

Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work - madmotive
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/25c2c8e0-491e-11dd-9a5f-000077b07658.html

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thorax
I'm personally more concerned with keeping CS as a study of the science of
computing rather than adapting it to improve the job prospects of students. My
feeling is that really so many people going into CS aren't looking to study
the science. They're going for software engineer/architecture/analyst jobs
that make them a decent salary.

Some of us went into computer science out of genuine interest in one of the
most revolutionary sciences in our lifetime. If it hurts our job prospects,
well, that's part of the sacrifice.

I think what we need to do is ask CompSci students what they're wanting to
achieve after school. Universities need to offer (and encourage) a broader
selection of software development degrees (software engineering, business
software, etc) rather than try to dilute CS to be all businessy. I know some
schools offer more, but I'm not sure they set student expectations
appropriately. Businesses (maybe even more importantly) need to learn how to
ask for the degrees/expertise they actually want rather than asking for CS all
the time for every software engineering job.

If you're reading this and making hiring decisions-- you can help by changing
the wording in your job postings. Stop asking specifically for CS degrees when
you really just need someone with a degree who can hack with the best of them.

~~~
gaius
Kids these days don't want to be programmers, they all want to be "Certified
Enterprise Solutions Architects" and whatnot.

Think about it, when was the last time you saw "programmer" as a job title? At
the very minimum now it's "developer" or "software engineer". No-one actually
wants to get their hands dirty with code. And I'll tell you why: in today's
modern culture, nothing is right or wrong. Lines, boxes and clouds on a
whiteboard and just someone's opinion, no more valid than anyone elses. But
code, that requires you to say "this is right" and "this is wrong". Kids these
days can't face the pressure of making definitive statements.

~~~
aristus
"For to learn, is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion
comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it. Hence young men
are sooner persuaded than those that are more in years..."

That's Plutarch, complaining about the same thing almost 2,000 years ago.

 _And get off my lawn!_

~~~
vlad
Your quote says young people have an easier time learning something new, so
its actually the opposite of what the other person said.

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kp212
Have you seen consultants from overseas in an internal IT dept? I think this
is total ____, and it sounds like another PR ploy to lobby a raise for the
visa quota. I work for one of the investment banks, and I would say a low ball
estimate is 25%-30% of the back office IT, is visa related individuals in the
US (either consultants or internal hires), not to mention the "24 hour" teams
they like to implement with India. I don't have a problem with companies
needing to import talent at all, but I do have a problem with companies
driving the wages down by using these excuses of a lack of talent.
Subsequently, paying these people below US market value. If a shortage was the
case, companies should pay a premium of something in the ballpark of 10% more,
because of the "lack" of demand. Instead, they look at this as a cost saving
tool. It's so blatant, and its so obvious, just work in the back office of
Wall St. for a month, and you will agree. I wonder what it's like on the west
coast.

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umjames
It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates. Someone who
should be going to DeVry to learn the J2EE stack or .Net and is only doing so
for the paycheck, not genuine interest in software development.

When I was in college (1996-2001), I would say an overwhelming majority of the
CS students were there solely for all those tech jobs that their parents read
about. They were only interested in learning something for either a grade in
class or that someone might hire them to do it. Really, trade schools should
be handling those types of people.

~~~
edw519
_It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates._

No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

It doesn't matter what technologies you learned at college, high school, trade
school, or from books. Whatever it is, it won't be enough anyway. You'll be
expected to get to work, use what you know, and pick up what you have to. _For
the rest of your life_.

More importantly, you will be expected to understand abstract ideas (people
and tech), break down complex issues, develop effective work habits, and
communicate intellegently with many different types of people. Aren't _these_
exactly the type of things that college is for?

~~~
gaius
_No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers"._

That's simply not true. I agree that that is how it _should_ be. But the vast
majority of companies hire by key/buzzwords on a resume. You could be the
greatest coder in the world but if you don't have "10 years Visual X+#" you
won't even get past the HR screen. Everyone loses in that scenario, you don't
have a job, the company doesn't have a worker. Sucks, but there it is.

~~~
huherto
So, it is the responsibility of the companies to make sure that they hire
competent people and not only by the key/buzzwords. The ones who know how to
hire will be more competitive.

~~~
gaius
I expect this is a significant factor in the productivity advantage of small
companies/startups.

------
babul
I see the current problems with the financial markets have already had much
impact on CS/software hire, especially in London. I hope this is not a return
to the bad days of UK CS job prospects, circa 2001-2002, after the internet
bubble burst and 9/11.

Back then even very proficient students at leading universities had hard time
finding jobs. These were people who did programming outside of uni courses,
had good summer work experiences, built multi-threaded distributed desktop
apps as well as web apps, and were actual 'problem solvers' with good skills
in mathematic modeling and algorithm design and architectural design skills.
However there was simply no market, regardless of how good they were.

Now, it seems as courses get diluted it really only harms all parties
concerned and I often think the best thing someone with good A-levels should
do is go directly into industry or in a startup/SME atleast before going to
uni.

~~~
tom_rath
2001-2002 wasn't bad. I know it seemed that way but it really wasn't.

1990-1994 was frickin' nuclear winter for (almost?) all engineering in
(almost?) all western nations. Senior staff in many offices would be left
reading newspapers at their desks (superb people with no contracts and nothing
to do) and there were extremely few junior positions to be filled. Any work
which brought in food and paid rent was welcome, and most of that was stuff I
never thought I'd see with a degree.

On the flip-side: After surviving that, bootstrapping a company from scratch
was a breeze.

~~~
eru
Where did you work?

~~~
tom_rath
At the time? Any place which would pay!

Here's the dynamic a recent graduate faces in a severe recession:

No companies in your field are hiring. Period. Contract work is out as well,
since larger companies are now scooping up all of the 'crumbs' which used to
sustain junior contractors. There are no boring Q/A jobs to temporarily take,
no support jobs, no documentation jobs. Nothing.

You could bump your expectations down and try for work for which you are
'overqualified', but there are tons of experienced, desperate and unemployed
people fighting for those jobs too. They will accept less pay than you and any
employer with half a clue knows you will bolt the moment you get an offer that
fits your qualifications anyhow, making you an inevitable cost and waste of
resources to train. Barring an awesome network or family favours, those are
out.

So, where does that leave you? I'm sure the seasoned Gen-Xers on the board
remember :-)

My own low point was sitting in a basement, handling dispatch phones for a
school board's janitorial service, while the 'senior manager' of the group was
briefing me on the arduous tasks I'd be facing; at one point explaining to me
how to add a column of figures by hand ('you have to carry the one here...').

Most of my friends have similar recession stories and we can all laugh about
them now, but things can get far shittier far faster than you'd ever dream
possible.

I wouldn't suggest you face the future with dread, but don't kid yourself when
you plan out what your 'worst case scenario' could be. Bad economic times can
be _really_ bad and it's often a struggle to get through them.

You will, though. It's all cyclical and prospects do improve with time.

~~~
pg
_So, where does that leave you?_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/apply>

~~~
tom_rath
..and for those who don't make the cut?

A recent graduate in recessionary times rarely has the luxury of sitting back
and waiting for the next application round. When there's rent to pay, food to
buy and an empty bank account facing you, things can be a little rough.

~~~
pg
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply YC is the solution for everyone. I just wanted
to point out that we're still funding, regardless of the economic weather.
(The average startup takes longer to succeed than economic cycles ordinarily
last, so we ignore them.)

~~~
Goladus
Even if one doesn't get YC funding, working on a startup is probably better
for your career than cleaning toilets.

------
coolestuk
I would estimate that the vast majority of IT jobs are not programming-
related. Most are in technical support and admin. And an employer is just as
likely (maybe more likely) to employ a liberal arts graduate to do technical
support, as hire a graduate of a computing-related subject. I've worked in
several smallish companies (circa 500 employees), where I was the only person
in IT who had a computing-related degree. Furthermore, I was the only one who
had any interest in IT per se, and the only one who had any knowledge of IT
beyond what was required to do the job (even in that knowledge some of them
were woefully ignorant). The truth of the matter is that there is a wide gulf
between a university education and what employers actually want/need.

------
vlad
It will be funny when doctors and lawyers are outsourced. Programming was
outsourced not because it is an easy profession but because it was the entire
profession that enabled outsourcing, and so was looked onto as magical by
people who had never seen computers or had as good a way to make a living
before.

But there's really no reason why outsourcing will be limited to manufacturing
and IT, especially as the kids of the 3rd world IT specialists grow up and
choose new professions for themselves. You really only need surgeons,
dentists, nurses, and pill dispensing machines on shore. American law books
and internal medicine facts can be studied very well off-shore, and trials and
meetings can be held via online video. Everything would be digital and operate
even faster than ever before. Nurses would have two main specialties,
consisting of taking care of the old and taking a patient's vitals for off-
shore doctors and computers that are good at predicting events and prescribing
solutions, to calculate.

This would also reduce the costs of healthcare for everybody. ;)

~~~
esja
Without wanting to start a debate about licensing, unionisation and so on, I
expect that to take decades. Much of the enabling technology is here now, but
the medical and legal industries have decades (or even centuries) of
experience in limiting entry to their industry and thereby maintaining high
wages... er, I mean, "high standards". They won't let this happen without a PR
war on whichever government is "allowing it to happen".

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menloparkbum
This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can
outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

~~~
wynand
Indeed. What bothers me especially is that these comments are made by managers
with combinations of elite business degrees and experience which will enable
them never to be limited in the kind of work they do. And yet, they are
practically demanding that CS students be neatly packed turn-key packages that
can do no more and no less than what is required of them in typical business
programming roles. "Limited career prospects" cannot begin to explain what I
see in this scheme of things.

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andreyf
> The figures point to the brutal reality behind technology companies’
> complaints that universities are not tailoring their computer science
> degrees sufficiently to meet business needs.

This is idiocy. Computer science has as much to do with their business needs
as pharmacists have to do with biology. That's why biologists have figured out
how to make separate programs for them.

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flavio87
I really wonder how this can happen in the UK. Here in Switzerland it's the
opposite. We have only like 300-400 people a year graduating with a CS degree
and 2-3k jobs open. It's a real crisis, and companies are outsourcing to
anywhere. Not to save costs, but because they simply can't find people. In my
school ETH Zurich, in 2000 there were over 300 people starting CS, this year
it was less than 100. I think salaries just have to continue raising until
they meet bankers so that engineering and CS starts getting attractive
again...

~~~
wallflower
At dinner, we were discussing European countries that we might consider moving
to. My friend mentioned that Switzerland is one of the hardest countries to
get a work permit and later residency (ten years uninterrupted). I immediately
started to wonder if the Switzerland IT job surplus is due to their pretty
restrictive immigration policies, to say nothing of the notorious cleanliness
standards (that you must adhere to when selling your home)

------
menloparkbum
This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can
outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

------
kenshi
The quality (and curriculum) of comp sci courses in the UK varies
dramatically. I know of Comp Sci graduates who don't know how to program. I
also know of Comp Sci courses that don't expose the students to anything like
client engagement or general business skills.

Another question worth asking is what exactly is an 'IT Job'? From the sounds
of things the IBM chap wants a Comp Sci degree to mean an IT Consultancy
Degree. How useful that would be to some other business that wants really good
developers is another matter.

------
ulf
This seems to be a improbably high number. I live in Germany, and here the
unemployment rate for CS graduates is among the lowest of any education, with
the prognosis still being very good. Do any of you who live in the US or UK
have had problems finding a job when you were searching for one?

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's not improbable at all. When I graduated (2002), I knew a few people who
had a lot of trouble finding a job. They got killed on interviews with
questions like "have you done any programming outside of class?", "what is the
complexity of insert on a vector?" and "what is your preferred unix shell?"
(note: resume had unix skills).

Eventually, they would up getting either non-computer related jobs or being
hired by clueless PHBs. There are some BAD programmers out there. 10% would
not surprise me.

~~~
wynand
I agree. When I started studying in 1998, the bubble was still growing and
many of my co-students were only in CS for the money they thought they were
going to make (and were they disappointed when we graduated!).

Some of the commentators in that article argue that CS degrees should be more
relevant to the business world. I disagree - too many universities have
already hobbled CS degrees to make them (apparently) more relevant to the
business world. This leads the wrong people into CS and under-prepares the
good students.

It's interesting that they mentioned medicine. Med students learn about a lot
more than most of them will ever face in their careers. So medicine is hard
and it takes a lot of work. But we expect this, because we expect them to have
an integrated view of the body in order to diagnose us correctly.

So why do we settle on CS degrees that are patchworks of business
communications, XML and web design?

My (not so humble) opinion: do justice to CS and push the standard up.
Graduates from such degrees will be able to handle whatever you throw at them.

~~~
ulf
I think the problem is not so much the low standard, but the lack of reliable
tests for the personal aptitude, and this should not only be a problem in CS.
Universities should spend a lot of effort prior to someone beginning their
studies, to find out if the person really wants to do what they chose, in a
way that the person itself realizes that quickly. This phenomenon is still
huge in Germany, I started studying CS in 2002 and after one year, 60% of the
people in my year had quit, mostly because they did not have any idea what was
expecting them...

~~~
huherto
At least the found out in the first year. They could have found out after four
years.

~~~
ulf
There still were some dropping out every year after that, but the number was
significantly smaller after each step.

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sealedidentity
There's a rider to that headline. The effect is in UK, not the US. Here in the
US, I do find that in the entry-level employers are more than willing to
recruit people who get on-the-job training.

That said, I hope they find decent jobs.

------
babul
I actually learnt more outside my CS course, experimenting in my own time,
than on it. People should be encouraged to experiment more in education and
not spoon-fed.

