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A Commencement Speech For 2013 CS Majors

Posted by Soulskill on from the enjoy-all-of-your-debt dept.

blackbearnh writes "Most commencement speeches are long on platitudes and short on practical advice. O'Reilly blogger James Turner has tailored a speech aimed specifically at the current batch of graduating CS majors. Among the advice that the 35-year industry veteran offers are to find a small company for your first job, but not one that is going to burn you out. Also, keep learning new things, but don't fall into the trap of learning the flavor of the day technology. Quoting: 'Being passionate about software is critical to being successful, because the field is a constantly moving target. What will net you $130K today will be done by junior programmers in five years, and unless you're constantly adding new tools to your belt, you’re going to find yourself priced out of the market. ... You are rarely going to get an opportunity to have your current employer pay for you to learn things, so learn them on your own and be in a position to leverage the skills when a new project comes along. But if you have a passion for technology, you'll already be doing it, and enjoying it without needing me to tell you to."

10 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. My commencement address by Latent+Heat · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Show up to work. 99 percent of success is being there.

    Be resourceful. Find ways to do your job without complaint or constantly and chronically asking for the next task to be done.

    Do these two things and your will be prosperous.

    (sits down to great cheers for having ended the speech in 30 seconds)

    1. Re:My commencement address by Jockle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      6: Have dummy Facebook and E-mail accounts at the ready. Employers will ask for username/PW access just so they can go through everything.

      Run away from jobs like that, if at all possible.

  2. Goes along with my poll: by agapeton · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the past 10 years how many CS graduated did you have to fire/have had fired because of their inability to learn something new? (i.e. because they need classes to hold their hands). Parent's shouldn't push their kids into a field about which the kids have no passion.

    1. Re:Goes along with my poll: by waspleg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not just their parents. I work in a public education. The entire system is set up to do that. I heard a show on NPR a couple weeks ago (Diane Rehm) about education "reform" and all of the panelists were saying the same thing: Kill Philosophy/History/Art etc and focus entirely on STEM and nothing else.

      The suits won a long time ago. College has been reduced to you paying for the training your corporate masters would rather pocket the money for (and in many cases not getting even that). Schools do not teach entrepreneurship or independence. They teach working on the plantation, being a good little serf that offers no objections to anything ever, while being as big an atom of consumption as possible.

      Welcome to the corporate states of America; check your soul at the door.

    2. Re:Goes along with my poll: by HeckRuler · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well yeah they push STEM, that's where the job/money/need is. Duh.

      As much as people would like to have a "classic" education and debate what the Greeks thought about spheres, it turns out that we need an educated workforce to function as a nation. I'd like to play games all day, but launching Kerbals to the moon won't pay the bills.

      The big question is CAN you even foster the sort of passion that helps people excel at STEM careers? If yes, then keep on pushing. If no, then we'll get a lot of mediocre programmers with a passion for philosophy. And hey, that's not a bad thing. It still pays the bills.

      A massive problem with colleges is that too many people are getting worthless degrees and can't get work out of college and are slung with hideous crushing debt. It used to be that having ANY degree would land you a cooshy job. Those days are over. (Hell, it used to be being able to afford college meant that daddy would line you up a cooshy job, but thankfully those days are over too).

      I'm still a big fan of artists, but I don't think they really need to go to college. And we still need a couple History/Philosophy/English majors. Just not this many.

    3. Re:Goes along with my poll: by Jockle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      it turns out that we need an educated workforce to function as a nation

      But that's exactly what we're not getting. Instead, we get rote memorization drones who think they're intelligent because they graduated from our lousy public schools with good grades, and then those people go on to be accepted into a degree mill that will drain them of any and all money they or the government may have. Alternatively, they may go to one of those 'good' colleges, but they'll come out with nearly zero practical skills because they're just rote memorization drones anyway.

  3. Re:$130k a year?! by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    See if you don't care about salary when you have a spouse and four kids to feed. And medical bills. And a mortgage. I'd say the majority of us in the software development and/or computer science would work different jobs if we didn't have these practical considerations. O'Reilly's speech was probably directed at the majority of people like us/you, not the rare few who can afford to go decades without balancing a desire for interesting work with a need to provide for one's family.

    Also, you may find that unchallenging implies uninteresting. So, unless you want to be bored, you probably can't avoid challenge.

  4. Re:$130k a year?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So don't have 4 kids and a mortgage you can't afford?

  5. true... true by dfn5 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been an IT professional since '95. Unix admin / DBA / network admin / SAN admin / Release Engineer / etc. etc. This advice really speaks to my career. You have to have passion for technology and you have to be willing to learn new things on your own. I run into so many people who want nothing to do with technology when they go home. I feel they are in the wrong industry.

    --
    -- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
  6. Re: research and theory = a poor setting to learn by Kaldaien · · Score: 3, Insightful

    research and theory = a poor setting to learn job skills and people in that setting may just do the min to pass and you can really see that in the filler and fluff classes.

    I don't know how many times I can stress this. Computer Science is not supposed to teach trade skills, there are specialized programs such as software engineering for that purpose. At my school, many of the students who could not hack theory quickly dropped out of computer science and enrolled in either information systems or software engineering; the way it should be.