British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market 349
An anonymous reader writes "British CS majors do badly in the job market — with, four years after graduation, a higher than average (for college graduates) unemployment rate and fewer returning to higher education. Brit CS majors also do badly immediately after graduation. No similar U.S. figures exist reports the Computing Education Blog."
Re:The difference between US and UK (Score:4, Insightful)
After graduating, it took me a year to get a job. This wasn't due to a lack of technical expertise, or interest in programming as a hobby.
One part of the problem was where 95% of the jobs were wanting 1+ years experience. What they didn't say is that they wanted commercial experience. With the remaining jobs, specialist fields were out (games, finance, etc.) as a result of lack of skills in that area.
With the remaining jobs, it was a matter of sending the CV out to those jobs. I found early on that I needed to chase them, as they wouldn't respond if the application was rejected. It was then getting feedback, and honing and improving the CV.
During that time, I participated in boost.org, learning about source control and implemented a simple application in my placement.
Universities should have source code control and bug/defect trackers as part of their requirement. This will help students when they get a job.
Also, Universities should help the students either get job placements during the summer holidays or to get them involved in Open Source projects. This would go a long way to showing experience and expertise. Also, the students should look at helping out answering questions on stackoverflow and the like. Then companies should be more receptive of this experience when considering applicants (especially since they can see the student's contributions).
Re:Perspectives from a British CS graduate (Score:2, Insightful)
But there is no "good" UK university for undergraduate CS, excepting perhaps Cambridge (and expect a mound of the sort of theory the dilettante technicians on Slashdot eschew). Hell, Oxford is mediocre in terms of actually providing CS education but has going for it the good name and the safe bet that a graduate will have been sufficiently challenged.
Engineering, law and medicine have clear professional standards which universities can aim to attain. CS is not a profession.
I can speak English but I can't speak for it.
Social Science is Harder than "Real" Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Think you deal with multi-variate systems? Compared to social scientists, no you don't. Think it's devilishly difficult designing a testable environment from which you can draw falsifiable conclusions? Try doing that with test subjects that have a will of their own, that you're also not allowed to dissect and examine afterward, nor abuse during the experiment (through oxygen deprivation, freezing, etc).
Social scientists use the same tools "real" scientists use, that is, math, statistics, computers, and other equipment, and they use them with equal skill and rigor. The difference is "real" scientists can blow things up, kill numberless lower life forms, disassemble systems, hold arbitrary things constant, and employ many, many other tricks that social scientists are unable or not permitted to use. Heck, even the Milgram guy shocked people with his experiments even though what he did was only playing head games with his subjects.
So the next time you're in your lab blending up a bunch of fruit flies to extract their DNA and looking down your nose at the "soft" scientists who "play" at doing experiments, consider how easy it would be to do science with both hands and feet tied behind your back while blindfolded.