5 ms·

As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS

As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS students don't want to program. I've been surprised at how many of them are getting a CS education as a platform for a career in product management, or even marketing. It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.

hinathan 16y ago
Sounds like the not-entirely-apocryphal "You can't get a PM job at Google without a CS degree" has been around long enough to sink in.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  It's been around a lot longer than Google. PMs at Microsoft are technical positions -- they mostly require a technical degree (how technical is dependent on your team. SQL Server PMs need to talk-the-talk with their B2B customers without confusion).
  - nika 16y ago
    Says the college student who, let me guess, never worked at microsoft. As someone who has, PMs are not technical people, at least not in that company at the time I worked there. I think ignorant college students who are not smart enough to know the limits of their own knowledge are the reason that hacker news has gone the way of slashdot. Oh, since you're probably under 20, slashdot used to have good discussion from actual engineers who were knowledgable, then it got overrun by ignorant gnu weeneis around 2001 or so-- back when you are 8.
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      I was a Microsoft SQL Server intern last summer. I got to know the SQL Server PMs very well. Every SQL Server PM had a technical degree. One of my good friends also graduated with a computer science degree last year and is now a B2B PM. Rudeness probably deserves rudeness back, but you're just so embarrassingly wrong that I don't think that I even need to say anything else.
slee029 16y ago
I think it was Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed in a recent interview with Marc Suster mentioned that the hard part of recruiting is that you find so many sales guys who really want to be a business dev guy and so many engineers who want to be a product guy. What you really need are craftsmen, which I completely agree with him on. But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact. YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
larsberg 16y ago
This sentiment is identical to what I experienced interviewing and hiring Stanford CS grads, even though it was back in 2002-2005. Not all, to be sure -- one of my top-performing college hires was a Stanford CS grad! -- but it was certainly the trend. Unlike MIT grads, who were just drooling to find a good problem and required intervention to worry about things like career trajectory, etc. I think it's more of a cultural bias from certain universities than a global economic trend in the field.
- spitfire 16y ago
  That's good to know. I've always suspected MIT students to be hard nosed technies above all.
econner 16y ago
I would agree with this too. I am an undergraduate CS student at Stanford and a section leader for the introductory courses (cs106b -- Prof Roberts calls it CS2 in the post -- this quarter). I do notice quite a few kids who have consciously chosen to major in CS because it will help them with management if they want to get involved with startups and acknowledge that they don't want to code. There are a number of other reasons I would argue though for the skyrocketing enrollment in CS here: First, the financial meltdown has prompted a lot of kids that would have majored in things like economics or management science to get into CS. Second, the introductory CS classes are widely considered some of the best classes here. The CS department has taken the time to hire a group of phenomenal lecturers who love what they do and who spent an incredible amount of time crafting these classes. Third, the introductory classes offer a level of human-to-human support that is unprecedented in any other department. We use undergraduate TA's (like myself) for the intro classes. We are a lot cheaper and so there are a lot more of us than there could be graduate TA's. For example, the computer LaIR is staffed with TA's from 6pm - midnight Sunday through Thursday. Fourth, the CS department dropped the CS140 requirement (hardcore operating systems -- the "dump your girlfriend/boyfriend before you take this class because you won't be together after" class) in favor of two more gentler systems courses. This was mostly the result of the widening breadth of subject matter in CS and requirements that the department felt did not keep up with the offerings. Fifth, CS itself has become an incredibly diverse subject. Here there are seven concentrations within the major: artificial intelligence, theory, graphics, information, systems, biocomputation, and human-computer interaction. There is a lot of overlap between them, but those overlaps also allow students to reach into other departments to get CS credit that they wouldn't have gotten within the department (e.g. art classes, physics, bio, etc). One of my friends who is concentrating in HCI is taking all studio art this quarter. Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, computing is becoming the platform on which a lot of other disciplines are built. It is becoming a fundamental tool, in my opinion. Look at computational linguistics and bioinformatics. Even writing papers now comes down to understanding computers... I mean, after programming a lot, you get pretty darn good at Googling, a nontrivial skill I would argue. Ok, maybe this should have been posted as a general comment, but I'll leave it here for contextual reasons.

hinathan 16y ago

Sounds like the not-entirely-apocryphal "You can't get a PM job at Google without a CS degree" has been around long enough to sink in.

Locke1689 16y ago
It's been around a lot longer than Google. PMs at Microsoft are technical positions -- they mostly require a technical degree (how technical is dependent on your team. SQL Server PMs need to talk-the-talk with their B2B customers without confusion).
- nika 16y ago
  Says the college student who, let me guess, never worked at microsoft. As someone who has, PMs are not technical people, at least not in that company at the time I worked there. I think ignorant college students who are not smart enough to know the limits of their own knowledge are the reason that hacker news has gone the way of slashdot. Oh, since you're probably under 20, slashdot used to have good discussion from actual engineers who were knowledgable, then it got overrun by ignorant gnu weeneis around 2001 or so-- back when you are 8.
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    I was a Microsoft SQL Server intern last summer. I got to know the SQL Server PMs very well. Every SQL Server PM had a technical degree. One of my good friends also graduated with a computer science degree last year and is now a B2B PM. Rudeness probably deserves rudeness back, but you're just so embarrassingly wrong that I don't think that I even need to say anything else.

slee029 16y ago

I think it was Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed in a recent interview with Marc Suster mentioned that the hard part of recruiting is that you find so many sales guys who really want to be a business dev guy and so many engineers who want to be a product guy. What you really need are craftsmen, which I completely agree with him on. But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact. YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

larsberg 16y ago

This sentiment is identical to what I experienced interviewing and hiring Stanford CS grads, even though it was back in 2002-2005. Not all, to be sure -- one of my top-performing college hires was a Stanford CS grad! -- but it was certainly the trend. Unlike MIT grads, who were just drooling to find a good problem and required intervention to worry about things like career trajectory, etc. I think it's more of a cultural bias from certain universities than a global economic trend in the field.

spitfire 16y ago
That's good to know. I've always suspected MIT students to be hard nosed technies above all.

econner 16y ago

I would agree with this too. I am an undergraduate CS student at Stanford and a section leader for the introductory courses (cs106b -- Prof Roberts calls it CS2 in the post -- this quarter). I do notice quite a few kids who have consciously chosen to major in CS because it will help them with management if they want to get involved with startups and acknowledge that they don't want to code. There are a number of other reasons I would argue though for the skyrocketing enrollment in CS here: First, the financial meltdown has prompted a lot of kids that would have majored in things like economics or management science to get into CS. Second, the introductory CS classes are widely considered some of the best classes here. The CS department has taken the time to hire a group of phenomenal lecturers who love what they do and who spent an incredible amount of time crafting these classes. Third, the introductory classes offer a level of human-to-human support that is unprecedented in any other department. We use undergraduate TA's (like myself) for the intro classes. We are a lot cheaper and so there are a lot more of us than there could be graduate TA's. For example, the computer LaIR is staffed with TA's from 6pm - midnight Sunday through Thursday. Fourth, the CS department dropped the CS140 requirement (hardcore operating systems -- the "dump your girlfriend/boyfriend before you take this class because you won't be together after" class) in favor of two more gentler systems courses. This was mostly the result of the widening breadth of subject matter in CS and requirements that the department felt did not keep up with the offerings. Fifth, CS itself has become an incredibly diverse subject. Here there are seven concentrations within the major: artificial intelligence, theory, graphics, information, systems, biocomputation, and human-computer interaction. There is a lot of overlap between them, but those overlaps also allow students to reach into other departments to get CS credit that they wouldn't have gotten within the department (e.g. art classes, physics, bio, etc). One of my friends who is concentrating in HCI is taking all studio art this quarter. Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, computing is becoming the platform on which a lot of other disciplines are built. It is becoming a fundamental tool, in my opinion. Look at computational linguistics and bioinformatics. Even writing papers now comes down to understanding computers... I mean, after programming a lot, you get pretty darn good at Googling, a nontrivial skill I would argue. Ok, maybe this should have been posted as a general comment, but I'll leave it here for contextual reasons.