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We have a nearby state university with a so-so computer science program. 2-3 graduates every year go to FAANG, a handful go to the local fortune 1000 companies,

We have a nearby state university with a so-so computer science program. 2-3 graduates every year go to FAANG, a handful go to the local fortune 1000 companies, and we (a < 500 employee company) get to pick through the rest. They all list C, C++, .NET, HTML, CSS, and Java on their resumes but haven't done anything except a simple group project in any of them, half the time not even writing any code for the project. Which means a role in documentation, testing, etc. They come with a chip on their shoulder, flaunt their degree, and demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. To make it worse, they don't have any personal projects to show. I tell every single person that I interview to create something, even if it's a failure. At least you can come back and discuss your experience trying to create something, and you'll learn more about development working on that project than you did the whole semester you learned Java.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zcw100 7y ago
It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. They're taught the language but none of the tooling. When I was in school, which granted was a while ago now, they didn't teach you subversion, make, how to use an IDE, how to install and use a compiler, linker, etc. I remember having to logon to a VAX machine so we could do some fortran assignment. It was a cruel joke. There was little to no instruction on how to use the damn thing. You just had to make your way through it. I don't think much has changed. The students who are curious seek out and learn to use IDEs, git, maven, npm, jenkins, whatever, but there are others who do what's asked of them and they're not asked to learn these things. As a result they're unable to even start on anything other than the trivial assignments they're given in class. I think they seem entitled because they did what they were told and possibly received good grades as a result and their attitude may be them saying, "I bought an education. I was graded and found to be exceptional. If I had needed it, it would have been a part of my education". Right or wrong you should feel sorry for these kids. They paid a fortune and got ripped off. They just haven't realized it yet.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  That sucks, but it's equally bad when "seniors" have no idea how stuff works outside of their little IDE bubble.
  - bluemooner 7y ago
    I don't think it's bad. Companies need engineers with depth experience just as much as engineers with breadth experience.
- capableweb 7y ago
  > They're taught the language but none of the tooling I want to expand on this a bit, as I think what students are being thought is the syntax of languages but none of the "how do you design a project continuously as requirements change?" which is the really difficult part of software engineering. So they might know how to write the code, but they don't know how to come up with what to actually write.
- alharith 7y ago
  > It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. Common misconception, but no this is not a failure of the academic side. This is exactly what universities are for. The thinking always was that if you teach the fundamentals, then the practical applications are a foregone conclusion. Someone who is well versed in advanced theories of computer science and electrical engineering: boolean logic, circuits, abstract computation machines and models of computing, data structures, algorithms, language design should be able to pick up whatever FooBar FOTM programming language or paradigm or framework that comes out. If you think that the situation today is difficult with all the languages and frameworks we have just know that it was almost the exact same back then as well, except you didn't have the internet, chat rooms, and robust documentation and Q/A sites to help you answer your questions. Imagine the, excuse my frank language here, whining that would be happening right now on this forum and many others if you were just slapped with an IBM manual and told to bootstrap things yourself. I could only imagine! Trade schools are suppose to be the institutions that teach you practical skills "to get a job". Universities are for expanding your mind and learning. I don't know why we mixed the two and then act surprised when a multi-century institution fails at modern workforce demands. To anyone reading this: Do NOT go to a University to get a job. If your goal is just to get a job in this field, you can do that in far easier and cheaper ways (start reading some programming docs and get busy building things). You go to a university to learn. The getting a job part is a natural consequence of the learning you have done and are now are able to do.
azhenley 7y ago
As a professor at a state university, I try to tell my students all of this. They’ll get hired at non-tech companies no problem with just a degree. But if they want the high salary tech company positions, they have to spend considerable time practicing their skills outside of class and building a portfolio. Our curriculum is great for exposing them to a variety of CS topics, but it won’t make them stellar engineers by itself.
- jmilloy 7y ago
  There needs to be a "portfolio" movement in software development degree programs. That, and a clearer distinction between a "cs" degree and "software engineering" degree. In, say, an architecture degree, students and professors understand that you will apply to positions with a portfolio. I think students are able to use work from the degree program in their portfolio. Their professors have portfolios from when they first applied for positions out of school, so they can help or at least provide examples. Currently, we just have a vague notion that you should have code or contributions on github, and that is for some reason not part of most degrees. Or, too many students get a cs degree and try to use it to apply for software development positions. In that case, yeah, you're going to need to self-study if you want to apply for positions you didn't actually get a degree is.
  - snazz 7y ago
    If you put serious effort into your class projects outside of what is required (https://thume.ca/ray-tracer-site/ https://thume.ca/ray-tracer-site/), you can certainly put that in your portfolio (that project is absolutely crazy). That said, I agree with you that more students should take "software engineering" degrees if they have trouble building things outside of class, plus that universities should make it clearer that a CS degree != a job offer from Google.
celticninja 7y ago
I am a developer who started as a trainee/junior with no formal education on the field. last year I started a degree course alongside my job, thinking I would learn more and become a better developer. This is not the case. I get a small amount of actual programming done in a variety of languages, but a lot of the assessments are based on writing a report about how or what I developed. I can see how a software engineering degree can be useless compared to actual experience coding.
fenwick67 7y ago
It's funny because I have made sure to emphasize my personal projects on GitHub on my resume and in interviews, I'm pretty sure they've never looked at anything.
- striking 7y ago
  I've definitely had people look at my personal projects. As an example, I applied to a company doing computer vision and they sniffed out my CV projects. They definitely came up in the interview.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Ironically I've found the same thing. I linked to live demos of projects on my personal web server and never found traffic referred from Github.
- hoorayimhelping 7y ago
  How big is your sample size? What phase of the interview are you thinking of? Context changes the approach. If I'm doing phone screens (i.e. top of the funnel and looking at large numbers of people) I glance over github projects and links quickly - about a minute per resume to look over everything (this is is why formatting, styling, and ease of reading matter on resumes). If I'm doing in person interviews (i.e. bottom of the funnel, talking to small numbers of people) I look at almost every personal project, website, and link the candidate puts on their resume with the intent of asking the candidate about them.
- madhadron 7y ago
  Depends on the place. When I was hiring at a startup, trawling a provided GitHub account was the second thing I did after scanning over the resume.
- jonfw 7y ago
  When I was interviewing after I graduated college last December, all we ever talked about was my projects. We would skip over school (every other candidate they interviewed had a comp-sci degree, not a differentiator) very quickly. I even had an interview where one my interviewers pulled up my GitHub during the interview and asked me questions about design and tooling decisions on certain projects. From each company where I received an interview, I was told that it was because they were interested by my side projects. Of course- it may depend on what your side projects are! Mine were of interest for the cloud based roles I was looking for- RESTful APIs, Kubernetes, AWS, Linux SysAdmin stuff, etc.
jmilloy 7y ago
I agree that some or even most important skills in software development are learned through experience. But the solution is a lower salary and job-training. When anyone writes "C, C++, .NET, HTML, CSS and Java" on their resume, that obviously has to be considered alongside their experience. If you don't want to hire and train inexperienced programmers, I guess that's fine. But I find this idea that there is a minimum experience (and accompanying salary) threshold for the entire industry that can only be reached through personal projects of a certain size frustrating.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  I agree. Honestly this thread makes me super-glad I graduated undergrad when I did: Decades ago, when you could actually get a junior position at a company without having to be Ken Thompson or Linus Torvalds. I graduated from a basic state school CSE program. We didn't have "Github profiles" and there was no expectation of having a portfolio for a junior position. You also weren't expected to crank out JIRA tickets starting day one. You could be hired on aptitude and potential only, and learn what you needed on the job. The universities and training you get in undergrad is probably miles better today than it was back when I went to school. This does not seem like an education system failure--it seems like inflated expectations from employers for entry-level jobs. If employers are looking for mid-to-senior level employees who can be productive from day one, that's fine but they should probably not rely heavily on university recruiting.
justin66 7y ago
> They come with a chip on their shoulder, flaunt their degree, and demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. Commoners! The arrogant peasants you're hiring expect to be paid? They're relying on data and expert advice to decide how much money to seek?!? You would be wise to steer well clear of such fools.
- dang 7y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mountainboot 7y ago
    That applies to you as well. Nothing in the comment came across poorly. Maybe you should assume good faith on his part.
    - dang 7y ago
      You're right - it applies fully to me, and I'm aware of how hard that rule can be to follow, so correction is welcome. As I read the GP comment, it accuses the OP not just of a straw man, but implies being an asshole (i.e. thinking that others are peasants who shouldn't expect to be paid). That's clearly not a fair reading of bluedino's post. Each move in such a direction is a step towards degraded discussion; hence the moderation reply. Obviously these are matters of interpretation, though. People often read the same things differently.
      - mountainboot 7y ago
        demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. The OP's comment implies that the job applicants are entitled for making salary demands based on statistics. There is nothing entitled about asking for market rates. The comment responding to it points out the problem with this thinking in a lighthearted way. To me it was the perfect response. I understand you may disagree, but it was in no way unreasonable. My comment on the other hand could have come across better. I implied you were not following the rules you set which I don't think is fair. I may disagree with your decision, but I could have done it in a more respectful way.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> we (a < 500 employee company) get to pick through the rest Why do you try to recruit from a small local pool like this? You can hire from anywhere in the country!
tombert 7y ago
That's something I've benefited from. I taught myself how to program when I was 14-15 by reading books and playing with basic graphics processing stuff to make games. None of my games were ever any good or impressive, but it led to me learning how to do web and network programming for fun, and led to me learning how to build stuff. This has been really good for me, since I don't have a degree, but I still can typically get through a whiteboard interview in most jobs that I apply for (though occasionally I'll get a problem that trips me up). School is certainly useful, but it should be used in addition to personal projects, not a substitute for them.
heyoo 7y ago
The "simple group projects" we made during my 5-year degree were the result of 3-5 people putting in ~200 hours each (over 4 months). They were of higher quality, better designed, tested and documented than most I have encountered in the industry now 5 years later. I would not say that I am much better technically now, than I was 5 years ago. Much of what I have learnt in the industry is about coping with working in an office, having pointless meetings, doing design by committee, etc.
intrepidhero 7y ago
To my mind there are orthogonal issues here. The much bigger one, not the lack of personal projects, is the chip on their shoulder. I've observed a certain amount of hubris in the culture of CS departments, at least in the university/college level programs I've been exposed to, that is very off putting. An ideal candidate would approach an area they are unfamiliar with, with curiosity, zeal and humility. If I can find people like that, who cares what they've built or not? I'm confident they will come up to speed and become a top level contributor. It's likely that people who approach tech with the desirable attitude above will have built something personal they can show. But having built a personal project is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate curiosity and zeal for craft. EDIT: To be clear, I think people willing to get the degree and do the work should be paid according to market value. You come across a little bitter that the top performers went off chasing jobs at FANGs... maybe if you paid market rate more of them would stick around.
jjice 7y ago
As a 3rd year CS student, I see this a lot. I personally love CS and programming is a hobby for me, so naturally I have projects on my GitHub. I always list my three personal projects I'm most proud of on my resume. I only list a language if I have proof of competence on my GitHub or in previous employment. Some of my peers will list everything they've written a "hello world" in, and from the employers I've spoken to, a good chunk of them see a long list of languages without any proof to mean they're over projecting competence. Doesn't mean there is no interview, but it hurts the chances of getting one. The interview ends up being the point where they can test how truthful they are.
Impossible 7y ago
To be fair I've interviewed a lot of senior (10-15 yoe) candidates at FAANG that list a lot of languages they don't really have experience with

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zcw100 7y ago

It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. They're taught the language but none of the tooling. When I was in school, which granted was a while ago now, they didn't teach you subversion, make, how to use an IDE, how to install and use a compiler, linker, etc. I remember having to logon to a VAX machine so we could do some fortran assignment. It was a cruel joke. There was little to no instruction on how to use the damn thing. You just had to make your way through it. I don't think much has changed. The students who are curious seek out and learn to use IDEs, git, maven, npm, jenkins, whatever, but there are others who do what's asked of them and they're not asked to learn these things. As a result they're unable to even start on anything other than the trivial assignments they're given in class. I think they seem entitled because they did what they were told and possibly received good grades as a result and their attitude may be them saying, "I bought an education. I was graded and found to be exceptional. If I had needed it, it would have been a part of my education". Right or wrong you should feel sorry for these kids. They paid a fortune and got ripped off. They just haven't realized it yet.

Nullabillity 7y ago
That sucks, but it's equally bad when "seniors" have no idea how stuff works outside of their little IDE bubble.
- bluemooner 7y ago
  I don't think it's bad. Companies need engineers with depth experience just as much as engineers with breadth experience.
capableweb 7y ago
> They're taught the language but none of the tooling I want to expand on this a bit, as I think what students are being thought is the syntax of languages but none of the "how do you design a project continuously as requirements change?" which is the really difficult part of software engineering. So they might know how to write the code, but they don't know how to come up with what to actually write.
alharith 7y ago
> It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. Common misconception, but no this is not a failure of the academic side. This is exactly what universities are for. The thinking always was that if you teach the fundamentals, then the practical applications are a foregone conclusion. Someone who is well versed in advanced theories of computer science and electrical engineering: boolean logic, circuits, abstract computation machines and models of computing, data structures, algorithms, language design should be able to pick up whatever FooBar FOTM programming language or paradigm or framework that comes out. If you think that the situation today is difficult with all the languages and frameworks we have just know that it was almost the exact same back then as well, except you didn't have the internet, chat rooms, and robust documentation and Q/A sites to help you answer your questions. Imagine the, excuse my frank language here, whining that would be happening right now on this forum and many others if you were just slapped with an IBM manual and told to bootstrap things yourself. I could only imagine! Trade schools are suppose to be the institutions that teach you practical skills "to get a job". Universities are for expanding your mind and learning. I don't know why we mixed the two and then act surprised when a multi-century institution fails at modern workforce demands. To anyone reading this: Do NOT go to a University to get a job. If your goal is just to get a job in this field, you can do that in far easier and cheaper ways (start reading some programming docs and get busy building things). You go to a university to learn. The getting a job part is a natural consequence of the learning you have done and are now are able to do.

azhenley 7y ago

As a professor at a state university, I try to tell my students all of this. They’ll get hired at non-tech companies no problem with just a degree. But if they want the high salary tech company positions, they have to spend considerable time practicing their skills outside of class and building a portfolio. Our curriculum is great for exposing them to a variety of CS topics, but it won’t make them stellar engineers by itself.

jmilloy 7y ago
There needs to be a "portfolio" movement in software development degree programs. That, and a clearer distinction between a "cs" degree and "software engineering" degree. In, say, an architecture degree, students and professors understand that you will apply to positions with a portfolio. I think students are able to use work from the degree program in their portfolio. Their professors have portfolios from when they first applied for positions out of school, so they can help or at least provide examples. Currently, we just have a vague notion that you should have code or contributions on github, and that is for some reason not part of most degrees. Or, too many students get a cs degree and try to use it to apply for software development positions. In that case, yeah, you're going to need to self-study if you want to apply for positions you didn't actually get a degree is.
- snazz 7y ago
  If you put serious effort into your class projects outside of what is required (https://thume.ca/ray-tracer-site/ https://thume.ca/ray-tracer-site/), you can certainly put that in your portfolio (that project is absolutely crazy). That said, I agree with you that more students should take "software engineering" degrees if they have trouble building things outside of class, plus that universities should make it clearer that a CS degree != a job offer from Google.

celticninja 7y ago

I am a developer who started as a trainee/junior with no formal education on the field. last year I started a degree course alongside my job, thinking I would learn more and become a better developer. This is not the case. I get a small amount of actual programming done in a variety of languages, but a lot of the assessments are based on writing a report about how or what I developed. I can see how a software engineering degree can be useless compared to actual experience coding.

fenwick67 7y ago

It's funny because I have made sure to emphasize my personal projects on GitHub on my resume and in interviews, I'm pretty sure they've never looked at anything.

striking 7y ago
I've definitely had people look at my personal projects. As an example, I applied to a company doing computer vision and they sniffed out my CV projects. They definitely came up in the interview.
bluedino 7y ago
Ironically I've found the same thing. I linked to live demos of projects on my personal web server and never found traffic referred from Github.
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
How big is your sample size? What phase of the interview are you thinking of? Context changes the approach. If I'm doing phone screens (i.e. top of the funnel and looking at large numbers of people) I glance over github projects and links quickly - about a minute per resume to look over everything (this is is why formatting, styling, and ease of reading matter on resumes). If I'm doing in person interviews (i.e. bottom of the funnel, talking to small numbers of people) I look at almost every personal project, website, and link the candidate puts on their resume with the intent of asking the candidate about them.
madhadron 7y ago
Depends on the place. When I was hiring at a startup, trawling a provided GitHub account was the second thing I did after scanning over the resume.
jonfw 7y ago
When I was interviewing after I graduated college last December, all we ever talked about was my projects. We would skip over school (every other candidate they interviewed had a comp-sci degree, not a differentiator) very quickly. I even had an interview where one my interviewers pulled up my GitHub during the interview and asked me questions about design and tooling decisions on certain projects. From each company where I received an interview, I was told that it was because they were interested by my side projects. Of course- it may depend on what your side projects are! Mine were of interest for the cloud based roles I was looking for- RESTful APIs, Kubernetes, AWS, Linux SysAdmin stuff, etc.

jmilloy 7y ago

I agree that some or even most important skills in software development are learned through experience. But the solution is a lower salary and job-training. When anyone writes "C, C++, .NET, HTML, CSS and Java" on their resume, that obviously has to be considered alongside their experience. If you don't want to hire and train inexperienced programmers, I guess that's fine. But I find this idea that there is a minimum experience (and accompanying salary) threshold for the entire industry that can only be reached through personal projects of a certain size frustrating.

ryandrake 7y ago
I agree. Honestly this thread makes me super-glad I graduated undergrad when I did: Decades ago, when you could actually get a junior position at a company without having to be Ken Thompson or Linus Torvalds. I graduated from a basic state school CSE program. We didn't have "Github profiles" and there was no expectation of having a portfolio for a junior position. You also weren't expected to crank out JIRA tickets starting day one. You could be hired on aptitude and potential only, and learn what you needed on the job. The universities and training you get in undergrad is probably miles better today than it was back when I went to school. This does not seem like an education system failure--it seems like inflated expectations from employers for entry-level jobs. If employers are looking for mid-to-senior level employees who can be productive from day one, that's fine but they should probably not rely heavily on university recruiting.

justin66 7y ago

> They come with a chip on their shoulder, flaunt their degree, and demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. Commoners! The arrogant peasants you're hiring expect to be paid? They're relying on data and expert advice to decide how much money to seek?!? You would be wise to steer well clear of such fools.

dang 7y ago
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mountainboot 7y ago
  That applies to you as well. Nothing in the comment came across poorly. Maybe you should assume good faith on his part.
  - dang 7y ago
    You're right - it applies fully to me, and I'm aware of how hard that rule can be to follow, so correction is welcome. As I read the GP comment, it accuses the OP not just of a straw man, but implies being an asshole (i.e. thinking that others are peasants who shouldn't expect to be paid). That's clearly not a fair reading of bluedino's post. Each move in such a direction is a step towards degraded discussion; hence the moderation reply. Obviously these are matters of interpretation, though. People often read the same things differently.
    - mountainboot 7y ago
      demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. The OP's comment implies that the job applicants are entitled for making salary demands based on statistics. There is nothing entitled about asking for market rates. The comment responding to it points out the problem with this thinking in a lighthearted way. To me it was the perfect response. I understand you may disagree, but it was in no way unreasonable. My comment on the other hand could have come across better. I implied you were not following the rules you set which I don't think is fair. I may disagree with your decision, but I could have done it in a more respectful way.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> we (a < 500 employee company) get to pick through the rest Why do you try to recruit from a small local pool like this? You can hire from anywhere in the country!

tombert 7y ago

That's something I've benefited from. I taught myself how to program when I was 14-15 by reading books and playing with basic graphics processing stuff to make games. None of my games were ever any good or impressive, but it led to me learning how to do web and network programming for fun, and led to me learning how to build stuff. This has been really good for me, since I don't have a degree, but I still can typically get through a whiteboard interview in most jobs that I apply for (though occasionally I'll get a problem that trips me up). School is certainly useful, but it should be used in addition to personal projects, not a substitute for them.

heyoo 7y ago

The "simple group projects" we made during my 5-year degree were the result of 3-5 people putting in ~200 hours each (over 4 months). They were of higher quality, better designed, tested and documented than most I have encountered in the industry now 5 years later. I would not say that I am much better technically now, than I was 5 years ago. Much of what I have learnt in the industry is about coping with working in an office, having pointless meetings, doing design by committee, etc.

intrepidhero 7y ago

To my mind there are orthogonal issues here. The much bigger one, not the lack of personal projects, is the chip on their shoulder. I've observed a certain amount of hubris in the culture of CS departments, at least in the university/college level programs I've been exposed to, that is very off putting. An ideal candidate would approach an area they are unfamiliar with, with curiosity, zeal and humility. If I can find people like that, who cares what they've built or not? I'm confident they will come up to speed and become a top level contributor. It's likely that people who approach tech with the desirable attitude above will have built something personal they can show. But having built a personal project is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate curiosity and zeal for craft. EDIT: To be clear, I think people willing to get the degree and do the work should be paid according to market value. You come across a little bitter that the top performers went off chasing jobs at FANGs... maybe if you paid market rate more of them would stick around.

jjice 7y ago

As a 3rd year CS student, I see this a lot. I personally love CS and programming is a hobby for me, so naturally I have projects on my GitHub. I always list my three personal projects I'm most proud of on my resume. I only list a language if I have proof of competence on my GitHub or in previous employment. Some of my peers will list everything they've written a "hello world" in, and from the employers I've spoken to, a good chunk of them see a long list of languages without any proof to mean they're over projecting competence. Doesn't mean there is no interview, but it hurts the chances of getting one. The interview ends up being the point where they can test how truthful they are.

Impossible 7y ago

To be fair I've interviewed a lot of senior (10-15 yoe) candidates at FAANG that list a lot of languages they don't really have experience with