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A Commencement Speech For 2013 CS Majors
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."
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)
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.
I'm sorry, but this is the vague timeless advice that isn't targeting the class of 2013. It gives no information that is insightful for today's graduates that wasn't also true for the last 30 years.
Even start-up / small companies have been an aspect of the industry since... what? The 80's? Before that you needed some capital just to afford a computer.
Why doesn't he address the upcoming death of the desktop? That China and India are developing a middle class and that China is graduating more engineers than the USA has citizens? The effects of large corporations steering large OSS projects into the ground? That the hardware has bottomed out and full computers only cost you $30. What about the consolidation of the Internet? Or how about the war on general computing? I mean, these are computer science majors, I imagine it's kind of a thing for them.
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.
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.
I'm working with a masters in a STEM field (Chemistry), and I make about 60% of the salary of the HR drone who happens to have a degree in History. The job market is so shitty for new grads in science that my company is starting chemists with undergraduate degrees at $13 an hour. This is not atypical for the industry, at least in my state. Trust me, I've been looking.
My friends that went into the trades already have houses and are making families. Those of us that went into science are living with roommates and scrounging by like we're 20 well into our 30's.
Don't get me wrong. There still are some good jobs out there. But similarly to what apparently (from my reading of slashdot) is going on in the software field, these positions require 15 years experience in a technique that is 12 years old.
That $13 an hour job I was talking about earlier? We received 63 resumes for the position. 63. The pay was listed. As was weekend work and mandatory overtime required.
Another interesting tidbit is that as health insurance continues to become a larger portion of the cost of the employee, the employers are experiencing a higher sunk cost per worker, shifting the sweet spot of overtime versus staffing up to higher OT values. My lab has cut two positions and moved to mandatory 45 hour base weeks, with mandatory additional overtime up to 55 hours.
The number of part time positions that are capped at 39 hours per week are also increasing.
Go into a trade. It isn't for dummies. Ignore your cultural bias.