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To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Community college is not flashy and does not make promises about your future employability. You will also likely not learn current way-cool web development technologies like React and GraphQL. In terms of projects, you're more likely to build software for organizing a professor's DVD or textbook collection than you are responsive web apps. I would tell you that all of this is OK because in community college computer science classes you're learning fundamentals, broad concepts like data structures, algorithmic complexity, and object-oriented programming. You won't learn any of those things as deeply as you would in a full-on university computer science program, but you'll get pretty far. And community college is cheap, though that varies depending on where you are. Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit. Which means it's possible to get a solid few semesters of computer science coursework down for a couple of grand. Which is actually amazing. In a new piece published in the Communications of the ACM, Silicon Valley researchers Louise Ann Lyon and Jill Denner make the argument that community colleges have the potential to play a key role in increasing equity and inclusion in computer science education. If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem. Access to education is a huge contributor to that, and Denner and Lyon see community college as something of a solution in plain sight.
How about we start allowing ourselves to hire developers over 45 ?
There isn't a diversity problem. Diversity isn't related to any challenges in software engineering.
credits may not transfer and few offer 4 year degrees.
Even when credits do transfer some 4 year Colleges may force you to retake classes or say you may have X credits but only some of them counted to what you need to get the degree from us.
If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem
There's unequal participation. That doesn't mean there's a problem.
Does diversity results in better code? Please provide citations.
In order to solve something, there must be a problem first. As long as no one consciously attempts to exclude a group, there is no issue. If women or Blacks or whoever feels uncomfortable, that's their problem to solve. It's not anyone's job to make someone else comfortable. If more women join, the atmosphere will change of its own. No one needs to force "diversity training" (unfortunately, it's a thing) on anyone.https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/04/1915224/to-solve-the-diversity-drought-in-software-engineering-look-to-community-colleges#
At least in the minds of everyone but the Social Justice Warrior set.
Being a different skin color or sex doesn't improve coding ability. The year is 2017, not 1959; there are no legal structures keeping black people from studying programming or being hired by any company who choses to do so. Jim Crow is dead.
Stop pretending that the United States of America is the most racist nation in the world, when in actually it is probably the least racist country.
Just stop shoving this SJW bullshit down our throat, Slashdot. It isn't helping, and it isn't working.
I'm a big fan of Community Colleges for one reason, they're inexpensive. I think we can all agree that you don't need a degree to be a good software engineer, although a degree can increase the salary you can demand and the return on investment is worth it.
Given that, it makes sense to start in a Community College and then finish up at a local in-state university. If I look at Salt Lake Community College and Weber State University in Utah you could do this for under $20k with room to spare.
In the end, it's how well you can program, not what school you went to.
I agree that looking to other sources for hiring programmers is a good thing. Not everyone is rich or brilliant enough to go to Stanford and get a CS degree, nor does every developer in your company need to be a Stanford grad. I'm in systems engineering with no formal university training...I got a degree in chemistry way back when. Since most of what I do is integration work getting developers' "masterpieces" working in production, it's very clear that a large percentage of developers have very little idea about how the machines their code runs on work.
Real computer science education starts pretty close to first principles and builds up. It doesn't start at a web framework or query language 478 levels of abstraction up the stack and work down. The big problem with "software engineering" is that people actually do need some of this first-principles understanding to be useful outside of the abstracted environments. Both community college and university education is often derided as being too theoretical because unlike coder bootcamps they don't start you off at a point where most problems are solved. But if inexperienced developers had some clue about how the magic box works beyond gluing together more magic libraries and frameworks on top, software quality might improve.
Indeed, and white men in particular have higher barriers in education and employment performance metrics than many minorities for whom lower standards are applied. It's disgusting, "equal opportunity" should not mean lower performance acceptable.