What Student Developers Want in a Job (techrepublic.com)
Organizations desperate for software engineering talent tend to follow similar plays when it comes to attracting student developers about the enter the workforce, including offering perks like free food, beer, and ping pong. However, student developers have a much stronger appetite for other workplace elements when making employment decisions, according to a Tuesday report from HackerRank. From a news writeup: The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are professional growth and learning (58%), work/life balance (52%), and having interesting problems to solve (46%), according to a survey of 10,350 student developers worldwide. These far outpaced compensation (18%) and perks (11%), which they view as "nice to haves" rather than deal breakers, the survey found.
For many student developers, a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school, the survey found.
For many student developers, a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school, the survey found.
The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are
I think you will find that this is "interview bullshit". It is the sort of answer that people think the ask-er wants to hear.
The reality is that is you offer a candidate a lower than expected "nice to have" salary, say: 50% less, they'll walk to the next employer who is offering more.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
criteria students look for in job opportunities are professional growth and learning (58%), work/life balance (52%), and having interesting problems to solve (46%
The first and last items are excellent goals to have ,and indicate the students are pretty astute.
I would argue the second should be less important starting out of school though. If you weight your time a bit more toward career in your first few years especially, it can really set you up on an easier and more interesting career path later. That's not to say you should never do anything but work, but to say that when you ware working putting in extra time when you are younger does have value, just as taking some time totally away every now and then has value as well rather than trying to balance life time so much in the weeks you are working.
a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found. Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school
I am kind of astounded that 32% said that, I was a CS major and it was a mixture of learning some things in school, along with learning some things on my own - before, during, and after my CS degree. I kind of wonder how someone that only learned to code at school would fare out in the workplace where they need to learn new languages or techniques all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or, are they just assuming that they deserve a high starting salary, and therefore, the "perks" are what the deciding factors are?
Geez....you work for MONEY, and if you are bitching about not having any, then that should make your first priority coming out of school.
Get out, make as much $$ as you can, gain experience, make connections...and then, start making your moves up the line where you have time to consider perks, etc.
Jobs aren't meant to be fun....otherwise it wouldn't be called work...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The three most important criteria students look for in job opportunities are professional growth and learning (58%), work/life balance (52%), and having interesting problems to solve (46%), according to a survey of 10,350 student developers worldwide. These far outpaced compensation (18%) and perks (11%), which they view as "nice to haves" rather than deal breakers, the survey found.
Providing growth opportunities, a work/life balance, and interesting problems for new developers to work on is difficult for many companies. Many business problems are simply boring and mundane. The interesting projects are often tackled by more senior staff. Extra pay and silly perks are easy to provide by comparison. The hardest part of my job is ensuring my employees are working on interesting projects they enjoy and are being challenged with. I find it the most important thing for me to get right and is one of my top two priorities (along with Business/IT strategic goal alignment), but it is still very hard.
Good employers are still the ones who can provide those aspects that employees actually care about, but it isn't hard to see why most employers focus on more superficial benefits.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It is my experience that senior developers want the same things.
After doing this for 20 years, I don't care about video games at work, or anything else you are trying to use to keep me there. I'm going to work to work, and when I'm done I'm going home to have fun. All the companies pay in the same ballpark, and I'm paid enough to afford my own lunch.
Give me something to work on that isn't going to completely bore me to death.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You spend all day getting caught on slashdot inventing non-facts and passing them along as pseudo-information. That's hardly a career.
Maybe the reason you don't understand work-life balance is because not only don't you have a life, you honestly have no idea what a life is?
Seriously, why do we care what "student" developers want in a job?
Instead of memescript and meme basic.
And a full lot of it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
They should be grateful somebody is willing to give them a chance.
What you really want is to get hired by a pre-IPO company, assuming that is still a thing.
CS grads that don't code in any languages exist. ... anything. Even javascript, cough.
I've met them. They come to our coding group and want to learn java, python, php, ruby, C, C++, C#
Anything, except Rust, that is. Nobody gives a shit about rust.
Thankfully there is nobody at my job who acts like the no-insight pompous asshole Cayenne. We would have murdered them day 1. You don't belong in a work place, you belong in a LABOR CAMP you twat.
I could make 50% more by switching jobs to one that has crappy work-life balance and is unpleasant.
Or I could stay at my current job where I work from home instead of sitting in traffic, while doing exactly what I most love to do - mentoring programmers in security.
If you're reading this from the US, you're probably already in the top 2% highest-earning people in the world. Most Americans in IT are already 2%ers. You're already rich, no matter what Nancy Pelosi tells you. Getting a tiny bit richer isn't going to change your life much.
* Rich in terms of income. If you spend your money on Starbucks instead of slowly building wealth, that's na different kind of rich that has nothing to do with your job.
Sorry your degree is only good for 18 years then you need a commercial truck driver license.
> you work for MONEY, and if you are bitching about not having any, then that should make your first priority coming out of school.
> Get out, make as much $$ as you can
You're confusing the ends with the means. Money is something I use to take care of my family. My family is the purpose. I work to put gas in my jetski, because riding the jetski is fun. A pile of money, of itself, doesn't make your life better or more fulfilling.
If you give up your family life in exchange for more money, you're doing it backwards. You're sacrificing the goal to get the method.
As I said before, if you're reading this from the US, you're probably already in the top 2% highest-earning people in the world. You already make enough money. You might spend too much, but you earn more than 98% of people do - the money part is already taken care of. If you're totally sacrificing quality of life trying to get just a little more money, you're really missing out.
> Jobs aren't meant to be fun....otherwise it wouldn't be called work...
Imagine if your job WAS fun. Imagine getting pumped up by your work, doing something that gets you kinda excited. I've discovered that when I do something I'm excited about, I also do a better job than when I'm just punching the clock. If you pick three things that you enjoy, somebody has a job that combines two of your three favorite things. Somebody like technology and they like naked women - okay, I made good money doing tech for the porn industry. Now I do work that's even more fun.
> otherwise it wouldn't be called work...
If you look up "work" in the dictionary, it doesn't mean "unpleasant". Here's the dictionary definition of "work":
--
Work (noun)
activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
--
The definition of work is being active for a purpose.
A purpose, by the way, also happens to be what makes an activity fulfilling. If you spend 9-5 doing something that seems to be without purpose, you may not be working at all. You're doing something, but it doesn't meet the definition of work. Work is defined as activity with a purpose.
By and large, they are clearly answering what they think the ought to answer, or else what they think those commissioning the survey want to hear. It reminds me of those surveys in which people are asked how many times they have sex a year, the average answer being once every other day. You wish.
None of the Comp Sci majors I have ever been given were ready to work on my real world projects right after they graduated (not even as code monkeys). In every case I had to take a passel of time to teach them what they had to know to even start to be useful.
Skills should be utilized and heirarchies squished. Labels are what you buy at the supermarket.
Work/life is fair, except that work that's disjoint from life will always be second rate.
A challenge is the only thing that keeps you going. A job is where you should be paid to learn as much, if not more, than to actually do.
Programmers who study and design make fewer mistakes, so if you want a decent product, don't let the programmers near a machine until they have the software on paper.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
having interesting problems to solve
These students have it backwards, but I didn't get it when I was a student either. Do not look for a job in an interesting industry, or that is solving "interesting problems." Look for a job with good compensation, and with good people who value your skills. Then the problems they bring you will be interesting because solving them helps you and helps the people you work with, whom you like. Work for good people and they will also support you in growth and work/life balance.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Nearly two-thirds (65%) said they rely partially on self-teaching to learn to code, and 27% say they are totally self-taught. Only 32% said they were entirely taught at school, the survey found.
65 + 27 + 32 = 124%
These sociologists aren't much better than the idiots in HR.
If sociologists want the same amount of respect as real scientists then they had better start acting the part.
professional growth and learning (58%) = "I want fast promotions"
work/life balance (52%) "I want to work as little as possible"
having interesting problems to solve (46%) "I only want to work on what I want to work on"
compensation (18%) "I'd rather be lazy than highly paid"
and perks (11%) "I don't need these if I get everything else I want"
It's pretty sad that living in Mom's basement while being lazy and unmotivated at a low-paying job is an acceptable form of existence for an entire generation.
The reality is that is you offer a candidate a lower than expected "nice to have" salary, say: 50% less
That's true up to a baseline. But for example. I expressly chose not to live in California although I could have easily had more than a 50% boost in salary... I make enough that I am fine not making as much as I could.
I could see someone just out of school taking a position with a small startup that was working on something really cool, and making even 75% less than they might going to Facebook for example. And that would probably be a good choice (in general I would say working for a smaller company is going to be a better choice for anyone with ambition and a desire to have a good career)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. How did you learn to code?
2. Besides HackerRank, which of these platforms do you use to learn how to code?
3. Which languages do employers need?
4. Which languages do students know?
5. Which languages do students plan to learn next?
6. Which frameworks do employers need?
7. Which frameworks do student developers know?
8. What do student developers want most in a job?
Option (Global % / US %), +/- US Diff
- Professional Growth & Learning (57.8 / 45.0), -13.8
- Good Work-Life Balance (52.2 / 52.9), +0.7
- Interesting Problems to Solve (45.9 / 43.0), -2.9
- Smart People/Team (43.3 / 37.0), -6.3
- Company Culture (32.3 / 44.9), +12.6
- Company Mission (19.9 / 17.8), -2.1
- Compensation (18.4 / 34.7), +16.3
- Impact with Product (16.6 / 14.3), -2.3
- Preferred Tech Stack (15.3 / 23.9), +8.6
- Perks (10.5 / 15.1), +4.6
- Proximity to Where You Live (8.9 / 7.4), -1.5
- Stability from a Large Company (8.7 / 11.1), +2.4
- Funding and Valuation (5.8 / 3.4), -2.4
9. What does work-life balance mean to U.S. students?
Answer: Pay off their student loans.
Just another day in Paradise
"For many student developers, a computer science degree is not enough to teach them the skills they will need in the workforce, the report found."
If they're anything like me, what the school courses will have done is just teach them various languages' syntax. I didn't really "learn" how to write code until I had to actually use it to accomplish various tasks (mostly on the job).
#DeleteChrome
You spend all day getting caught on slashdot inventing non-facts and passing them along as pseudo-information. That's hardly a career.
Maybe the reason you don't understand work-life balance is because not only don't you have a life, you honestly have no idea what a life is.
If you believe Java, and the completely unrelated JavaScript languages comprise half the IT work "out there" then you are woefully ignorant.
I don't do Java anymore myself, but I used to do Java for many years as an enterprise developer - if you lumped Java and Javascript together (which I agree are unrelated except by name) I think that would be around half of all IT work you'd find in most companies today - especially so with Javascript which has really gained a pretty widespread use for server development...
If you wanted to work in IT I'm honestly not sure what would be a better choice at this point, maybe Python... .Net is always big of course but that's a little too tied to a specific platform (in terms of how it's used in real companies) for my tastes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fools!
They are cannon fodder, anyway. When they are in their 40s they will barely remember how they mainly wanted personal growth and interesting problems to solve, by that time what they'll want will be money to pay the mortgage and child support. Because at that time too younger developers will ask first and foremost for personal growth opportunities and interesting problems to solve rather than compensation...
Nazi homosexual recruiter RAY MORRIS pushing debunked Nazi propaganda even after corrected, #ROPE
We're talking about people will a software engineering degree. Their income will be about three times what's needed to pay the rent, put food on the table, etc.
> If you don't have enough to to pay the rent, provide for your family, and retire, what kind of life do you have...
That's not the people we're talking about. At least, not in terms of income - you said "have" rather than "earn". If you have a software engineering degree and consistently don't have enough money to pay the rent, you probably have a spend problem, not a salary problem. The phrase is "put food on the table", not "tip the waitress who put food on the table". If you're a software engineer and don't have enough money to eat, there's a good chance you should check out the inside of a grocery store and forget where your favorite restaurant is.
True, over 90% of millionaires made less than $100k - they invested over time, and earned returns on their returns on their returns. The time factor in investment is huge - investing early makes a HUGE difference.
That said, it's also easy to lose track of the real purpose and pursue money, so if you're working hard now and foregoing spending in order to retire at age 45, remember that's your goal. Don't be working 60 hours a week when you're 50 in order to get more money, after you already have $2 million.
You come to work and do the fucking job we need you to do and we'll give you a paycheck. Now quit being so fucking entitled that you think your wet behind the ears ass is in any position to demand anything.
Or you can live with your parents and work for McDonalds.
with web development you'll spend 70% of your time creating forms and doing client side validation, then doing server side validation and writing a bunch of useless unit tests.
then 20% chasing the latest development fad/buzzword/library
maybe 10% will be interesting if you're lucky.
There, I fixed it for you.
You can thank me later.
Have you never heard of embedded systems? C, C++, C# and so many other languages too numerous to list?
I've done some embedded systems work myself, and know C and C++ well (well I used to know C++ well but I think enough time as passed I may be cured).
However that has nothing at all to do with IT programming.
Even if it did, the number of embedded systems and OS programmers is way less than web developers so probably including that would not change percentages...
Game development is a whole other world.
All web development doesn't even account for anywhere close to half the work in IT.
But again, we are talking about IT work, which includes not just web dev but backend work. As I said, a lot of that has moved to Javascript these days when it's not Java.
I did mention C#, that's more specific to companies that are all MS stack though, and may make up the remaining 50% (not sure about that though).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see. You are right as long as we redefine the scope of IT to be "only those things that make you right." Nobody can argue with that (lack of) logic.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If work were interesting, you'd be paying your boss to do it instead of them paying you to do it.
No, I am not saying anything about who is right, simply saying that most people consider IT work to be development work done for large companies.
I have worked in a variety of companies, large and small. While it is true 30 years ago I was doing C and C++ for general development work in companies.
But in the last ten years the work large companies are doing is way more in Java and C# than C++ - or especially C, which is used in hardware development but not nearly so much any more for general operations programming... You would be insane these days to do much backend work in lower level languages.
Perhaps you have had different experiences, I relate what I have seen personally and also what I know from a large array of friends across the country who work in IT for large companies, none of them are doing C/C++...
I'll let you have the last response, because you simply seem to want to disagree without any proof - not even anecdotal! I guess you just like to argue, but I don't have the time to explain any further that which is plain if you just look around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ping Pong should be a natural right for all developers
Do you employ offshore contractors? You do? Thanks, but you can't pay me enough to put myself through that daily hell.
An actual job ðY
The best and brightest who have already proven themselves get those things. The rest of you get the crap jobs that the rest of us used to do. Somebody has to do them, and it's usually the new guy.
I had to laugh when I read about 'career advancement' and 'learning opportunities'. Every company I've ever worked with has tuition reimbursement, if you don't use it, that's your fault. The only obligation the company has regarding career advancement is to let everyone know that one job has just opened. If someone is too lazy to not apply for it, or they don't have the skills to get it because they didn't use the tuition reimbursement program, it's their fault. Not the company.
What they really want is all-expense paid trips to some conference somewhere so they can attend a 4-hour class and eat on the company dime. Been there, the only real value in those is networking so I can find another job.
What these naive wannabe-developers don't get is you learn more useful and long-term concepts from the crap jobs than the 'interesting' jobs. Like how to deal with office politics and how to suffer through work you don't like because your boss tells you too. Those are skills that last a lifetime instead of some shiny new tool-toy that will be replaced in a year when someone new gets hired and pushes the only tool they know how to use on everyone else because they are too stupid to learn anything new. Even though it's old and works just fine to those already using it.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Yup. Some companies won't even consider hiring commoners. Time for pitchforks?
Say you're 14, and you have [no] computer.
I washed dishes for two summers to pay for my first PC.
Someone may not be able to follow you in that if his or her parents and principal aren't willing to sign his or her work permit, which the law requires of all workers under 18 at least in my home state. (Source: Indiana DOL: Child Labor FAQs) The excuse my own parents gave for denying me a work permit was "Your education is your job. You need to concentrate on that." The aforementioned FAQ document also mentions that "schools have total discretion to refuse or revoke a work permit based on poor academics or attendance," and I doubt that most high school students have a 4.0 (A) average and perfect attendance for the entire preceding school year.
In addition, someone may not be able to follow you in that if all restaurants within walking distance have a blanket policy not to offer jobs to minors under 16 because all available positions have at least one duty that federal and/or state labor laws prohibit for children under 16. (Source: Indiana DOL: Prohibited and Hazardous Occupations for Minors) For example, a fast food restaurant may give the duty you mentioned (washing trays) to someone who also has the duty of cooking, and the law requires those who cook to be 16.