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."
Minimum experience required... (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK is broadly speaking a service industry country which means we can support lot's of I.T. people in good-times, but also means we have a lot of excess employees when the economy goes tits up.
Re:It's not just British CS... (Score:5, Interesting)
> 70% of graduates in IT (don't think it's called CS here) don't even know what DNS is
Might be a different problem but what I often see is a CS graduate who does not know what DNS is but that will talk for hours on end about the theory of distributed systems.
> Personally, I would take a dropout any day if he knows his stuff.
My former employer was always trying to hire people with masters or phds, and those would not only suck at the technical interview (all they knew was Prolog), they would also want to design operating systems or create search algorithms while what we needed was testers or ajax web developers. So for a while I proposed to bring in dropouts, but it did not turned out much better; a lot of them were basement-know-it-all with a lot of personal issues.
We ended up hiring a lot from technical schools, those public or private schools were older people go to get a new career after being laid off in their previous 10- or 20-year jobs. Not all people from those schools are stars, but the programs are usually okay and the best students are pretty good.
Most IT jobs dont't need a degree. (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason is probably because having a CS Major over qualifies you for most jobs in IT. CS is great if you are going to be designing and building systems, but most jobs in IT are maintenance. The problem is modern governments who think that they need to push more people to get degrees to have highly skilled high tech workers. That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.
Re:Minimum experience required... (Score:4, Interesting)
I had that problem too but managed to build up a body of example code I could show to potential employers. It was all open source or personal projects, but it demonstrated that I knew what I was doing. Employers love that because usually they have to take a chance based on interview questions alone.
social engineering (Score:4, Interesting)
50% of jobs in the UK are obtained through networking. The proportion gets higher the higher you go. (I get the impression that this is certainly true at the higher levels in the US but there is much more "competition on merit" in the job market or whatever you like to call it there - or at least competition based on the interviewer liking the interviewee on paper and at interview rather than having known him for a few years prior.)
Computer science types are not very social.
The economy is shit.
"People can design a programming language and operating system but don't know the idiosyncracies of the Java API!!!" has nothing to do with it. An intelligent man can learn any imperative language quickly and program well, being much more cost-effective in the long run. It is a mark of a mediocre firm to have an insecure interviewer who cannot handle that the person he may be taking on might have better cognitive abilities, so he dismisses him because he can't roll off an optimally compact/write-only Perl script from the top of his head. The better firms will challenge you with theory (not "write a quicksort" but "let's explore this paper") and ideas ("how can we improve...?").
That is all.