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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.
> 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
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...
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.
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).
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.