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Be True To Your CS School: LinkedIn Ranks US Schools For Job-Seeking Programmers
theodp writes "The Motley Fool reports that the Data Scientists at LinkedIn have been playing with their Big Data, ranking schools based on how successful recent grads have been at landing desirable software development jobs. Here's their Top 25: CMU, Caltech, Cornell, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Univ. of Washington, Duke, Michigan, Stanford, UCLA, Illinois, UT Austin, Brown, UCSD, Harvard, Rice, Penn, Univ. of Arizona, Harvey Mudd, UT Dallas, San Jose State, USC, Washington University, RIT. There's also a shorter list for the best schools for software developers at startups, which draws a dozen schools from the previously mentioned schools, and adds Columbia, Univ. of Virginia, and Univ. of Maryland College Park. If you're in a position to actually hire new graduates, how much do you care about applicants' alma maters?
I have a GED, and I assure you I earn substantially more than most CS graduates. Additionally, I continue to note a marked absence of (1) actual programming ability, (2) knowledge of even the most rudimentary information security practices, and (3) adequate understanding of core systems principles among recent CS graduates. Perhaps your perspective is the result of having grown acclimated to working with people with substantially reduced capabilities.
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In theory, schools can act as a crap filter for workers.
In theory. In practice, I test employees myself (and ask them to show me something they've done) and hire self-educated individuals because I know that schools pump out lots of trash.
This is the sort of reply I expected, so please allow me to bring my core point into sharper perspective. In the course of my fifteen years of employment in a variety of roles in assorted industries (network infrastructure, hosting, finance, biological sciences, etc), my firsthand experience has been that software developers "lacking" a CS degree have displayed a marked tendency to produce more functional, reasonably secure, and efficient/scalable code than their CS counterparts. They have also, on average, commanded substantially higher salaries in software development roles than their CS counterparts.
Degree mills and some otherwise respected educational institutions may not be happy about these facts, but it's important to note that they're not exclusively to blame for the situation. A computer science degree simply doesn't translate to skill in software development, largely because formal computer science has relatively little to do with programming. Thus, my original post is entitled "missing the point."
I've worked with a few CS graduates who purportedly had a specialized focus on information security. As it turned out, their ability to actually perform in their professional roles was woefully lacking.
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