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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.
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
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.
Very true, Computer Science is a true degree, in that it's an academic endeavour, not a vocational one. It sums up everything that university should be about. I only wish the software engineering courses were moved off to where they should be – vocational collages.
Note: I'm not implying CSE is in some way inferior to CS – merely that if you want a vocational qualification, you should look at a vocational collage, as should employers.
Academics on the other hand should look at university courses.
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.
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.
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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!
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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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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
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.
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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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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
I learned geography here in the US, so I'm guessing "Indonesia".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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."
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