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British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market
An anonymous reader writes "British CS majors do badly in the job market — with, four years after graduation, a higher than average (for college graduates) unemployment rate and fewer returning to higher education. Brit CS majors also do badly immediately after graduation. No similar U.S. figures exist reports the Computing Education Blog."
> I get job offers weekly that offer to pay me ~$60/hr throughout the U.S
No you don't. What you get is calls from headhunters, like everybody in IT. These are not "job offers" but merely opportunities for you to submit your resume. And the 60$/hr is the going rate for those opportunities, not what you personnally are being offered.
lucm, indeed.
As a UK CS grad, let me say that there are far too many unemployed I.T. people at the moment, many of which have a decade of experience. You want someone who knows your system already rather than someone you need to train up to that standard.
The UK is broadly speaking a service industry country which means we can support lot's of I.T. people in good-times, but also means we have a lot of excess employees when the economy goes tits up.
They also insist on 'teaching' students outdated technologies based on theoretical knowledge rather than any practical understanding of what is required for a job in the real world. I've recently interviewed several graduates who have top notch degrees in CS and who claim to have passed programming courses but don't know the first thing about how to actually solve a programming problem - in pseudo code or one of the languages they proclaim to know.
The main problem they all shared was that not one of them had any interest in programming outside of their course so had not given themselves any practical experience. They turned up for their classes, studied the poor quality material they were spoon fed, got their grades, but then wondered why they didn't just walk straight in to a top flight job. A good programmer is primarily a problem solver as they will adapt to whatever language is required. This is not something that is taught or encouraged in our Universities.
> 70% of graduates in IT (don't think it's called CS here) don't even know what DNS is
Might be a different problem but what I often see is a CS graduate who does not know what DNS is but that will talk for hours on end about the theory of distributed systems.
> Personally, I would take a dropout any day if he knows his stuff.
My former employer was always trying to hire people with masters or phds, and those would not only suck at the technical interview (all they knew was Prolog), they would also want to design operating systems or create search algorithms while what we needed was testers or ajax web developers. So for a while I proposed to bring in dropouts, but it did not turned out much better; a lot of them were basement-know-it-all with a lot of personal issues.
We ended up hiring a lot from technical schools, those public or private schools were older people go to get a new career after being laid off in their previous 10- or 20-year jobs. Not all people from those schools are stars, but the programs are usually okay and the best students are pretty good.
lucm, indeed.
I know this girl, Melody, she makes 4x that amount per hour, however she only works 10-15 minutes stints, about 8-10 times a day. She also could just throw a dart on the map and find a job in her area of expertise there (unless it's in San Francisco or in Utah, but for different reasons).
lucm, indeed.
lol at my last job I got a phone call to schedule an interview with myself from a company I submitted a resume to 3 years prior
yea I can make 4x that much no problem anywhere in the country, problem is I cant do that 8 hours a day 5 days a week
240 bucks a week if I bust ass is nothing to brag about ... its just a little extra cash for savings
oh I just got the joke (wooosh)
No, computer science is as stupid a name as social science.
It's called 'informatics' in Europe (not IT), and that reflects it being to information what mathematics is to math. It's such a simple and fitting word, it makes me sad that 'computer science' gets used so much and basically degrades the whole field down to the level of the social 'sciences'.
The article says that CS unemployment is (5.1% unemployed) is worse than unemployment for all courses (3.8%) for grads from 06/07 four years later. However a larger precentage of the CS cohort (81.5%) were in full time employment compared to all grads (73.2%).
So things are tough for all grads and many are not going into full time employment in any subject...
The reason is probably because having a CS Major over qualifies you for most jobs in IT. CS is great if you are going to be designing and building systems, but most jobs in IT are maintenance. The problem is modern governments who think that they need to push more people to get degrees to have highly skilled high tech workers. That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Meh, the joke's on you really.
C/C++ and Java still pretty much rule the roost in terms of jobs, with the MS .Net technologies bringing up the rear. Of these only the MS stuff is within the last decade.
Software tech does not move anywhere nearly as fast as a lot of folks like to believe.
That attitude is sure to get you hired somewhere respectable.
Here are some more fixes for the first post:
McDonalds
Johnny Stoner
What
beating
Gears of War
Not to mention that your last sentence is just an incoherent mess.
And the second one:
because
2 AM
Ending a sentence with a full stop is proper grammar.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I work in a senior IT position for a large UK company and we basically don't hire UK IT people for development, everything gets offshored to India.
Don't agree with offshoring as it leads to delays and higher costs but am not surprised by this study as high level management in the UK tend to see developers as bottom rung and equivalent exchangeable units so a guy in India has a lower unit cost per hour than a guy in the UK.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
For one, they're talking about the US jobs market- we here in the EU have it far better, with far stricter labour practices.
My advice is to only submit your CV to companies you actually want to work for; give any "recruiting" firms a wide berth (unless you really don't have anything to lose, i.e. you're desperate for your first job). And as a rough rule of thumb, companies don't contact you; real employers are more than inundated with high quality applications to muck around cold calling coding grunts. Unless you're respected and at the top of your field, the only people who will cold call you for a CV will be recruiting agencies.
50% of jobs in the UK are obtained through networking. The proportion gets higher the higher you go. (I get the impression that this is certainly true at the higher levels in the US but there is much more "competition on merit" in the job market or whatever you like to call it there - or at least competition based on the interviewer liking the interviewee on paper and at interview rather than having known him for a few years prior.)
Computer science types are not very social.
The economy is shit.
"People can design a programming language and operating system but don't know the idiosyncracies of the Java API!!!" has nothing to do with it. An intelligent man can learn any imperative language quickly and program well, being much more cost-effective in the long run. It is a mark of a mediocre firm to have an insecure interviewer who cannot handle that the person he may be taking on might have better cognitive abilities, so he dismisses him because he can't roll off an optimally compact/write-only Perl script from the top of his head. The better firms will challenge you with theory (not "write a quicksort" but "let's explore this paper") and ideas ("how can we improve...?").
That is all.
After graduating, it took me a year to get a job. This wasn't due to a lack of technical expertise, or interest in programming as a hobby.
One part of the problem was where 95% of the jobs were wanting 1+ years experience. What they didn't say is that they wanted commercial experience. With the remaining jobs, specialist fields were out (games, finance, etc.) as a result of lack of skills in that area.
With the remaining jobs, it was a matter of sending the CV out to those jobs. I found early on that I needed to chase them, as they wouldn't respond if the application was rejected. It was then getting feedback, and honing and improving the CV.
During that time, I participated in boost.org, learning about source control and implemented a simple application in my placement.
Universities should have source code control and bug/defect trackers as part of their requirement. This will help students when they get a job.
Also, Universities should help the students either get job placements during the summer holidays or to get them involved in Open Source projects. This would go a long way to showing experience and expertise. Also, the students should look at helping out answering questions on stackoverflow and the like. Then companies should be more receptive of this experience when considering applicants (especially since they can see the student's contributions).
The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a generic cognitive ability and/or personality test. Meaningless metrics are the bane of modern English work culture, from "performance targets" which encourage little more than gaming the system to "aptitude tests" which test little more than the willingness of an employer to pay for another con-man's puzzle book.
(Prior to my 18th year, I did many of these tests. One was part of the scholarship which allowed me entrance to a nice school. They are not hard. They are just pointless at best and harmful at worse.)
Have you actually done a verbal reasoning test? Most go absolutely nowhere to testing the kind of skill you indicate may be useful.
If you want to see whether someone can communicate effectively, read their work and get people including yourself to speak to them over time. One interview session is unlikely to be sufficient.
Recall, finally, that not all roles require an excellent communicator. Since computing has become cool, there are more cool people interested in computing: their ability to present themselves well (and unintimidatingly - it's easy for an interviewer to think he has an extrovert all figured out) may not make them the best for the job.
I've just graduated from Computer Science from a good British university. It was a good university in the rankings and is well known and I worked very hard and achieved a good degree. As a result, I've had a lot of job offers with very good salaries for a fresh graduate position (£30k to £45k) and had to turn down quite a few and pick the one which was most interesting and enjoyable to me. Finding a job hasn't been hard at all. The same applies for the rest of my year and my friends, all had good jobs to go to straight after university.
I did a really interesting course, with a great balance between theory and practice. We have some of the best lecturers in the country and had opportunities to work with a lot of cutting edge research and technologies. You don't have teachers, but researchers and lecturers working on really exciting things and up to date knowledge sharing it with their students. It was very useful and valuable, and quite different from what a CS Major is in the US. We actually study just CS (A-levels and GCSEs cover what Americans generally also cover alongside their Major, which are done at school). What I learnt and did on my course has been invaluable in my job, so it was definitely worthwhile (not to mention really interesting!)
Companies want *good* graduates, not just graduates. As I've ended up doing some recruitment myself in my current position, that comes from experience as well! If you are a good graduate who has worked hard, has a passion and an interest, did a good course and is ready and willing to learn and give their best, you can't find enough of them and they will get good jobs, and indeed they do!
I don't know how much people know about the UK university system, but there a good universities and bad universities. Good universities are top in the rankings, have a good reputation, and are about learning and gaining new knowledge. Bad universities are basically a result of the government pushing everyone into higher education. To go to a good university, you need to work hard at school, get good A-levels and work hard through your course and get an accredited meaningful degree from a university people will know exist. All the rest go to the bad universities (which are more like colleges - polytechnics which werent even previously called universities), require nothing to get in, party and have a good time and get a fairly meaningless degree at the end of it and very little knowledge. There's a big difference here.
Furthermore, CS in the article is grouped as containing all the other related-but-not-really degrees. From experience again, people with IT degrees (completely different to CS - CS is technical, IT is "business thinking") find it hard to find jobs. They can't really become managers as they don't understand what they are trying to manage. They can't go into technical positions as they haven't done it. On the other hand, as a good CS graduate, you have a lot of opportunities in a lot of different areas.
In conclusion, a good graduate from a good university will have no problem at all getting a job. Students from bad universities (ones which recruit, rather than select students) and who do strange courses (e.g. Things like Computer Games offered at some not-so-great universities) or things like IT degrees generally find it a lot harder. Theres some big distinctions here, which the article doesn't fairly represent.
having a portfolio with a wide variety of open source projects has done more for my employability than anything else
I'm out of IT now (teaching instead :-) ), but when I was a programmer my portfolio was gold. It needn't take all that long to do. Work on a project in your spare time for a while, take pieces of code out of it and document why you did what you did. Because I was an XP coach for several years, on my own open source projects I did a kind of mini planning game complete with iteration plans, velocity, etc, etc. I included some of these in my portfolio as well. I got more feedback about that than anything else, which surprised me somewhat. One manager even told me that he hired me specifically due to the planning artifacts (which made him comfortable that I knew how to work in a controlled manner).
A lot of time people put in insane hours at work but leave nothing for themselves. It can really, really helps you professionally to take a few hours a week out for yourself so that you can make a portfolio. If you aren't working 40-hour-weeks, it pays to tell the boss that you need to take some of those overtime hours back to practice programming techniques. They get a better programmer and you get a portfolio (and new skills). It's a good trade-off.
After being unemployed for 9 months as a Comp Science grad, here's my experience of a typical job ad:
... Wow, this turned into a really long post...
Junior Web admin - £18,000
Required Skills:
HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Java, Apache, SQL, C, VB.net, ASP, Active Directory, Microsoft Small Business Server, our obscure CMS, Photoshop, Flash.
2 years experience a must!
If the impossibly long list of skills doesn't put off the graduate (some of which are impossible to learn on your own due to the setup they need), the experience they require will do (should be illegal to advertise a junior position as requiring professional experience). Companies are completely unwilling to take on staff and help them gain the skills they need. They way all those skills, which only an experienced dev will have, then they want to pretend it's an entry level position so they can pay a highly skilled job the same as they pay people who answer telephones and type data into spreadsheets.
There are companies which do offer genuine on the job training and proper graduate jobs, mostly large tech companies, but these literally get hundreds of applicants (Jobsite.co.uk show application stats which is especially soul destroying). Meanwhile all the other companies which make no effort on this front moan to the government that there's a skills shortage (which they're one of the causes of) and try to get them to attract some Eastern European developers and the problem gets worse.
But then, I'm a bit bitter as I've ended up as the sole web developer in my company (who's earning £16,000 a year after 3 years) and is currently on the verge of losing my job as it's going to be outsourced to Bulgaria. Of course they haven't told me this yet but I've overheard phonecalls they didn't want me to hear, I've been pulled off of active development work and have been doing heavy documentation work and reports on improvements needed. Guess they think I'm stupid and haven't noticed. Perhaps I am stupid for not leaving, just worried that I'll spend another 6 months on the dole which would bankrupt me this time.
Not sure what it's like there, but herein the UK, there's a certain "Cover your ass" culture in any company of any significant size.
Sure, the dropout is probably going to be fine, but what if he's rubbish? Other people, with the benefit of hindsight will point to the fact that he dropped out and use that as proof you did a bad job.
If you get a guy who has a degree at least you can legitimately claim here was no way to know, if he doesn't work out.
What planet are you on?
That's because n university is not a vocational school. It's purpose is to teach theoretical knowledge, not prepare people for a job. And yes, that means that you shouldn't go to one if your goal is a well-paying job outside academica.
University trains scientists; you're looking for engineers.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yeah, keep in mind that you're trying to hire from the same pool of applicants who are having finance jobs dangled in front of them. When you're 22, 35K + bonus sounds like winning the lottery.
Yeah, but my friends who took those jobs become more and more boring as time goes on.
I went with the £25k, interesting job (in outer London). I have less spare cash, but I also have no pressure, a relaxed working environment, a shorter working week, more holiday, there aren't any w^Hbankers in the office, and most importantly I contribute something to the world rather than steal from it.
My advice is: when you're 22, £25k is still way more than when you were a student. Look at the other things.
(There are a few places that pay bank-range basic wages but are more interesting, like Google, although finance still wins because of the bonuses.)
I did a stint on the milkround interviewing for Logica many years ago and did 100's of interviews of grads and grad+1's. You need to sell yourself; too many grads came in with what they thought were great CS degrees but were actually terribly theoretical and not practical for software development. We also kept stats on how grads did at the company and which degree courses they were on. It was well known in the sector that Oxford and Cambridge grads did poorly against grads who had come from more hands on courses.
So, my view is that if you have open source software development experience - and can demonstrate it (i.e. not just a few crappy bug fixes, but thought leadership, delivering results etc - then apply for the grad+1 jobs and make your case that you produced software in a highly competitive environment and was able to achieve results even though you were doing this on a shoestring;/late nights etc.
SELL YOURSELF.
The problem is, at least here in Canada, a 2 year comunity college diploma that probably prepares you better for an actual job writing actual software for actual real world people is looked down upon by most employers. There is a noticable pay difference and the large number of jobs will just shred your resume if it doesn't have a university degree on it.
This is the attitude that needs to change. I think a fairly large chunk of university students would much prefer a "no bullshit" education in the field they hope to make a living in.. but end up going the university route for resume food.
Think you deal with multi-variate systems? Compared to social scientists, no you don't. Think it's devilishly difficult designing a testable environment from which you can draw falsifiable conclusions? Try doing that with test subjects that have a will of their own, that you're also not allowed to dissect and examine afterward, nor abuse during the experiment (through oxygen deprivation, freezing, etc).
Social scientists use the same tools "real" scientists use, that is, math, statistics, computers, and other equipment, and they use them with equal skill and rigor. The difference is "real" scientists can blow things up, kill numberless lower life forms, disassemble systems, hold arbitrary things constant, and employ many, many other tricks that social scientists are unable or not permitted to use. Heck, even the Milgram guy shocked people with his experiments even though what he did was only playing head games with his subjects.
So the next time you're in your lab blending up a bunch of fruit flies to extract their DNA and looking down your nose at the "soft" scientists who "play" at doing experiments, consider how easy it would be to do science with both hands and feet tied behind your back while blindfolded.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Like plumbers, HVAC, and electricians a lot of work is hands on or keeping a in place systems running, and classes loaded with theory do not give the skills needed to do the hands on part of the job now it may help on the high level design of systems but in meany places you are better off working your way up and starting with the skills needed for the hands on part and maybe getting the high level theory later on. Now some theory nice but most colleges classes are to theory loaded for low level jobs and they have way to much math for them as well.
Also what does art history and music filler classes help you to be a better IT guy, plumber or electrician?
Now IT should have a apprenticeships system maybe mixed with a tech school and after you have the base skills and did some real work then you can move to maybe a MBA if you want to be a manager.
Also you can keep the old CS system or parts of it in place for people who want to go just for the higher level stuff but still even then doing a apprenticeships first then going back for the high level skills if you don't want to do the hands on parts is still better then just doing 100% class room.