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This seems like a problem for educational institutions, not for industry. We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, whic
by omginternets 4y ago
This seems like a problem for educational institutions, not for industry. We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials [0]. I don't see how this is going to further reduce the supply of competent candidates.
What it will do, however, is make it difficult for CS departments to evaluate students based on homework, and it's not clear to me that this is such a bad thing. My experience with university CS courses has been that assignments are largely auto-graded, with systems akin to unit tests. In the common case, an overworked TA quickly spot-checks the source code to look for obvious signs of academic dishonesty, but that's it. So, universities are left with the following choice: give everyone an A, or grade differently. In the optimistic case, this might even produce a grading strategy that improves the value of a CS degree as a predictor of programming competence. It likely won't, in which case we have a status quo.
[0] This is a problem in its own right. I recently referred a grad student as a job candidate in my current company. I'm the most senior backend engineer, and this grad student was a highly competent contributor to my open-source project, which currently plays a strategic role in our backend. Said grad student is unusually bright and productive in a complex specialty (distributed systems), and I had to push our VP Eng very hard to hire him. His initial reaction was along the lines of "he doesn't have any industry experience, so we don't know if he's good". It gives me nausea to think about how many outstanding, 2-sigma engineers are rejected because companies don't know how to evaluate their talents. In the end, we ended up hiring him, but only because I stated that I would take full responsibility for his productivity. I regret nothing. </rant>
- armchairhacker 4y agoNortheastern University is a college which is extremely popular for it's co-op program. What is co-op? It's literally just working at a company for 6 months. Yet students proclaim how it teaches them so much better than classes and helps them so much to get a great job, and I mean, it does. College is the new high-school: everyone goes, only to get a job, because you have to go to college and get a CS degree to get a job. Why? A lot of "compute science" isn't used in software development at all. I think we should replace colleges with "boot camps" which are unpaid internships which teach high schoolers how to work in actual software development, in various fields (let's call them "entry level jobs which don't require 5 years of experience"). Why unpaid? Because companies will love it, and it will still be better than colleges where you pay a full year's salary in tuition. What about people who actually want to pursue higher-ed computer science? Just don't replace all colleges. It seems like most people getting into CS are not doing it for academia, those that are will have a better time taking courses with others who are passionate about the subject instead of simply using it to get a high-paying job.
- ckuehne 4y ago> We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials How does looking at job experience help to distinguish good from bad developers?
- omginternets 4y agoYou make a good point - I’m not sure it (always) does. However, it’s been my experience that hiring managers believe it to be a good indicator. My sense is that hiring managers think academic experience is so far removed from the needs of industry that that won’t be able to understand or evaluate the merit of academic experience. I’m of the opinion that they’re mistaken, but ah well…