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."
Definitely not the case in the US (Score:2)
I get job offers weekly that offer to pay me ~$60/hr throughout the U.S.. Seriously, I can throw a dart at the map and find a job. I am a recent graduate of 2010. I had a job 2 weeks before graduating, and I was by no means an outperforming student. 2.7 GPA.
Re:Definitely not the case in the US (Score:5, Informative)
> I get job offers weekly that offer to pay me ~$60/hr throughout the U.S
No you don't. What you get is calls from headhunters, like everybody in IT. These are not "job offers" but merely opportunities for you to submit your resume. And the 60$/hr is the going rate for those opportunities, not what you personnally are being offered.
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The saddest thing is that they don't mess with your career because they are evil, they just don't care. I received so many calls for opportunities at the company I was already working, it convinced me to get out of the resume websites and apply on gigs only via my existing network. Which anyways usually is enough after a few years in IT.
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lol at my last job I got a phone call to schedule an interview with myself from a company I submitted a resume to 3 years prior
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I have been on the hiring end of it. I was disgusted and subsequently quit working with a big name 'Technology Consulting' firm - who shall remain anonymous - after their rep repeatedly referred to recruitment "sessions" (where they have a bunch of applicants come to their office and have me interview them) as "cattle call". Really?!! That told me a lot about how much value they placed on PEOPLE that they were working with.
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How do you know? (Score:2)
If anybody started sending my resume around with the line "this person is really keen to work for you" (without m explicit consent), I'm sure my union would help me sue the hell out of them... (Well, granted that they're within reach of the law, e.g. residents in EU).
But how do I know if someone asking for my resume is sincere? If he works for company X, can I safely assume he's not going to pitch people for current
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For one, they're talking about the US jobs market- we here in the EU have it far better, with far stricter labour practices.
My advice is to only submit your CV to companies you actually want to work for; give any "recruiting" firms a wide berth (unless you really don't have anything to lose, i.e. you're desperate for your first job). And as a rough rule of thumb, companies don't contact you; real employers are more than inundated with high quality applications to muck around cold calling coding grunts. Unle
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A favorite tactic is also to suggest that someone you are working with is about to leave, and has suggested you as a prospect. Normally I turn to the 3 other guys I work with (all partners) and ask which of them is leaving. The recruitment guy normally hangs up at this point.
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They also insist on 'teaching' students outdated technologies based on theoretical knowledge rather than any practical understanding of what is required for a job in the real world. I've recently interviewed several graduates who have top notch degrees in CS and who claim to have passed programming courses but don't know the first thing about how to actually solve a programming problem - in pseudo code or one of the languages they proclaim to know.
The main problem they all shared was that not one of them h
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).
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I did a stint on the milkround interviewing for Logica many years ago and did 100's of interviews of grads and grad+1's. You need to sell yourself; too many grads came in with what they thought were great CS degrees but were actually terribly theoretical and not practical for software development. We also kept stats on how grads did at the company and which degree courses they were on. It was well known in the sector that Oxford and Cambridge grads did poorly against grads who had come from more hands on
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That's because n university is not a vocational school. It's purpose is to teach theoretical knowledge, not prepare people for a job. And yes, that means that you shouldn't go to one if your goal is a well-paying job outside academica.
University trains scientists; you're looking for engineers.
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The problem is, at least here in Canada, a 2 year comunity college diploma that probably prepares you better for an actual job writing actual software for actual real world people is looked down upon by most employers. There is a noticable pay difference and the large number of jobs will just shred your resume if it doesn't have a university degree on it.
This is the attitude that needs to change. I think a fairly large chunk of university students would much prefer a "no bullshit" education in the field the
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That attitude is sure to get you hired somewhere respectable.
Here are some more fixes for the first post:
McDonalds
Johnny Stoner
What
beating
Gears of War
Not to mention that your last sentence is just an incoherent mess.
And the second one:
because
2 AM
Ending a sentence with a full stop is proper grammar.
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And "infact", and starting sentences with lower-case.
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And there I was thinking precision typing was a useful skill for a programmer. I don't think I'd trust any major code syntax to someone who can't remember that capital letters go at the beginning, full stops go on the end...
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um uyanna fries with fat?
No, I want potato strips deep fried in lard.
Re:Definitely not the case in the US (Score:5, Funny)
I know this girl, Melody, she makes 4x that amount per hour, however she only works 10-15 minutes stints, about 8-10 times a day. She also could just throw a dart on the map and find a job in her area of expertise there (unless it's in San Francisco or in Utah, but for different reasons).
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yea I can make 4x that much no problem anywhere in the country, problem is I cant do that 8 hours a day 5 days a week
240 bucks a week if I bust ass is nothing to brag about ... its just a little extra cash for savings
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oh I just got the joke (wooosh)
Jobs market? (Score:2)
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.
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It doesn't help that most of the supposed IT people that I interview are woefully inept when it comes to anything above desktop support work. Even the staple (Windows) exam questions like "What are the 5 FSMO roles" or "How would you recover a failed domain controller" or even "What are the stages of name resolution" usually result in blank stares. Once you start getting into more complex questions such as the pros and cons of running different systems in virtual environments they mostly just give up entire
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CS in the UK is for people who seem to know nothing about computers ...
They are the people who cannot program, manage networks, or do tech support ... they are therefore the first to lose their jobs
I suspect CS in the US is a different course and includes all the useful skills the employers need
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My area of expertise is linux software development. I know how to talk to LDAP (the underlying technology of windows domains) but as far as which buttons to push in the oujia board known as windows to make something happen? Pfft, you'd be better off asking a desktop support wienie. You need me to make a
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Because those aren't CS questions- those are sys admin questions. CS isn't training to become a sys admin, it's to become a programmer. You wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer who designs a car to fix it, you don't hire a CS grad to run your network.
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.
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As an employer, of a tech team of nearly 20 who's actually hiring now as well I would very much like to agree with AmiMojo.
The single biggest contributor to whether we will hire someone or not is whether we are convinced that they are actually really good.
Qualifications and degrees to NOT say that. Having a shiny last job does not say that.
What says it is two things;
- code we can see that is good, whether from our aptitude test or code that you wrote and can show us (legally, without breaking NDAs)
- an ob
Not a jobs issue (Score:2)
Whilst what you say may be true about IT support where the market was flooded long before the unemployment rate started to rise in the recession, what you say absolutely isn't true of software development. I find IT support recruitment to be rather sporadic though, there's so many good people out there who can't get jobs, and so many bad people that have jobs. I find companies desperately struggle when it comes to recruiting good IT staff- it's a blaggers industry, and those who are best at blagging get the
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It always surprises me when fellow CS people or engineers say stuff as if there is no other way.
I would say that any software system is sufficiently complex to rival any legal system or medical system.
Doctors go through years of general medical school. After that, they really can't do anything serious. To actually 'operate', they need years of residency training with an expert in their field. Only then can they actually operate. Once they get their niche specialization, they are paid very well just for
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I think it's because the general attitude towards CS is that we're like plumbers. Once you take the computerin' class, you know everything that goes on inside a computer. When's the last time a plumber said to you, "Sorry, my area of expertise is sinks. I can't fix your toilet."? The general public (including the hiring class) just don't understand that.
I wish we could *find* grads for my work.. (Score:2)
We don't recruit many people here, maybe 5-6 grads a year into an IT department of 80, but find ourselves wading through hundreds of applicants, most of whom can't score above high-school level in the numerical and verbal reasoning SHL tests that we ask them to do. Personally, I think we're doing something wrong in our recruitment, but after a 6 month recruitment programme we only ended up with 3 out of 6 grad positions unfilled this year. That's for a £25,500 a year job in Berkshire.
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The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a ge
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OP said that people were tested to have those skills at "high-school level" (what is high hyphen school in England anyway? did the verbal reasoning test include Scots/Americanisms?).
The underlying questions, then: what is a university level of verbal and numerical reasoning? Who says? What has attainment of this higher level on these tests been shown to mean?
Put another way, let's assume that the grading on these tests is sufficiently scientific that performance by a wide range of graduates has been recorde
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Have you actually done a verbal reasoning test? Most go absolutely nowhere to testing the kind of skill you indicate may be useful.
If you want to see whether someone can communicate effectively, read their work and get people including yourself to speak to them over time. One interview session is unlikely to be sufficient.
Recall, finally, that not all roles require an excellent communicator. Since computing has become cool, there are more cool people interested in computing: their ability to present themsel
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Inflation puts your £18k at ~£22.5k. East Berkshire is fairly close to London. £25k will put off the best candidates interested in money, and the stupid reasoning tests will put off those interested in the work for its own sake.
Why are people even hiring graduates when there are many skilled people with years of experience now out of work? Your graduate is not some perfect blank slate to be decorated precisely in your image - he's merely someone with less experience and less proven ability
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Yeah, keep in mind that you're trying to hire from the same pool of applicants who are having finance jobs dangled in front of them. When you're 22, 35K + bonus sounds like winning the lottery.
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Yeah, keep in mind that you're trying to hire from the same pool of applicants who are having finance jobs dangled in front of them. When you're 22, 35K + bonus sounds like winning the lottery.
Yeah, but my friends who took those jobs become more and more boring as time goes on.
I went with the £25k, interesting job (in outer London). I have less spare cash, but I also have no pressure, a relaxed working environment, a shorter working week, more holiday, there aren't any w^Hbankers in the office, and most importantly I contribute something to the world rather than steal from it.
My advice is: when you're 22, £25k is still way more than when you were a student. Look at the other things.
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Wait a minute (Score:5, Informative)
The article says that CS unemployment is (5.1% unemployed) is worse than unemployment for all courses (3.8%) for grads from 06/07 four years later. However a larger precentage of the CS cohort (81.5%) were in full time employment compared to all grads (73.2%).
So things are tough for all grads and many are not going into full time employment in any subject...
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.
Companies bring in foreign secondees (Score:2)
Not suprising when we offshore everything (Score:3)
I work in a senior IT position for a large UK company and we basically don't hire UK IT people for development, everything gets offshored to India.
Don't agree with offshoring as it leads to delays and higher costs but am not surprised by this study as high level management in the UK tend to see developers as bottom rung and equivalent exchangeable units so a guy in India has a lower unit cost per hour than a guy in the UK.
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If it cost more financially, it wouldn't happen.
It can be much more inefficient and exact a personal cost on the Western managers running it, but delays are often management error. Some expectations about what can be achieved and when need to be reset, whereas new things are also possible.
That's not my observation (Score:2)
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.
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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.)
Nope. This is totally dependent on boom/bust cycles. When IT is in a bubble any monkey with a resume can get a job. When the economy is in the toilet, like it is now, then you're back to nepotism. Of course, we're still hiring lots of H1-Bs, even though many skilled IT workers went into other careers they're not happy with and would be glad to jump out of if there were jobs available. I do keep hearing IT is doing well again, but I'm not seeing the millions of jobs. Then again, I'm living in bumfuck nowhere
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"50% of jobs in the UK are obtained through networking."
Evidence or STFU.
I'm sure there's a bit of an exclusive club atmosphere at the very top, but the rest... I don't believe you for a second.
Maybe deserved? (Score:2)
I graduated a couple of years ago, and of the class of ~300 there were only ~10 who really seemed to know what they were doing -- people were reaching the final year of the Java-based course without knowing the difference between classes and objects, for example; and the university was dropping the "hard" modules like "how compilers / interpreters work" in favour of more "hello world in PHP" :-(
I'm *really* glad that I got lazy with the course, and spent my time writing my own code -- having a portfolio w
Portfolios (Score:3)
having a portfolio with a wide variety of open source projects has done more for my employability than anything else
I'm out of IT now (teaching instead :-) ), but when I was a programmer my portfolio was gold. It needn't take all that long to do. Work on a project in your spare time for a while, take pieces of code out of it and document why you did what you did. Because I was an XP coach for several years, on my own open source projects I did a kind of mini planning game complete with iteration plans, velocity, etc, etc. I included some of these in my portfolio as well. I got more feedback about that than anything
My two cents/pence (Score:2)
Perspectives from a British CS graduate (Score:2)
I've just graduated from Computer Science from a good British university. It was a good university in the rankings and is well known and I worked very hard and achieved a good degree. As a result, I've had a lot of job offers with very good salaries for a fresh graduate position (£30k to £45k) and had to turn down quite a few and pick the one which was most interesting and enjoyable to me. Finding a job hasn't been hard at all. The same applies for the rest of my year and my friends, all had goo
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tl;dr Oxford or Cambridge?
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There are plenty of *other* good universities in the UK, depending on your field; Southampton is good for Engineering, LSE for Law, Edinburgh for Medicine, UCL for English, etc.
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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 sp
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What on earth are you blathering about?
Academic standards for CS are high at a variety of UK universities. Hell, Tim Berners-Lee (You know, invented the Web) is part of the CS faculty at Southampton. Imperial College is academically brilliant at pretty much all technical and scientific disciplines.
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Interesting. They must not have liked you very much. They tend to give lower offers to people they actually want.
IC have a worldwide rep. Didn't do my degree there, personally, and I'd think twice before holding forth in such ignorance as yourself.
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yup we need more detail on the Comp Sciences split - Computer Studies, IT, Business computing, Computer games != Computer Science
I know several Computer Studies courses you can pass without getting anywhere near writing code or understand programming at all.
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I don't think so. My experience suggests that Sosigenes' post is rather perceptive and that the AC parent has (a) not had much contact with the higher education system since he graduated and (b) has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. AC may be right to whinge about clueless recent graduates who know nothing. But Sosigenes correctly identifies why there are so many bad graduates around. it is all down to the belief that the Blair-era govenments had that just becau
The problem for UK IT graduates (Score:3)
Junior Web admin - £18,000
Required Skills:
HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Java, Apache, SQL, C, VB.net, ASP, Active Directory, Microsoft Small Business Server, our obscure CMS, Photoshop, Flash.
2 years experience a must!
If the impossibly long list of skills doesn't put off the graduate (some of which are impossible to learn on your own due to the setup they need), the experience they require will do (should be illegal to advertise a junior position as requiring professional experience). Companies are completely unwilling to take on staff and help them gain the skills they need. They way all those skills, which only an experienced dev will have, then they want to pretend it's an entry level position so they can pay a highly skilled job the same as they pay people who answer telephones and type data into spreadsheets.
There are companies which do offer genuine on the job training and proper graduate jobs, mostly large tech companies, but these literally get hundreds of applicants (Jobsite.co.uk show application stats which is especially soul destroying). Meanwhile all the other companies which make no effort on this front moan to the government that there's a skills shortage (which they're one of the causes of) and try to get them to attract some Eastern European developers and the problem gets worse.
But then, I'm a bit bitter as I've ended up as the sole web developer in my company (who's earning £16,000 a year after 3 years) and is currently on the verge of losing my job as it's going to be outsourced to Bulgaria. Of course they haven't told me this yet but I've overheard phonecalls they didn't want me to hear, I've been pulled off of active development work and have been doing heavy documentation work and reports on improvements needed. Guess they think I'm stupid and haven't noticed. Perhaps I am stupid for not leaving, just worried that I'll spend another 6 months on the dole which would bankrupt me this time.
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Perhaps I am stupid for not leaving
You're not. Wait for the redundancy pay and then, in your next interview, you can tell them that you were made redundant from your last position. I've always found interviewers are sympathetic to this.
I know what you mean though. In my last job, my boss was such a prick that he still made me sit in on a call on my last day to give my opinion on a project that I wasn't going to be involved in in a few hour's time because they'd outsourced it and given me my notice. Incredib
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It is almost always better to move to another position while employed, because it doesn't give the hiring party a clue that you are desperate. It really impacts your salary otherwise at a lot of places and the redundancy pay rarely compensates, unless you are at the end of your career - not at the start.
Start looking for another job right now, while there is no hurry and you don't need to accept the first thing that gets offered. Also, moving out before the axe falls feels much better than getting replaced
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HR paranoia (Score:2)
The 'required skills' of a lot of job specs always make me laugh with their massive list of requirements. I don't honestly understand why they do it because you'll never find someone with all those skills.
Just guessing: If you reject someone who meets all the requirements in favor of another applicant who has something useful you weren't expecting, then they might accuse you of discrimination. So list everything you might conceivably base your decision on. Of course, anti-discrimination laws are a great idea - in a parallel universe where HR departments adopt them in spirit. Back in this world, HR departments interpret them in the most paranoid and defensive way possible and try to turn recruitment into a qu
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(who's earning £16,000 a year after 3 years)
Oh man, after reading further above about the guy on £30-45k I felt my £23k was a bit lousy.
Wait for your severance package and look for something in higher pay. Where are you based? The going starter rate for graduate developers here is £20k
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That said, at least I've now got a nice long list of skills through this job. Nicest skill I've learnt was Drupal development. Comparitively uncommon (not taught in unis) yet highly sought after a
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My favourite was ~3 years ago when all the jobs I was applying for were demanding 3+ years experience with Windows Server 2008...
Being an IT graduate sucks unless you either have connections or, like me, got lucky and found a decent contract agency who were willing to put some effort into finding me a suitable job; after a year of on and off short-term contracts arranged by idiots, where I learned nothing, this agency managed to find me a Helpdesk role that quickly migrated to a Server Admin role that put m
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If you're interested in work in London, you've got a reasonable grasp of Java and you love web development drop me a line ( j s h i e l l at yazino com). We're a small company so we can't currently manage people entirely sans experience, but a couple of years + passion may well do the trick and we're happy to train to fill in the gaps.
And we're desperate for good, passionate web developers.
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I'm thankfully employed having spent over a year on the dole. If you're worried about your job now, it doesn't change much. To succeed and change jobs interviewers expect the impossible despite experience (Q: You know about static assertions? A: Yes I use them to guard external APIs [and why]. Q: How are static assertions implemented in a cross platform manner? Q: Ugh I er use them. I've not written my own handlers. I've not had time to research that - I've got deliverables and I'm relied upon.).
Things aren
Computer scienceS - NB last character (Score:2)
From what I can see this data include Computer Studies and Computer Science, These are diff degrees in the UK. You can quite easily get a Comp Studies (esp from a ex-poly) without touching a line of code and just know how to drive Photoshop. dreamweaver etc.
The data needs more detail to split out a proper Comp Sci degree from the Studies degrees
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And neither includes Information Science, which is what you get taught elsewhere. Seriously: naming a study Computer Studies is asking for trouble. Give it a better name and include rigorous math. Computer Science is a big red sign telling everyone "vocational studies, not a real academic subject". Small wonder you don't get Ph.D's.
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*cough* bullshit *cough*
Computer Science where I studied (Southampton) included mathematics, formal proofs, compiler engineering, neural networks, AI, optimisation theory, computer vision and a whole bunch of other academic studies. And there absolutely are Ph.D's in it.
CS is a rigorous academic subject in a lot of places. Your wires are crossed somewhere.
Well (Score:2)
As someone who graduated from a UK university (Maths primarily, CS second, part of the University of London) and works in education, I'll tell you why.
- The people who enter CS degrees have zero CS experience or knowledge when they join. Blame the A-Level's and/or CS being "playing with computers" in their eyes. On my courses, I didn't meet a single person who'd programmed for themselves (i.e. something other than a fill-in-the-blanks coursework) before they started university. I was sitting there spotti
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Same here - any university that doesn't teach you mathematics first, is a failure. And the name "computer studies" has a lot to do with that. Call it "Information Maths" or Information Science and expectations will change.
most IT job needs apprenticeships not degrees (Score:3)
Like plumbers, HVAC, and electricians a lot of work is hands on or keeping a in place systems running, and classes loaded with theory do not give the skills needed to do the hands on part of the job now it may help on the high level design of systems but in meany places you are better off working your way up and starting with the skills needed for the hands on part and maybe getting the high level theory later on. Now some theory nice but most colleges classes are to theory loaded for low level jobs and they have way to much math for them as well.
Also what does art history and music filler classes help you to be a better IT guy, plumber or electrician?
Now IT should have a apprenticeships system maybe mixed with a tech school and after you have the base skills and did some real work then you can move to maybe a MBA if you want to be a manager.
Also you can keep the old CS system or parts of it in place for people who want to go just for the higher level stuff but still even then doing a apprenticeships first then going back for the high level skills if you don't want to do the hands on parts is still better then just doing 100% class room.
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IT isn't called CS anywhere. They're two different things.
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I think he meant that 'CS' is called 'IT', not the other way around, but far be it from me to put words into his mouth.
While (IMO) what you say is certainly accurate, there *is* a difference in what "IT" is considered to be in different places. In some places (eg US, from my experience), it just means the people (and their skills) who operate the networks and services that are used throughout the company; while in other places, it encompases a significant part of computer science too, though mostly with a m
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It's called 'informatics' in Europe (not IT), and that reflects it being to information what mathematics is to math. It's such a simple and fitting word, it makes me sad that 'computer science' gets used so much and basically degrades the whole field down to the level of the social 'sciences'.
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My arse it is, I've never heard a native English speaker use that word[1]. It smells suspiciously like a badly Anglicised version of informatique, which itself is rather vague.
[1] Though you do see "bioinformatics", probably because "computing related to plants and hanimules and shit" is rather unwieldy.
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My arse it is, I've never heard a native English speaker use that word
There is more than one country in Europe, and I think there are more native German speakers than native English speakers. In German it's "Informatik".
I've always called it computer science, but I'm willing to be persuaded. We don't often do science (testing theories, etc).
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.
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The thing is they probably use different terminology. In Hungary you can become
1, programmer mathematician (literal translation) ( mostly CS, 4 semester calculus and at the end some UML and softwere engineering classes; they don't write programs in the first year altogether (at least that how it was in the old 5 year training; now we're doing Bsc/Msc as well )
2, technical informatician (literal translation) / computer engineer (officially used English translation) ( depends on the university; in the Techni
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.
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Sure, the dropout is probably going to be fine, but what if he's rubbish? Other people, with the benefit of hindsight will point to the fact that he dropped out and use that as proof you did a bad job.
If you get a guy who has a degree at least you can legitimately claim here was no way to know, if he doesn't work out.
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Degrees *can* make a difference, especially if they are recent and cover recent techn{ologi,iqu}es. They are also *required* in some industries (nuclear, iinm).
Howver, the value in a degree varies widely throughout the world, irrespective of where the degree was obtained. In China, for example, degrees are very important.
Anyway, if you can up your salary by 50% each time you change, I can't help but wonder why you don't change more regularly...
Re:I don't think a degree helps you (Score:4, Informative)
Meh, the joke's on you really.
C/C++ and Java still pretty much rule the roost in terms of jobs, with the MS .Net technologies bringing up the rear. Of these only the MS stuff is within the last decade.
Software tech does not move anywhere nearly as fast as a lot of folks like to believe.
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Good CS graduates shouldn't care what language they've been taught in, although I've heard it make it easier to get past HR in some companies if the right things appear on a CV. I'm still at my first job since leaving university though, and here all CVs are sent to my manager to review, and if she's not sure she asks the developers.
At my interview for this job I was asked if I knew certain languages and some modules/frameworks for those languages. I didn't (except Java), but explained in general terms wha
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It looks backward to me (Score:2)
:A computer scientist should not be maintaining AD or playing with VMs for a day job. Building
Good idea (Score:2)
Please, if by mistake you ever visit our country, don't go anywhere with a BA postcode as I wouldn't want our average IQ reduced.
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Whoops, wasn't logged in. Abuse to this username, please.
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People like to speak in vagaries to hide any error on their part.
Why don't you post the actual problem you give to interviewees so other readers might offer an idea of why so many "can't do it"? :-)
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Not a chance, as I hope some of my interviewees read Slashdot :-)
However, similar problems would be something like the game of Battleships - I'd provide a simple interface for the game logic (e.g. fireAt(x: Int, y: Int): Boolean) and ask them to go about solving it. So no worrying on graphics or such niceties, just simple data structure manipulation. And as previously mentioned, most don't even run - we're much more interested in the approach than a working solution.
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I still don't understand why puzzles are considered a suitable way of testing suitability for employment. It's a mile better than some generic aptitude test, but what does it really show beyond interest in contrived puzzles? I assume here that you mean that you want someone to write an algorithm which plays a good game of battleships. This often means, "Has this guy been to the same uni as me or read the same book where this puzzle is studied in detail?" Sometimes the interviewer doesn't even realise that t
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The question you should be asking yourself is: Where am I going wrong with my recruitment process that people who fail to solve what I regard as simple problems are being admitted for interview?
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