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The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience e

The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out. Add that to the decades-old "CS != programming at job" dilemma and it's easy to see why so many people are unemployed.

majormajor 10y ago
> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree) This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Yes, that's the problem and it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed any time soon.
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    From a hiring side, the current industry standard of job-hopping within two years has a significant negative affect on junior hires. The ROI on training someone really isn't there if the their employment expectation boils down to dine-and-dash.
    - zzalpha 10y ago
      Now that is a very valid point. We recently rejected a very green grad because it was very clear he had no intention of committing to the job more than a couple of years. With a likely 12 month ramp and training period there was no way we were going to put in that level of investment into someone who would vanish a year later.
zzalpha 10y ago
Umm... Of course they're graduating with no professional coding experience. The entire point is they don't have professional experience yet. What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere. Do chemical companies refuse to hire newly graduated chemical engineers who don't have professional chemical engineering experience? That doesn't even make sense.
- drakonandor 10y ago
  Projects. Internships. I would never hire a graduate without at least some combination of those. Typically, getting a 'real' internship requires projects anyway so we can just say internship experience. And yes, good chem E candidates have internship or project experience, in conjunction with decent grades to show they understand the theory.
  - ipnon 10y ago
    How is your company doing overall?
- arrosenberg 10y ago
  Chemical companies would absolutely refuse to hire a newly graduated chemical engineer who gained no practical experience during their time in college. Same deal with CS grads (or really any discipline for that matter).
- sotojuan 10y ago
  > What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere. Internships are the best way, but open source and personal projects... anything like that works. In a perfect world companies would train new grads and stuff, and we can fight and ask for that, but for now it pays off to have something to show your skill. If I hadn't started teaching myself stuff and coding my own projects after class, I'd probably still be unemployed (I went to a college without a good CS-job network).
- rglovejoy 10y ago
  Don't they have internships in the UK?
vonmoltke 10y ago
> there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree) Why are you expecting fresh college graduates to have professional experience?
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I guess I didn't explain my point well. I don't expect new grads to have "professional experience" (bad choice of words in my part), but a lot of companies expect them to have SOME sort of experience, be it an internship, open source stuff, personal projects, etc. You'd be surprised how many people don't code outside of class and if you think that's fine and companies should train then I agree with you but it's not the reality most students are living in.

majormajor 10y ago

> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree) This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."

sotojuan 10y ago
Yes, that's the problem and it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed any time soon.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago
  From a hiring side, the current industry standard of job-hopping within two years has a significant negative affect on junior hires. The ROI on training someone really isn't there if the their employment expectation boils down to dine-and-dash.
  - zzalpha 10y ago
    Now that is a very valid point. We recently rejected a very green grad because it was very clear he had no intention of committing to the job more than a couple of years. With a likely 12 month ramp and training period there was no way we were going to put in that level of investment into someone who would vanish a year later.

zzalpha 10y ago

Umm... Of course they're graduating with no professional coding experience. The entire point is they don't have professional experience yet. What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere. Do chemical companies refuse to hire newly graduated chemical engineers who don't have professional chemical engineering experience? That doesn't even make sense.

drakonandor 10y ago
Projects. Internships. I would never hire a graduate without at least some combination of those. Typically, getting a 'real' internship requires projects anyway so we can just say internship experience. And yes, good chem E candidates have internship or project experience, in conjunction with decent grades to show they understand the theory.
- ipnon 10y ago
  How is your company doing overall?
arrosenberg 10y ago
Chemical companies would absolutely refuse to hire a newly graduated chemical engineer who gained no practical experience during their time in college. Same deal with CS grads (or really any discipline for that matter).
sotojuan 10y ago
> What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere. Internships are the best way, but open source and personal projects... anything like that works. In a perfect world companies would train new grads and stuff, and we can fight and ask for that, but for now it pays off to have something to show your skill. If I hadn't started teaching myself stuff and coding my own projects after class, I'd probably still be unemployed (I went to a college without a good CS-job network).
rglovejoy 10y ago
Don't they have internships in the UK?

vonmoltke 10y ago

> there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree) Why are you expecting fresh college graduates to have professional experience?

sotojuan 10y ago
I guess I didn't explain my point well. I don't expect new grads to have "professional experience" (bad choice of words in my part), but a lot of companies expect them to have SOME sort of experience, be it an internship, open source stuff, personal projects, etc. You'd be surprised how many people don't code outside of class and if you think that's fine and companies should train then I agree with you but it's not the reality most students are living in.