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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."
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.
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.
All the computer science uber-gods were mathematicians, physicists and engineers by training anyway.
That kind of follows naturally from the fact that CS didn't exist before they got their degrees and invented it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
To be honest, a CS degree is nice and all, but personally I think, having proper, real life experience just also means more. CS needs to be rethought anyway.
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.
Ah; but that would ruin the university and/or lecturer's numbers. And, thanks to various naive, "Hey, let's run this school like a business, punish failures, rewards successes" schemes, you can look bad because you failed too many people, regardless of whether they deserved it or not. Nobody seems to have figured out a quality metric that manages to capture "your quality, as expressed by the delta between the performance of these students under your tutelage vs. their hypothetical performance under other conditions" rather than a basic "what grades did your students get?"(the latter, perversely, makes people who provide honest feedback about bad performance look like bad teachers, while rewarding those who provide dishonest feedback about bad performance. Clearly an excellent metric.)
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
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
Not sure how long it would take me to get bored of that!
Not long (IMO). I had a bunch of manual labor jobs before (finally) going into IT: Tree work, construction, furniture repair and delivery, etc. There are some of those romantic notions about those jobs, and some of them were a blast, but that stuff takes its toll on your body, you do NOT get paid well, and the benefits usually pale in comparison. I also got wore down by the treatment you receive from others ... the assumptions made about intellect, etc. It was nice being outside and in the sun for a bit, but the joy of that was fleeting. Of course, IT bennies can blow too, but as much as I get bored from time to time, and get annoyed by the political jockeying and the decisions that are made based on personal relationships and nepotism, I count myself fortunate to be in this position (higher ed IT).
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