for facts, but CS grads are seen as people who enjoy fiddling around with things without actually getting anything out of it. Just my opinion, though.
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work. It's the summer (the first one we've had in three years) and so I spend a lot of time sitting outside relaxing. Not sure why I'd want a job - I'd earn less, have to sit in an office, and have someone else telling me when I had to do work (instead of when I had to have done work by).
Just make sure you plan for the odd period where you are unable to find work. I know a few consultants who found finding work quite tricky to get the consulting work they relied on in about 2004 or so when the trend in the UK job market was to always hire permanent staff whenever possible and train them up via various government grants.
This is never going happen with our current government but remember than things change. If you are in IT for the long haul then you can be sure you will see many changes over the course of your career. Consultants and the self-employed generally do better under Conservative governments, but Labour have habit of trying to encourage people to become permanent employees so they have less scope to get creative with paying income tax.
I dont read
Having a job builds character. If you had ever held a real job, you might have been inspired to post something interesting or helpful to new graduates instead of just arrogantly gloating about your minor successes and unknowingly making yourself look like an ass.
I'm looking at the same stats here for Belgium, one of the UK's closest neighbors, and the picture looks quite different. No idea if this is because we're small, or if this is similar to the rest of mainland Europe.
Informatics: one of the highest amounts of outstanding jobs, although 30% less than last year. Similar to engineers, though the demand for those didn't drop.
Only beaten by: metal construction workers and technicians (x1.5), and...cleaning ladies! (x3)
Unemployment after 1 year is between 5.1% and 13.3%.
Art, fashion, language, archeology, interior design, and history around the highest ones (>15%), so this seems contrary to the original post.
Medicine (even nurses), Science (Maths, Chemists, Engineers) have basically 0% unemployment.
I'm also in the UK, also have a computer science degree and I'm also spending the summer relaxing. (And I'm not on the dole!)
As a former employer, my experience was that the problem isn't just the quality of the people on the courses, but the courses themselves. Many "computer science" degrees are actually piss-poor vocational courses in Java. There are few universities in the UK offering actual computer science, and I'd be surprised if any of their graduates were willingly unemployed.
And learning correct English spelling always helps in getting those highly paid jobs, I've found. And the best way to absorb (by osmosis) spelling is to read many of those Fine books. Semi literacy is often shown up by such mistakes as paid/payed loose/lose and a few other common ones. Firefox, with an inline spellcheck works great too.
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work.
I would assume that you had a job before taking up consultancy. Very few people can become consultants straight from University.
Who cares? I have a BA in psychology. I graduated in 1981. I need a job. Recent graduates should go to the end of the line while their parents go to the front of the line.
It only makes sense with no experience. Employers are looking for solutions from software engineers. Experience is invaluable.
The final frontier of the wealthy is IP ownership. They only have to own something valuable and inexhaustible to become wealthy and stay that way. To ensure this, they only need some laws (got that) some world treaties (got that) and some soldiers to exert your will on the rest of the world (got that too!).
Sure there will be some work in services of various types... medical, fast food, legal and what have you, but manufacturing and agriculture and even technical work are all send out of the country because local workers are too expensive. It harder to grow your wealth when you have to pay people enough not to starve...better to pay people who are already starving!
This is the direction I see the world going anyway...
So ... unless you are the previous mentioned randian superman and can go to topcoder and own the place to put yourself into view how is a fresh student supposed to make himself employable for decent paying freelance work? You are competing against the usual assortment of east-Europeans/Asians etc who will underbid you. Far more than normal jobs this environment is a ruthless globalized meritocracy.
Which is not to say that trying to land some projects wouldn't be a better use of your time than doing nothing ... but for most it's going to bring in peanuts.
I finished a UK Comp Sci degree a few weeks ago. The quality of the degree depends significantly on what modules the student picks. If they decide to take all the easy modules with little extra programming or theoretical knowledge then they will come out with a useless degree and become part of that 15%. Fortunately at my uni (Nottingham) some of the more theoretical (as in actual Comp Sci) modules were mandatory.
Currently in my country CS students could choose from as many jobs as they please. Most of the students already start working during their studies. There is also a government push to reduce the number of non-technical degrees as they cannot get a decent job.
Interesting to see that this is quite the opposite of the UK situation.
Nope, I started freelancing during my PhD, and continued to do it full time afterwards. I had a couple of jobs while I was an undergrad, but they didn't really make me want one when I finished. I did a couple of short-term academic research jobs (one between degrees, one after the PhD), but they don't really count because they were basically being a student without getting another degree at the end. The writing work I got through talking to the right people (contacts I made while working on the XMPP standard, while I was an undergrad), and the subsequent consulting has mainly come via my involvement with open source projects.
No one becomes a well-paid consultant straight out of university (unless they have well-connected parents or something), but even while I was a student there was a reasonable amount of poorly paid contracting work available, and it's often possible to turn this into better-paid work when you've built a relationship with the company. Once you're sufficiently familiar with their operations that you can do in an hour something that someone less experienced would take a day to do, you can charge the same amount that the other person would charge for half a day and it's still good value for them.
When you're starting out, it's much more important to build a good relationship with your customers than to get paid a lot. I'll often do a small amount for free for a potential client and then give them a quote for the rest - that way they have something to judge the value of the contract to them. I don't want to work for anyone who won't be happy with my work, and no one wants to employ a contractor to do work they won't be happy with (although a depressing number of companies do).
That's the point of my post. Having a job is not the same as earning an income. You can leave university and become self employed, working for companies anywhere in the world, and being given a wide variety of interesting problems to work on. Or you can complain that there are no jobs (there certainly aren't many around here, although there are a couple of interesting startups). Most people pick option 2, and most of them do it because no one tells them that option 1 exists.
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These numbers don't make any sense. Given: "And the number of students who managed to find employment within six months has dropped from 62% to 59%.", one would expect the weighted mean % across disciplines to be 41% unemployed. So how is it that Computer Science has only 17% unemployed[1] (the most) yet we can still end up with 41% of graduates unemployed?
[1] As defined by "Source HESA: Percentage of full-time first degree graduates (2008-9) unemployed after six months"
As the article submitter, I'm like to note that timothy actually corrected a factual inaccuracy in my original submission. In other words, he read the linked article and... well, there's no other word for it... he edited the submission.
I know, I know: I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it myself.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
As always though the statistics contain individuals who will get jobs because they have other skills, are persistent or just so good.
But...for what it's worth here is my opinion as a professional Bioinformatician working in academia.
CS as a scientific discipline is great - but it is like 'Physics' or 'Biology' - seen as an academic subject (even by me and I've met original "Sander @ the Zoo" most likely and can tell my Cathedrals from my Bazaars). Perhaps because that is all CS is: great for going further in academia; maybe the perception is wrong. // 'Computational Biology' and suddenly the graduates become more employable. A lot in the case of BioInf.
Add some concept of application however to the general term in the degree of CS such as crossing it with another field like 'Biophysics' (surprisingly CS intensive actually in parts), or my field 'Bioinformatics'
Why? The world of Biology & Medicine (aka 'Medical Informatics') is really short of good quality graduates - and to be honest we prefer postgraduates i.e. MSc, PhD - with 'Informatics skills'. We don't generally want computer scientists though: we want people who can cross into Our Domain and solve Our problems. Most of these are - by CS standards - relatively simply but remain unsolved because we can't find the people to tailor the existing solutions. How many more 'Web Frameworks' / new File Systems / Software Development Models do we need? I use Linux. And grep. And Perl. And rest of LAMP. CS is a means to an end for us not a tool.
Know something about filesystems and data structures? Call yourself a 'Data Manager' and come talk to me, or your local Microscopy unit. Get a job! (Win a Nobel Prize?) And even the Canadian Government will let you immigrate on their Skilled Worker Program.
Sadly the induviduals who "work" ( a term used in its loosest possible sense) are even worse at identifying suitable candidates than the HR departments would be. All they do is take a list of keywords dreamed up from deep within the recruiting company and slavishly match them against all the electronic applications they have on file.
What they happens is some random acts of association. Your CV says "3 years C++", the client asked for 2 years, so you're overqualified. They asked for Javascript experience, you have Java so you get sent on an entirely pointless interview that takes a day of vacation (or sick) time. Turn down an interview prospect and you're labeled "hard to please" and no more opportunities come your way. In fact it's a wonder that any vacancies get filled, that any IT departments get any staff who can actually do the job - rather than fulfill the tick-list the agencies use. In fact the only people who get what they want out of this arrangement are the commission-earning staff, who not only get paid for placing an unsuitable candidate, but then harass that person's previous employer and get paid if they fill the vacancy they created.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
maybe they're not trying to find a job within 6 month, because...
* they already have a "side-job" generating enough money
* they're freelancing
* working on the black market
* discovering the opposite sex
Open source is a good way to start. I've got quite a bit of work from companies that have seen hippyware stuff that I wrote and wanted someone to do something similar. They may be able to hire someone who is a better programmer in the general case, but not someone who has the same domain-specific experience.
The other thing to remember is that work that pays poorly can often lead to work that pays well. In the past, I've done some free work for companies that looked like good longer term prospects. They then have something beyond the typical not-very-trustworthy CV of most contractors to assess my competence and when I give them a quote for something else, they're more likely to accept it.
The writing I got via my (quite limited) participation in the XMPP standards process as an undergrad. This got me in touch with an editor, who got me some work-for-hire stuff on a Linux book (which I knew a reasonable amount about due to my participation in the university computer society). The publisher liked the work I did on this project, and so invited me to write a book by myself. That one got good reviews, which led to my next one, and to my writing a regular column for their web portal. While I was a student, I wrote a lot of articles for a local tech news startup. The startup went bust, and I never got paid for any of the work, but it gave me something to point to when I wanted other writing work.
If you expect the first contact you have with a company to lead to a high paying contract, you're going to be disappointed. If you're willing to start with small things, often for little or no money, and work up to things that pay better, then you can do quite well.
Not everyone could do this, but a lot of people can. There's a huge amount that the government and universities could do to make this easier, but sadly don't. They still compile statistics as if the only two options are 'working for a corporation' or 'claiming the dole,' so a lot of people never explore alternative options.
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there is no shortage of contracting work available from foreign companies that I can do in the UK. May you elaborate on how you get to these foreign work?
It's no secret that the job market in the UK is abysmal at the moment; In the end either through shame, or sheer financial stress, or pride, people will take whatever is on offer - relevant or not. Being unemployed here makes you utterly ashamed; the bureaucratic rigmarole and being looked on as a dole-sponger hardly helps morale when one mails off those resumes. Sucks since you get an absolute pittance to live on and pay it back in taxation in no time: Unemployment is to rise to well over 10% within a few years, in line with massive cuts to public services or private firms who profit from government investment. One simply cannot afford to pick and choose, and even those skeptical in the massive marketing propaganda so common to university campuses across Britain are often surprised by just how grindingly hard it is out there.
I think it's less of a question whether CS grads find a job than it is whether they find a job relevant to their degree. I never studied CS, but from the guys I know who did I gathered it's one of the more vocational, concentrated degrees. Thus, the few jobs that there are out there in the British market have absolutely no relevance to 98%+ of what they've learned. Bit of a downer when you consider how doing the course requires a lot more passion than 'Media Studies' or 'American Studies' or countless other subjects which, whilst nice as a hobby, rarely translate to a job relevant. CS grads (justifiably) expect something to do with computers for the years of graft they put in. Outsourcing and other issues aside; having to do much more actual work and much less partying than Mr. Arts/Humanities, these geeks count on a true career.
A lot of people do a subject they 'like' in university here, and its the same across the West. Unfortunately what is liked sometimes translates to low employability and relevance in the job market - the smorgasbord of subjects (hundreds beyond the 'traditional' body of sci/eng/math topics) offered in our universities is testament to how people see education as more of an end than a means, or simply want what they think will be a better/easier time in higher education. But very, very few people go into CS for fun like this; most undergrads are at least somewhat aware of the big bad math skills required to get past the first year of the course; and for this reason most non-geeks avoid it like the bubonic.
It's the same story for other hard subjects like physics; plenty of grads, no jobs for said grads. A shame because talent gets neglected, as do research proposals which might hold promise - UK science funding is finicky as hell. The issues as to why under-25s have such a hard time getting work are much discussed in the broadsheets of this country; beyond all this endless talk by comfortable journalists in their offices one thing is certain: Along with the disabled the young be the ones feeling most the next 5 years of unrelenting neoliberalism embodied by our Conservative/Liberal Democrat government.
I got hired even *before* my MSc was finished, without any problem, in a UK-based company that is supposedly very picky about who it takes.
There are even people who have just a BSc or an MEng and they're on the same payroll as people with MSc.
The problem is probably that in the field, the degrees are pretty much worthless, and what matters is your actual skill.
I don't believe the statistics... McDonalds would hire a compsci grad as long as he/she shows up on time.
The key is being pro-active and proving your skills and commitment before you graduate. Offer your services (for free if necessary) to some real life companies and build up a portfolio of real, commercial experience. The main issue I see with CS recruitment is that university doesn't really teach you enough real world skills - of course this is the same for most university courses, but we don't expect a doctor or a lawyer to just turn up on day one and produce the goods, they're trained on the job, while CS grads are expected to be productive from the outset (no firm wants to offer low wages to train someone up and have them leave when they've got the commercial experience, similarly no firm wants to offer good wages to an untested graduate, so it's catch 22 unless you can do something to shift the balance or are lucky enough to find a firm that will take a punt on you).
The only way for an employer to judge if you will be productive is on past experience, which obviously puts graduates at an immediate disadvantage. If I had to guess how GP got into his current position (assuming he's not just making it up), I'd guess he got off his backside and did some work on his portfolio before he left uni, if you just assume good uni grades will land you a high paying job or freelancer contract, you're in for a shock.
I wouldn't want to work with over 20% of the people graduating, those unexperienced gold bricking morning-programmer types, so 17% is actually surprisingly better than I would've thought...
You may have gone to some piss pot ex-college bigging itself up by putting university in its title that only cared about the number of students on a course and not what they learned but I went to a proper Uni and we were *required* to learn formal proofs, predicate logic, set theory, database theory and microprocessor design amongst other things. If you failed those modules you were out. End of.
"The only thing a degree measures is whether you can sit in a room for three-four years and learn what is told to you."
So you think knowledge is a waste of time? An interesting point of view. What are you expecting , a degree that teaches you all the skills you require to go straight into a 6 figure salary? Get real. It gives you a grounding in various parts of CS, nothing more , and also a proof of ability to potential employers.
"Try explaining what spanning-tree algorithms do and why they can be used to avoid network loops... most CS grads can't once they have left their graph theory courses"
And I doubt you'd have much lucky explaining how gouraud shading works or how 3rd normal form differs from 2nd without looking it up first. So what? So you're clued up on one small part of CS because you work in that area. BFD. That doesn't make some sort of genius.
You are a ar5e. I don't know if I've worked with you. Yes you are more stupid than a cabbage.
We have not enough engineers (especially computer scientists) in Germany. Just jump over the channel. However, a bachelor degree is not that well paid in Germany and it is not that easy to get a job with a bachelor (which is in Germany in most universities a 3 year thing, which is considered a better "Vordiplom" which was the mid studies exam in Germany in the last decades). So first get a master (bologna compatible version) and the you get a job here.
yeah, I agree with this, the idea that a guy with no experience can't pick up ANY work is rubbish, there is always someone out there willing to give you 100 euros or pounds to fix something in their website. each client you do, puts you another client to show off, you need to build your own website to show off your talents and above all, make yourself look important. your impression to clients has to be that you can get the job done, not that your a whiney slashdot freak with no experience. Even if it's not true, console yourself with the money you earn and drown your moral sorrows with beer you can now afford without asking your parents. I know it sounds hard, but it's not, TRUST is the key, I need to TRUST you that you will do the job, when you do it, be thankful and keep in touch with that client, perhaps they are interested to work more together. Facebook fan pages are also good for putting the news about the work that you do, you can't sit around waiting for work to come to you, so whilst you are not on project, keep busy, think of something you need to help improve your performance, say you keep writing email code, refactor it all into an object which does it all the same and reuse that object, sounds ridiculous but you wouldn't believe the amount of duplicated email code I see, from the SAME PROGRAMMER. once you've put your name on twago, rentacoder, loquo, whatever is best for your region, be proactive, quote what you think it'll take for some jobs you see and just keep doing it, you have to be persistent, as well as confident. You will fuck up the first couple of jobs perhaps, or at least, not do very well, or perhaps it's super easy and you'll be amazing, but don't let failure kill you, shrug, your inexperienced, the world won't end because you messed up a client requirement and had to spend a week fixing it. So I completely agree, it's all about just putting yourself out there and being confident and trustworthy.
A few years ago, CS was the major to be in if you wanted a great starting salary. So, a lot of kids with no interest in programming and no real idea what they wanted to do with their lives followed the alleged money. Remarkable as it may seem, there are today a bunch of graduates who aren't very good at computer science but are most upset that companies aren't fawning over them.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Dude,
You're a research assistant. A research assistant at a UK university making comments like yours is futile on levels of meta that I don't want to contemplate.
I'm not surprised at all to be honest... Since (no offence) any idiot can get an IT certificate nowadays in universities in UK. I got 2 degrees, and was surprised at how easy it was..
BSc in Networking, and we did more non-networking shite than actual networking subjects that we can use, build up on, and that reflect the real world. (Honest, who cares about switching on a light bulb or opening a ticket gate with 200 lines of assembly in a networking course?)
And MSc in Network Security was also a sham.. you'd expect one learns about networks, security, database security, hacking/securing, *nix networking, etc... instead, we learnt more about marketting, that guy who has a fetish about his mother (Sigmund Freud - sp?), and stories - yes, stories - about companies that got hacked..
In both universities, seeing everyone in the final exams, some still didn't even know what a 3-way handshake was and yet they passed and got their degree..
I asked a few lecturers and they say education in the UK is absolutely ridiculous nowadays.. It's all about the ratings.. If they fail too many, then they lose in funding, reputation, etc.. And it's as if everyone's finding an easy way to grab a certificate through IT.. They're not teaching what they should, the students aren't learning anything useful, and certificates/degrees are becoming more and more worthless.
Even nowadays when I see fresh grads applying to join our teams at work (multi billion $ company) as network operators/admins or IT ops/admins, many seriously lack in networking, *nix, scripting, et al. up to the point where many don't even know how to list files in linux or windows command line shell..
As for this piece of news, I'm quite surprised IT fresh grads (or anyone else in this matter) are having problems finding work, as I thought we're out of recession and restaurants, fast food joints, and other shops are still looking for employees to hire..
But if it's referring to IT specific jobs (and they should clarify btw), then I wouldn't be surprised as if it were my company, I'd keep looking and picking the smart ones that actually know how to switch on a PC and do something with it, than all the others that are just graduating for the University Statistics sake of it.
If I had to guess how GP got into his current position (assuming he's not just making it up), I'd guess he got off his backside and did some work on his portfolio before he left uni, if you just assume good uni grades will land you a high paying job or freelancer contract, you're in for a shock.
Pretty much. I was active in the university computer society, which has a lot of old members hanging around and providing advice, and I did a fair bit of hippyware stuff. I cofounded one project, and actively contribute to two others. The most productive in terms of finding work has been LLVM - now seems to be a very good time to have compiler experience, with things like GPGPU and ARM SoC support being needed in a lot of places. I've never (yet) actually been paid to work on one of the projects that I contribute to in my free time, but it's worked as good advertising.
The best advice I can give anyone at university now is don't expect your degree to teach you everything that you need to know. Schools teach you things. Universities give you an opportunity to learn. If you don't make use of this opportunity, don't complain that you aren't being offered work later, or that your degree was a waste of time (it was, but that was your fault).
I did some teaching for a bit after my PhD and one of my students posted something complaining 'I'm paying £3000 a year for this degree - I don't expect to be told to read something in a book!' With that kind of attitude, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he is now unemployed. When I said 'this isn't going to be on the exam' and half the students started packing up to go, you could tell the ones who were there because they were interested in the subject, and the ones who were not. Anyone in the latter category is wasting their own time being on the course. If you get a degree you're interested in, you are much more likely to be employable than if you get a degree hoping to get a job as a result.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No one becomes a well-paid consultant straight out of university (unless they have well-connected parents or something), but even while I was a student there was a reasonable amount of poorly paid contracting work available, and it's often possible to turn this into better-paid work when you've built a relationship with the company. Once you're sufficiently familiar with their operations that you can do in an hour something that someone less experienced would take a day to do, you can charge the same amount that the other person would charge for half a day and it's still good value for them.
This is what's missing in most of the people I've seen applying for roles straight out of university. They seem to think they can demand the same rate as someone with several years commercial experience the second they graduate, but the fact is you have to be very lucky to find an employer who will hire you with no real commercial experience, pay you the same rate as an experienced developer and will then spend time and money training you on the job. Why wouldn't he just hire an experienced developer to begin with (and one who obviously doesn't have unrealistic salary expectations at that). If someone has done even a little commercial work of their own accord before entering the job market for real, he will instantly place himself head and shoulders above his graduate peers. If he's done a few projects for a range of companies he can expect to step onto the ladder much further up. Too many grads see taking a low paid job where they can gain experience as being beneath them, but it's how the real world works.
Software Engineering can be just as rigorous and academic as any other Engineering discipline. Yes, there are some Software Engr. courses that would be better shuttled off to vo-tech, but the same could be said for Intro to CS courses.
Software Engineering is indeed less heavy on abstract theory vs. CS, but as an Engineering field, that makes sense and is perfectly proper. There are lots of problems worthy of intense study, PhDs, and professorships that simply aren't designed to be tackled by your average CS egghead. Engineers have to actually get stuff built, not just admire the elegance of some framework that hasn't seen a single major project. Software Engr. has plenty of rigorous things to study like system architecture, project management, documentation practices (trading-off time vs. usefulness), scheduling, reliability, interface design, testing methods, etc.
To say that Software Engineering should be shuffled off to vo-tech because they take some courses in coding is like saying Mechanical Engineers should do the same because most of them learn to operate machine tools. We don't propose Civil Engineers get shuffled off to vo-tech because they merely make use of physics and chemistry.
SirWired
Freelancing is an amazing option that few people consider (relatively speaking) because the custom is to go to school and join the workforce as a dedicated full-timer. So long as one can deliver decent (not even good!) stuff on time and with clear communication, freelancing is the most liberating, enjoyable, and educational profession one can consider. Furthermore, software developers are even more well-suited for being consultants, since their work doesn't require a physical presence.
The only problem is that to get good at it, one must devote their entire time to improving their consultancy. Having a full-time job will clash heads with being a full-time consultant, especially if the consulting work is involved. The other problem is that in the early stage, money stops flowing in once one stops looking for contacts, so one has to dedicate time to selling him or herself frequently. With other important responsibilities like graduate school or raising kids, this can be a tough way to live. In fact, I'd argue that having a full-time position during those times is a much better alternative because the money coming in is guaranteed and many places support their employees in those situations.
I just hate folks that find full-time jobs because they want to "take it easy" after college, and so many people do that.
A matter of context. I think I get what the OP is trying to say; Most other professions lead on to the salaryman mentality, and you end up working as a salaried employee (always with a job).
I worked contracting through my second degree (Computing for Real Time Systems), so by the time I graduated, I'd got a fair reputation, and some regular clients.
This had me bouncing on and off into the 'currently employed' segment, as a fair part of the time I spent delving into books, building systems and breaking them, learning more that could be used commercially in upcoming contracts and so on.. But for that 'interim time', I wasn't classed as employed by anyone.
When I landed the contracts, they were usually short, but very highly paid (enough that I could afford a fair bit of time 'not working', if research is counted as not working). It worked nicely for me, but I'd guess really played havoc with employment statistics.. I wonder if they've checked this in their analysis as a confounding factor..
Slashdot readers are among the wealthiest and most literate people on the planet. (opinion without any supporting facts)
100% of slashdot readers have access to computers and read. (useless statistic that does not logically support the preceeding opinion)
Profit!
See how easy that was?.....
Anyone who's come straight out of uni hoping to get a nice low skill level coding job to build up their skills has almost certainly experienced a huge amount of frustration with the jobs available. Here's a typical 'graduate' job for a web coder:
Junior Web Coder - £16,000 Skills required: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java, Flash, ASP, PHP, VB.net, active directory, oracle, Linux, Windows Server. 2 Years experience a must!
The genuine graduate jobs quickly get 200+ applicants (which naturally means they probably go to someone with lots of experience). The jobs market is utterly unwilling to give young IT workers training and they're losing out on a huge amount of talent.
Meanwhile you have clueless job centres that accuse you of being work shy because you said you were a C++ coder and they keep sending you Java or Visual Basic vacancies. But hey, if you're struggling, after 6 months they'll give you a huge amount of help by sticking you on a 3 week 9-5 course that puts your job hunting on hold so you can be taught how to write a CV that looks exactly like hundreds of other people's!
I live and work in a 1mil+ American metro area. We're a Microsoft shop (C#, SQL Server). The rumor mill here says that we have about two dozen open req's that can't be filled because there aren't enough good candidates here. We've basically tapped out the local population. Note that I said *good* candidates. We're still interviewing; they're just not up to snuff.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
> That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.
I would definitely agree with that, but it's nothing new. I finished uni 7 years ago, and I knew people (even some awarded a first) who quite simply couldn't write a computer program. I work at a dedicated software house, but most people we employ have come in from the other sciences, particularly physics, and maths backgrounds. I understand why: my brother went to the same university 2 years behind me, doing Physics and Molecular Chemistry. He had to take an 'introduction' to C-coding course worth 5 units - it covered approximately 3 full modules (30 units) of my own course.
As I say, my own experience of uni is now a bit out of date, but I get the impression that generally, the CS courses on offer in the UK are not up to par with the proper sciences or maths. And the grades are awarded way too easily, even to people who fundamentally don't understand the subject matter.
Not everyone could do this, but a lot of people can. There's a huge amount that the government and universities could do to make this easier, but sadly don't. They still compile statistics as if the only two options are 'working for a corporation' or 'claiming the dole,' so a lot of people never explore alternative options.
I'm glad to see someone pointing this out. Thank you.
In industries such as large-scale manufacturing, people need to work in groups and have expensive premises and equipment before they can do anything useful and earn money. A typical employment relationship reflects this: the individual members of the group get a fixed deal, but this represents only a modest fraction of the profits at a successful business, with the employer who provided the opportunity and took the risks to get everything set up claiming the lion's share.
None of that applies in knowledge-based industries such as software development. There are few good reasons for any reasonably capable developer to work as anyone's employee.
Like TheRaven64, I wish the careers services at universities who do produce graduates with reasonable skill and experience would explain this, before their talented people all go off to work in cubicle farms for The Man their whole lives.
Signed,
A guy who got off the treadmill a lot later than he should have
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When you have to tell a CS MSc graduate what OO, recursion and how joins work... you realise that the guy who has been playing with computers since childhood is more capable of resolving issues and having more world knowledge. It comes down to the ability to produce, a CS grad will think about how to do the project in a refined and academic way, the other guy will get on with a simple design and code from that and from experience, he'll produce as good or if not better code and structure than the CS grad...
Luckily this should start to change now Tony the criminal has gone and the nice new government is trying to tidy up the mess he left. All those imaginary, unnecessary jobs should go and hence the employment of all those with imaginary Tony-sponsored degrees. Eventually if we are lucky enough to get a double-dip recession only those with real industry skills will be employed and all the rest can rot. Disclaimer - I am not a Tory MP.
Must be nice having socialized medicine. Here in the US, if you aren't an employee, you basically can't get decent health coverage, and will pay out the nose for what little coverage you can get.
By helping on well-known Open Source projects.
And it depends on what you specialize on: there's maybe 0.000001% of the people in the world who can write reverse compilers, for example.
The dice message boards are chock full of posts like this:
"What can I do now? I graduated from some 'prestigious' four year university . . . with a 3.25+ gpa and have been looking for software work for close to a year now. Really, I am sick of looking for work + rejection now."
Please take a quick look at this blog article:
http://techtoil.org/doku.php?id=articles:news_and_commentary
I was thinking what GREAT news this is for the young computer science majors.
"A Job" is not the place to be.
I doubt that there's another field, or another time in history, with such low barriers of entry to starting your own business. It used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds to be able to launch a successful business.
Now you can sit in Starbucks, and using your laptop, set up a business on Google-Killer-App Engine, and you're all set. Or crank out a phone app.
---
If you are one of the unfortunate un(der)-employed, approach business and your career search as an engineering problem - it's an approach that you're likely to be familiar with. Design your career as you would design a complicated software product. Determine the overall objective, check what resources and components you have available, design a schematic (along with a test suite), build your career, ..., profit!
(that's how I did it.)
They are not "least employable." That's the wrong title for the Slashdot summary. The article is talking about unemployment rate for new graduates based on subject area.
TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
Engineering is up there too (13% compared to 17% for Computer Science)! Does that mean engineers are not employable? No. It means there is a saturation of engineers and computer science majors. This happens all the time. There is not always a demand for a certain major.
Working in IT means you are competing with 3rd world wages. There is no way that most western workers can do that. The few IT jobs that can not be offshored right now, will be staffed by foreign guest workers until the job can be offshored.
Maybe US workers with top-secret clearances can find jobs.
In some ways, IT is even easier to offshore than manufacturing. With IT, you do have physical items to ship. As I write this, I am seeing entire IT departments being offshored.
Freelance? You mean that a project to make shuttle auto-pilot should cost only $100, or with the bidding war $98? Forget it, i prefer to go out and wash some dishes, and actually to do something meaningful, instead of selling my precious skills for nothing. As for the other kind of jobs, like writing books, inventing something new, you either have to have a lot of experience, or a lot of money. There is no shortcut here, and even I, after so many years of active development in so many languages, i still confess to myself how little i do know, but at least, i do know how to make the work done, in time, and with the available resources.
Blank look.
To cut a long story short, all he knew about was "web design" - but he couldn't actually do any job because he would be utterly unsafe. Buffer overflow? Numeric overflow? Performance? Algorithms? Not the first clue.
In fact on this particular recruitment run we had three like that if you include the one with the fake degree certificate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Not to burst your carefully crafted bubble, but consulting is a job. I'm pretty sure consultants fit right in with the rest of employment statistics. Then again, I've worked with enough consultants to question why...
I like to tell people (when not telling them to get off my lawn) that my first job working with computing involved technologies that did not exist when I was at University. This wasn't completely true as I graduated in 1972 and the Intel 4004 came out in 1971, but the 8008 didn't come out till 1972, and I still call that the first "proper" microprocessor (as distinct from calculator chip). The mechanical engineers in our company called what we did either "maths" or "electronic engineering", and never liked to ask how the "maths" got into the "circuit boards" in case their eyes glazed over.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I would hope that the survey would still count consulting, writing books or being self-employed as having a job, rather than still looking for a job. If yes, you can drop the "Look at me, I'm different" - you still work for a living, even if your job is writing books. If no, then the survey is rather flawed.
You may have the advantage of higher pay, but the disadvantage of lacking stability. Many employed people can work from home, so that's not a clear distinction.
It is a sad state of affairs for these UK graduates and will have a lousy effect far beyond the UK. Computer science can and is making a huge difference in the way we live, medical care etc.. It is important work and despite the commercial lack of interest society should highly value these graduates and make sure they have an easy path so that they can get on with their life's work.
Ask graduates after five years if they felt the money spent on their education was a good investment. That encourages the school to fail or otherwise convince people who shouldn't be in the field to leave, as they won't be happy once they hit the real world, and will hurt their metrics. It should probably be broken out by discipline.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Eurasia is an island, too.
When I said 'this isn't going to be on the exam' and half the students started packing up to go, you could tell the ones who were there because they were interested in the subject, and the ones who were not. Anyone in the latter category is wasting their own time being on the course. If you get a degree you're interested in, you are much more likely to be employable than if you get a degree hoping to get a job as a result.
I'm an undergrad, who like most other CS undergrads I know, finds his studies quite intensive. I have to say that there have been several occasions when there is a TA giving a review/tutorial on a subject that I was genuinely interested in learning and I pack up and leave when I am told that it won't be on the exam. Especially during the exams, there are periods in the school semester where I am so busy that if I want to get a half-decent grade in all my courses, I can't afford to sacrifice extra time on non-exam material... I always think, "I hope the TA isn't offended, because I do like this stuff," -- so, don't be offended...
Most are aware of option 1, but it takes time, a large helping of luck, and great deal of work (much of it while getting your degree when you're already swamped) to have any kind of success at it.
You pretend like it's easy because you managed it, when the truth is that it's anything but.
>In CompSci in particular, a lot of people come in with no understanding of what the subject is really about.
I agree with you.
Universities with Computer Science programs need to be more clear, then, in expressing what the degree is about.
I hold a B.S. in Computer Science. In my opinion, a Computer Science education is primarily a course of study in algorithm development. You do, of course, do some programming, and even some breadboard electronics work. But these are all just canvases upon which rudimentary algorithms are created and tested, with the goal of being able to learn to extrapolate and create new algorithms to solve more complicated problems later.
I think that "Computers" have become so ubiquitous that many people believe that a study in "computer science" is simply a science course about computers. I'd almost more simplistically call it a giant math word problem.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Not sure where you got that from. I held two short-term RA posts, one between degrees and one after finishing my PhD, but I haven't been in academia for a couple of years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So ... unless you are the previous mentioned randian superman and can go to topcoder and own the place to put yourself into view how is a fresh student supposed to make himself employable for decent paying freelance work?
You start before you even graduate. You look for internships, you look for jobs inside school, you network with professors who might know people in the industry, you network with companies that fund projects at your university, you attend job fairs, you give a helping hand to open source projects. In other words, you make yourself visible before you even graduate.
If you wait till you graduate, guess what? You will be green, you will be unnoticed and you will be fighting the competition. And what is worse, the competition will contain individuals that did move their cards before graduating (and who thus are no longer green or unnoticed.)
It is an unfortunate thing that no one explains this to students, but then again, nobody does. People who do this, do them on their own. They have passion and motivation. People either have it or they don't. No gloating here, just stating the facts.
You are competing against the usual assortment of east-Europeans/Asians etc who will underbid you.
Well, don't be a cookie cutter programmer. Specialize in something... and don't wait until you graduate for doing so. I've seen students in their senior (or even junior) years aggressively going after (for example) Sun's certifications on Java web service development and architecture, blog about it and get themselves known for it. You gotta find something in which to specialize. Otherwise, you will be yet another replaceable body.
Far more than normal jobs this environment is a ruthless globalized meritocracy.
Which is not to say that trying to land some projects wouldn't be a better use of your time than doing nothing ... but for most it's going to bring in peanuts.
Welcome to the real world buddy. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and work for peanuts while climbing the ladder. I did that for years, people were mocking me for the peanuts I made in the career I chosen, but it eventually paid. Expect to be paid peanuts right out of college for a couple of years.
During that time, your pay is not your salary, but the opportunity to work in the real world and acquire valuable, specialized skills. Putting your faith on whether you make a decent salary or peanuts is a sure way to screw your nascent career.
Without going into specifics, I know of a young graduate who got an offer at a major engineering firm that produces very valuable, well-known system-level tools and applications. The company is super-hard to get in, but the name carries prestige and they know how to work software.
Well, the idiot (sorry, I can't call him anything but an idiot) declined the position because the money wasn't there (about 15% below the average for entry level developers). Big deal getting 15% less than the average. He could have learned all these wonderful things. The name of this company in his resume would have meant he actually made it through their rigorous hiring process.
Instead he opted to do entry-level, cookie cutter web stuff on a local hospital, known for their piss-poor software practices, working among a bunch of incompetent programmers... and the pay wasn't even that better anyways. I actually thing he devolved from a recent grad into yet another incompetent programmer just because of the exposure to that kind of environment.
Make your choices wisely, and don't base them just on salary. Expect to work for peanuts until you actually acquire the skills that warrant for a better pay.
As I surmised, many of the IT books are written by book learned 'consultants' who have spent more years studying for a PhD than actually doing the work in the real world. Then we get these 'wonderful' new silver bullet methodologies out of these people's heads based on a few consulting jobs instead of years of real world experience across many projects. This is why silver bullet 'innovations' don't work. I've seen many of you consultants come in and fuck things up. Another case of where high paid managers think someone is good based on a bunch of letters and a high price tag rather than taking the time to check the person's experience. A pox on you.
Land means land, not island. Switzerland is landlocked!
And anyway, the UK isn't an island. Great Britain is.
For most of us, it sort of helps to pay the mortgage and feed our kids, you insufferably smug git.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Good for you for making a living without taking employment from some company, but I do think you're talking at cross-purposes to the article.
You've either had a succession of job-contracts, or more likely have worked for yourself. Either way the government's statistics (and most normal people) would not consider you unemployed.
Consultant: a man who knows 99 ways to make love but doesn't know any women.
Consultant: a man that borrows your watch and then proceeds to tell you what time it is.
As someone who knows the difference between Java and JavaScript, I thought that becoming a recruitment agent would be a good idea. So, how hard is it to match buzzwords? Apparently, you need two years experience...
I have a degree in computer science and I walked away from software engineering and became a licensed funeral director.
Sure embalming may seem gruesome to some but its full of a lot of technical challenges. Its part chemistry, physics and even a bit of fine art. It provides a lot of rewards and situations to overcome. No two bodies will embalm the same way and all the different methods and modes of death provide the embalmer with innumerable situations to deal with.
The downside is long hours and the pay isn't great its one very stable job. Nobody is going to offshore funeral directors.
If you are one of these CSI groupies you can take your computer science degree plus your embalmers license and get a job as a pathologist's assistant for your local medical examiner.
If you are tired of playing unemployed computer science geek call up your local funeral home and ask if you can volunteer to do an observation at the funeral home because you are considering a career in funeral services.
Never finished high school but have a great job as a FE working on critical machines in many different data centers..
Most of the admins I meet that just came out of school are close to useless, they don't learn anything new and just try to pass the blame on to another tech who is even more confused and frustrated. When something breaks most of them will hide and get as far away from the situation as possible.
Before I started working with these people I honestly thought everyone in the business was just like me and was genuinely interested in learning about technology.
Oh well, more job security for me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmm, do universities and colleges still offer basket weaving as a degree!
Come on mods - I was making a serious point, but I was definitely trolling.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Could you post links to your books please?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
When a Lit or Women's Studies or CA major fails to get a job related to their field, they instead get a job as a secretary, or retail manager, or human resources, myriad other jobs that require a degree but have no obvious/prevalent corresponding major. When a CS major fails to get a job related to their field, they live with their parents making a website that will "make it big someday."
We're more likely seeing several separate effects :
(1) Britain has far too much immigration for their population size, reducing job availability. All the immigration has then depressed salaries for high tech workers particularly, making those jobs less desirable.
(2) A few top institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, etc. have remarkably clever students, but other UK institutions are usually accepting far weaker students than correspondingly ranked places in France, Germany, etc.
(3) I've afraid that social class remains extremely important for British people, so a "working degree" like engineering or CS may attract people with less educated family backgrounds.
We've now got synergies between these three issues creating a vicious cycle.
There are also some possible confounding factors the study may ignore :
(4) You've got separate immigration and emigration issues at the student level which complicate counting people.
For example, a few bright indian and asian kids might take the high grades outside Oxbridge, and the good non Oxbridge jobs, but they're ignored by this study. Alternatively, good British student may seriously consider finding better & cheaper schools in France, Geramny, etc. if they don't get into Oxbridge.
(5) And the study may simply not count people who take jobs abroad correctly, which may differ among different fields.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The same people that was made redundant 2 years ago (due to the recession and the then apparently unstopable outsourcing of evey interesting tech job to India) are back with a vengeance.
What happened is that "doing with less" reaches eventually the point in which it becomes a pipe dream: you can't do everything for nothing, as much as some "entrepreneurs" and "business people" would try to make you believe.
In several places they realized that the marvelous outsourcing outfit in India didn't have first rate Engineers, but bright young things, eager to learn and earn more, and fearless to break things in the process.
But as old timers know, breakages cost money, so their former masters began to bring them back to help, and in some cases simply to provide guidance, and given that many companies hiring policies are hari kiriean in nature (most banks state very clearly that they wont re-employ somebody that has left, regardeless of circumstances) then the only way to engage those people that know what they are doing is by paying high contracting rates.
The consequence? The good local jobs go to the old timers, the junior jobs go on permanent holiday to Mumbai, and the young bright things in the UK are left in the cold (but since they didn't even bother to vote during the last general election, then I can't say I have much sympathy for them: partying and getting wasted but not bothering to change the social system in which they live).
Could you post links to your books please?
I guess it's not technically spam if you ask (please feel free to mod this off-topic though - the 'no karma bonus' checkbox seems to have gone, or I'd use that)...
The first one was The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor. This was a lot of fun to write - I knew absolutely nothing about Xen when I started (and I was doing it as a procrastination activity to avoid writing my thesis). The publisher sent me to Cambridge for a bit to talk to the XenSource guys and to the XenSummit in upstate New York (I got a nice holiday in NYC too, as it turned out to be cheaper to put me in a hotel in Manhattan for a few days than to fly me back the day after the conference ended).
The second was Cocoa Programming Developer's Handbook. A couple of open source projects I work on are Clang and GNUstep, so I know the Cocoa APIs inside out (literally - I've spent almost as much time reimplementing them as using them). I found that really useful when writing it, because I knew the sort of trades involved in implementing a lot of the classes and how that should affect how they are used.
There's also a LiveLessons (video instruction) series accompanying this book. That was a lot less fun. I am really rubbish at talking into a microphone (I don't like telephones or videoconferencing either) and it was a lot of time with me spent recording 'and if you look at uh, that thing, wait, what was I talking about?' then deleting it and recording it again.
The most recent one is not out yet. It's the Objective-C Phrasebook, which was also fun to write. It's the shortest of the three, and will fit in a pocket. The Phrasebook series is intended for experienced programmers moving to a new language / framework. For this one, I was very lucky to get Fred Keifer (the GNUstep AppKit maintainer) to do a technical review - he's both very knowledgable and amazingly pedantic, which is the perfect combination for a technical reviewer. The draft incorporating his comments is much better than the first one. I'm really looking forward to seeing that one published.
I also write regularly on InformIT. I think a couple of my articles there have been Slashdot'd, and OSNews picks them up periodically. I tend to write about whatever technology I've been playing with the most recently on there. I find the best way of testing whether you really understand something is to see if you can explain it to someone else. If I can't explain something clearly in an article, it tells me which bits I don't understand properly.
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Getting an entry level programming job in the US is pretty darn hard. Everyone wants experience, CS qualifications are considered theoretical, and outside-of-school qualifications aren't reflected well on a resume unless you've worked on a well-known open source project. It's easy to say, "oh, bring a portfolio of open source work", but you have to get an interview first and most of the time no one calls.
In the end I was lucky and, after two years, networked my way into a poorly-paid position in academia that let me get the experience I needed to get a real job. I wouldn't have gotten that experience from a Help Desk job, though.
It is extremely cyclical. When I was coming in there were older programmers who were happy to be able to put relevant experience on their resume and were basically in the same position I was, only with 15-30 years of experience. Right now, where I live, if you know C++ you can get a job in a heartbeat. The problem is that if you start out during a downturn, it hurts your earnings for the rest of your life. Just like taking a job in a completely unrelated field. I bet the Celtic Studies majors give up on working in their field and just start waiting tables, whereas the CS majors hold out hope of eventually breaking in.
Until college degrees are more practical or more than a few big companies have well-defined paths to bring in inexperienced people, CS majors need to learn to be less hopeful. Of course, the best suggestion I've heard so far is to go to some place like MIT in the first place.
If you can't find a job it's because you have nothing to offer. I don't care what kind of paper you have in that frame on your wall or where you got it. You need to develop some skills and build something real, even if you have to serve coffee to make money while you do it.
I have no advanced degree and make more than most PhD's. /shrug
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
-Linus Torvalds
If you can't produce a well written piece of code, that you wrote, that wasn't part of a school project, you have issues. Talented people do what they do because they love to do it. If you don't love what you do, and don't do it all the time, regardless of your employment status, you usually won't amount to much unless you know people or are related to them.
If you do write code and build shit all the time, you will succeed in spite of yourself.
I made $20k a year at my first engineering job. I could have made more money as a union electrician. I didn't care how much money I made, because I got to do what I love to do.
I'm a lazy fuck too when it comes to everything else in my life. If it only paid $5 an hour, I'd still be doing it.
You gotta pay your dues, and that means building things and getting experience. Sometimes it doesn't pay well at first. Stop crying about it and make something out of yourself.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
This leaves you with plenty of time to stroke yourself on Slashdot. Congrats! You're the man now dog.
I'm pretty amazed by this if you want the truth. It takes a LONG time for us to find qualified people (and we're in the US), and by long I mean 3-9 months depending on the skillset.
Personally, I was getting 2-4 pings a month from recruiters for resumes that were 2+ years old. If these kids have applicable skills, which I can't believe they don't, then I'd think they would be very attractive.
About the only reason I can see is lack of experience and companies are leery of making the longer-term investment to train these kids in the present economic environment...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
It was entirely correct for your CompSci degree work to have no immediate real-world application. It's a highly-mathematical field, and not designed to be an applied science.
If you don't want to do theoretical work for your eventual job (most people don't), the degree should have given you enough foundation to supplement with self-learning. For you, the degree existed to give you the skills you need to rapidly pick up other skills useful to your employer. Actually doing so is YOUR responsibility, not your degree's, not your professors', and not your college's.
I remember that one of my CompSci courses was Computer Languages. The professor deliberately chose a textbook that was 15 years old at the time. Why? So we could concentrate on learning how to analyze and learn computer languages FAST. If there were modern, useful, languages in that book, chances are we would have already learned them in other coursework and therefore not understood what the course was trying to teach us. Learning the foundations of OOP is much easier if you are doing it in SmallTalk and LISP instead of C++, which most geeks can code without really understanding what's going on.
If you wanted "applied CompSci" you should have taken more Software Engineering courses.
-- The units do not prepare you to hit the ground running when they reach the real world. (A few examples below)
-- Getting a pass, and often even a decent mark, depends more on friends who already did the unit, knowing the lecturer and his style of examining, and has very little to do with getting a true understanding.
-- If you are legitimately interested in the subject and go out of your way to really get to grips with it you are putting yourself at a serious disadvantage in terms of grades.
-- Computer communications; all about a topic which is all about abstracting away complexity so you don't need to know more than you need to use it, with constantly changing protocols. Fascinating, but not applicable.
-- Computer graphics; all about the basic primitives of 3D computer graphics; raytracing, rasterization, etc. How many people are really going to go on to use this stuff, that won't need to relearn it with regard to some specific API anyway e.g. OpenGL or DirectX? Again fascinating, but rarely applicable.
-- Hardware fundamentals; transistors, flip-flops, integrated circuits. How many of us will really be going on to deal with this sort of thing, when a washing machine can run Java for all it matters. It's a pretty specialized field. Really interesting, but we don't need to know it.
-- Project Design and Management; I can't summarize concisely enough all the ways this unit was a complete and utter waste of time. Truly depressing.
-- Computer communications 2; perhaps learning about the protocols is worthwhile, but do we really need to spend 6 months learning to implement linux (specifically) based servers in a robust way? The way it works based on interrupts and things is just horrible, and there are so many better alternatives to using low-level linux calls (even on linux). How many of us are really going to go out there are start building high-load linux servers from absolute scratch? Very interesting, but I'm sure I'll never use it.
-- Software engineering; maybe I've just not been exposed to it but I cannot believe people out there actually use UML in meaningful ways to do useful things. That might be my ignorance, but they didn't sell it and I know little of it; it was either common sense or nonsense.
-- OS fundamentals; which was all about disk caching; although very few people actually need to deal with that stuff (and we went into much more detail than you'd need to understand swap caches etc), and disks are getting phased out for increasing memory and solid-state drives.
-- More emphasis on open-source software (making, not using); incentivize people to be inventive and put useful code out there. Much more useful, impressive and practical than any assignment.
-- More emphasis on interacting with real-world cases, so CS students hit the ground runnin
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The "No Karma Bonus" checkbox is accessible through the Options button at the bottom of the Reply box.
Unfortunately this is now a permanent setting, so you have to remember to change it back after posting.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Computer communications; all about a topic which is all about abstracting away complexity so you don't need to know more than you need to use it, with constantly changing protocols. Fascinating, but not applicable.
Who do you think designs those protocols? When I was an undergrad, I participated in the design of the XMPP protocol. Various bits of my networking course were essential to understanding what was going on there.
-- Hardware fundamentals; transistors, flip-flops, integrated circuits. How many of us will really be going on to deal with this sort of thing, when a washing machine can run Java for all it matters. It's a pretty specialized field. Really interesting, but we don't need to know it.
I very strongly disagree here. The people who don't understand this stuff generally are the ones that write terrible code. Using a high-level language is great, as long as you understand exactly what is going on when the machine executes the code. Unless you understand things like cache hierarchies, you won't understand why, for example, writing a special case optimised version of some code can make the program slower overall. Unless you understand branch prediction, you won't understand why two similar high-level designs can have very different performance characteristics.
-- Project Design and Management; I can't summarize concisely enough all the ways this unit was a complete and utter waste of time. Truly depressing.
I completely agree on this one. It exists solely as a requirement for accreditation. If you want an accredited degree, you need a module like this. If the BCS were less incompetent, this one could go straight in the bin.
-- Software engineering; maybe I've just not been exposed to it but I cannot believe people out there actually use UML in meaningful ways to do useful things. That might be my ignorance, but they didn't sell it and I know little of it; it was either common sense or nonsense.
I always assumed the point of this kind of module (aside from the stupid accreditation requirement) was to show you how stupid UML is and make sure you wouldn't use it.
By contrast there was nothing on web technology, nothing on languages popularized in the last 10 years,
Why would there need to be? Most of the current popular languages are in the Smalltalk family, as long as you've learned one Smalltalk-family language, you're set. A few that are gaining traction recently are functional, but as long as you encountered Haskell or ML, you should be fine there too.
nothing on internationalization,
Now I'm completely lost. What on earth does this have to do with Computer Science? It's a toolkit issue for software developers.
very little on IPv6, etc.
That surprises me. My course covered IPv6 back in 2001...
-- More emphasis on open-source software (making, not using); incentivize people to be inventive and put useful code out there. Much more useful, impressive and practical than any assignment.
I agree there. The university that I attended recently offered a few final-year projects that involved contributing to an open source project, but I'm not sure how many of them got done. I'd love to see more engagement of academia by open source, with people offering to mentor students for open source projects of this nature.
-- More emphasis on interacting with real-world cases, so CS students hit the ground running.
Hitting the ground running is not the aim of an academic course, it's the aim of a vocational course. If you want a vocational course, don't do c
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I'm not saying the all things I brought up are useless. Far from it; many of them were the units I enjoyed most of all, but it is such a wide field that you need to make cutbacks to make room for some more practical aspects.
As much as I would regret not having them the article is all about CS grads being ill-equipped for the real world, and I think that's a valid criticism (especially when some are ill-equipped but have the knowledge to get up to speed in whatever sub-field no time, while others simply bluffed their way through because there were so few concrete tests of ability. Without the ability to distinguish the two the purpose of a CS degree is undermined, and articles like these are a consequence).
You can argue that CS is an abstract course and shouldn't be based on the current trends in computing, but as your XMPP example earlier shows, the stuff you learn in CS does need to be as practical to the wide field of computing as possible. (I've not been taught about XML by the way, surely something as important to XMPP as knowing TCP/IP)
I admit computer communications wasn't the best example, but as much as I enjoyed it I still think a case could be made for having different priorities. TCP/IP isn't going to change, the OSI model is pretty irrelevant really, and you don't usually need to know about it (certainly not at the level we're taught it).
The transistor level of computing, and to a lesser extend transport-layer network protocols, just isn't where stuff is happening right now (SCTP is interesting, but I think TCP/IP will be staying for now). Not many people end up writing multi-threaded linux servers or making chips (certainly not with transistors), yet semesters are spent on those and no time is spent on, say, the browser environment.
You can also argue that knowing these things about transistor logic and the specifics of protocols helps you do higher level things more efficiently, and I agree to an extent, but it does seem like a wasteful way to teach fairly basic good habits. Also that seems like a pragmatic consideration that's not in-line with CS as an abstract course.
I went into CS basically because I wanted to learn what makes computers tick, and that any future work I do would be based on that fundamental knowledge. But when we're being taught about an arcane linux call to open several read/write/error sockets at once to prevent locking issues due to a TCP/IP relic, or about csh or Perl's basic syntax, or about how the simplest components of a microprocessor work, I think the line between abstract computer science and useless trivia is being blurred, when there are so many really important things to teach.
Also "hit the ground running" is a bit of a vague statement; I'm really referring to the complete incompetence of an unfortunate subset of CS graduates to be of any use in the real world without substantial further training.
I'm not suggesting that CS students should leave uni, necessarily, with in-depth knowledge of RoR development using git, or whatever, rather that they shouldn't be quite so hopeless.
Anyway it's a complicated problem, but I don't think it's constructive to say "I used xyz in my career so we should keep it", or comparing what we learned here or there. I think it's a huge field, CS needs to cover its underpinnings and it's an impossible task, but that it could be doing a better job. I'm not calling any knowledge within the field of computing useless, just relative usefulness
(Sorry that this post is a bit rambly, it's late and you raise some interesting points)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
...we are going to see a heck of a lot fewer Universities and they are going to be far, far smaller in size. I would find it very hard to justify funding such a system beyond saying anyone who goes can pay for it themselves or the establishment can pay for them. This would make make University the sole preserve of the hyper intelligent and the rich.
It is absolutely true that in some UK departments it is actually the research grants that pull in the majority of the money but if you look far enough, sooner or later it's going to come from taxation. If I was a parent who couldn't afford to send my kids to Uni I may be sorely tempted to say I don't want to fund other people's children to go to Uni either.
Unfortunately this is now a permanent setting, so you have to remember to change it back after posting.
I'm pretty sure that's only true if you enable javascript in your browser.
At least I'll find out for sure with this post...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Many thanks - the points you make are interesting and useful.
So, is there such a thing as a BSIT? The only degrees I read about in job ads are BSCS or BSEE.
Yeah, communications majors may get a job more easily but "Do you want fries with that?" is not a great result from tertiary education.
Well, what's the result?
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Maybe if you HAD had a job, you'd know that impressions count. Broken personal homepage link for a consultant? Weak, dude.
I was right. Or at least without javascript it doesn't remember it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
By way of introduction, I run a high-end software consultancy[1] and have spend a good proportion of the last few years trying to recruit really good CS grads.
My overwhelming impression is one of massive variability in quality of CS graduates, which bears no relation to the result they got. Hence, a CS degree (even a first class one) is out of step with the realities of real jobs. It seems that the really good candidates succeed partly in spite of their CS training, and the really bad ones use their degree to cover over the cracks in their abilities for as long as possible when in a real work situation. Often, hiring a CS grad is like hiring a baby: you have to run around cleaning up after then for ages. They don't really start learning how to code until they start working on their first job - they're really only at trainee level at that point.
I'm slowly forming the opinion that a full time CS degree with no industry experience is the wrong training for professional programmers. We don't train doctors or engineers like that! Give me anyone who's passionate about coding, regardless of experience and even to a certain extent regardless of talent: they can be turned into a great software craftsman over several years, if they have the right personal skills and motivation. What's actually important is: how organised are they? What's their attention to detail like? Can they get on with other people? These skills are learned in real work environments, not in a lecture hall.
An apprenticeship scheme, working on the job with a sponsoring company, and perhaps a part time CS degree for the theory would work better. This should be taken over about five years: true software craft is hard and most achieving a good level stumble their way there in the dark for about a decade before they really know what they're doing.
If CS grads were more like this, then maybe they'll actually be in demand.
[1] http://www.edendevelopment.co.uk/