7 ms·

CS Career fair cancelled at community college because no companies reached out

77 points by ajdude 2y ago

cranberryturkey 2y ago
That's not surprising...I remember after the dotcom crash was in full swing I went to a career fair and there like 20 companies and 4,000 people searching for jobs.
- ghaff 2y ago
  From what I've seen, things haven't hit dot-bomb nuclear winter. But at that time there were a lot of IT workers in the would you like fries with that category who never got back into the profession. I was very lucky to get rehired shortly after 9/11 but, to be honest, didn't really get a well-paying position until years later.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    The thing that saved the computer industry after the dot bomb was: 1) Broadband. A lot of the 90s business models that didn't work out at the time did work out a few years later as people got faster internet and 2) A little bit later there were smart phones. The problem I see now is we need some other big thing to come along that would make a lot of business models that didn't work before suddenly start working. We haven't had any big platform shift since smart phones and the industry is now entering into a "maturation state." Kinda like aerospace in the 80s/90s after SST didn't work out and everything became about getting another 3-5% efficiency at mach 0.81 every decade. I added more thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I'm very glad I didn't go to work for Boeing in the early eighties when I had a job offer without even an interview out of school. I had to actually ask to get flown out to Seattle to meet with some folks. I'm not sure where I'd put my bets these days. Blockchain ended up pretty much a bust even outside of the crypto-scammers. Quantum feels like it's receding and I know folks that have exited from day to day involvement. Not sure what's past Kubernetes/containers/etc. and many folks seem to get annoyed if I press too hard on the question. Of course, there are always new innovations but unclear to me what's game-changing which may imply compensation that's very ordinary engineering/professional levels as was the case outside outside of SW in some locations for the past couple of decades. Which people with visions of $500K comp pages for ICs may find disappointing.
      - cranberryturkey 2y ago
        AI is the obvious one
        ghaff 2y ago
        Maybe. We'll see how it plays out and whether it's a positive or a negative from an employment perspective and what types/levels of employment it affects. I actually think AI is probably a big deal but the details are very unclear to me.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I basically agree. There were a lot of things: Web 2.0, smartphones (as you say and mobile more broadly), broadband had been coming in but really blossomed and a lot of things associated with it... So there was definitely a dot-bomb with a lot of knock-on effects in the tech sector but people who were able to wiggle through a few years to the other side, like I was albeit with not great comp, were mostly OK and generally weren't as affected by 2008 as a lot people outside tech were.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Not surprising. But always a good reminder that despite what they try to tell (lie to) you: the economy is in fact not in good shape. Or at least, companies forecast a bad economy even if they believe the current economy is good.
quantified 2y ago
The post looks like it's SF area. Given that employers want 4-year credentials and there's a big Stanford/Berkeley/top-tier bias, what was the representation by companies prior to this at the community college level?
- jmclnx 2y ago
  I find this curious since the Federal Gov. recently said a 4 year degree is no longer needed for IT. I wonder if some other type of thing is behind this. When I started out, one could get into development with just a high school diploma in some cases.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    Looking back over the decades in my career, only a handful of the really standout people that I've worked with had CS degrees. Most common were music degrees or being self-taught. I understand how people recruiting are filtering for degrees, but I think outside of true entry-level positions it's completely silly to do so.
    - rvnx 2y ago
      There is this thing also: when you have a project or a passion, you don't waste 4 or 5 years for a degree, when you already spent everyday during 5 years learning these skills. Many talented people just skip the school and go straight to work (for themselves or others). The courses also are usually outdated. Learn AI by yourself with the videos of Karpathy and you will know state-of-the-art. Follow courses from your local university, and you will learn the perceptron and OCaml.
  - richk449 2y ago
    (1) the actual message doesn’t say the fair is canceled - it is still on; the message says no employers specifically looking for software engineers will be attending. (2) it says that IT employers will be attending the carer fair. (3) it also says that they plan to have more government employees for software engineers at the next career fair.
renewiltord 2y ago
Did CCSF have a lot of companies ever? Education there is free and pretty last resort. I signed up for Chinese (Mandarin) once.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  CCSF's cybersecurity courses are renowned, from what I recall.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    That's interesting to me. Very cool.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  The fact that it being free is used as an argument about its low quality is the most American thing I've read in a while.
  - ConradKilroy 2y ago
    Thank you for stating this. Its annoying to hear free education = bad in all subtle forms.
    - antisthenes 2y ago
      It's even more annoying when hearing it about health care.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        And it's even more annoying when people use it to say that open source is bad.
  - linotype 2y ago
    Well this kind of comment didn’t take long to surface on this post. Ooof.
pknomad 2y ago
It's unfortunate but not surprising given that the job market is awful and worthwhile recruiting tends to be localized to top tier unis...
- guywithahat 2y ago
  I think CS is starting to become more and more like being a lawyer. Nobody cares if you have the credentials unless it’s from a good school, but if it is they’re willing to pay a lot
  - dmoy 2y ago
    In law it also depends a lot on how what rank in your class you were.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    The situation with law is that you need credentials from a good school, with a decent class rank, and probably a good clerkship to get your foot in the door with a well-paying white shoe law firm. Otherwise there are probably plenty of law positions but they may pay pretty poorly in many cases.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    That doesn't make sense because a lawyer's pedigree is valuable to the firm. They want to tell their clients that "we have Harvard lawyers working on your case." Nobody really cares about the pedgree of a computer programmer. There are some narrow areas where they may want to have a highly credentialed person serving as "chief scientist" or something, to impress investors. A startup may want to tell investors that "our technology team is lead by an MIT PhD in AI" but beyond that the credentials of your dev team are not marketable.
    - guywithahat 2y ago
      Contact firms care a lot, although I think the degree is intended to convey competence. An exceptional programmer is worth a lot more than two mediocre programmers, and so if you can be convinced someone is exceptional they can make a lot of money. Although I don’t always agree with the logic, going to a top school can help convey this sentiment
klodolph 2y ago
I’m a fan of community college, but I’m not surprised that no companies reached out. It is rough to try and jump into an entry-level position after only two years of studying programming. If you want to be a programmer, the way community college fits into that plan is as the first half of a four-year program. You take intro programming classes in community college, transfer to a four-year college, and then take your 300-level and 400-level algorithms / compilers / operating systems / databases classes. You end up with significantly less student debt and the same credentials, although this is not without its drawbacks (mainly, you may transfer but end up needing three years of study instead of two; you have to really be on top of shit w.r.t. bureaucracy to de-risk this one).
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  I think it's just rough no matter what. I've worked with a lot of junior devs and the thing is I haven't noticed that the 24 year olds with a fresh CS masters do particularly better than code school grads who were working at walgreens or whatever the previous year. Software development is a discipline in its own right that only very partially overlaps with a university CS curriculum.
- adrianN 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at university.
  - bnchrch 2y ago
    Same. I feel like, outside of the work experience that was baked into my degree, I could've spent those 4 years and all that money in a much more productive way. (Note: I don't regret it, I had a lot of fun, but in terms of becoming a professional I could've been much more efficient) As a result, anyone who's come to me asking how they can "break into" programming, I strongly discourage them from University at all.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    Idk I have a lot more confidence because I know what I know, that is, fewer known unknowns, and I have high confidence that there aren't unknown unknowns lurking around corners. This helps me drive decision making across the org.
willcipriano 2y ago
With rate cuts on the horizon I expect this to turn around over the next year.
- spacemadness 2y ago
  Let's all hope because when it's an employer's market, they tend to lean towards exploitation and burning people out that do have jobs which isn't exactly healthy.
busterarm 2y ago
I've seen companies do some really stupid stuff recruiting-wise post-covid. Like one company I'm familiar with that after a two-decade relationship with Waterloo, stopped sending recruiters there because the recruiters no longer wanted to travel so far. Literally their best hires came from there.
ggorlen 2y ago
CCSF alum here (AA, completed over 20 CS courses). I attended a similar CCSF job fair in 2017 and there were only 2-3 companies involved even then. If I recall, it was Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Mission Bit, maybe a third that must not have been interesting enough to stay in my memory. There were ~10 students at the fair. The LLNL internship seemed too IT-oriented to interest me. Mission Bit involved teaching high school kids to code after school, which I did for over a year and received course credit at CCSF for. So it's not that surprising to me that they went from ~2 companies to 0, even disregarding the major drop in attendance at CCSF since 2017 [1]. I didn't attend any other fairs so maybe I missed something, but I never got the impression that they were especially "bumping". [1]: https://sfstandard.com/2022/01/27/by-the-numbers-sf-higher-ed-enrollment-in-6-charts/ https://sfstandard.com/2022/01/27/by-the-numbers-sf-higher-e...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
manav 2y ago
I know the California CC system pretty well and have taken a few courses. In tech, there are usually two main paths: either transferring to a 4-year school for CS/Engineering, or specializing in something like Cybersecurity, AWS, Cisco, etc. For Software Engineering, there’s not gonna be any employer demand for those students at CCs since most people going that route tend to transfer to a university and their education/experience isn't really complete for that role.
tsumnia 2y ago
When I first started teaching college it was for my local community college. CS was situated with other tech careers like System Administration, Web Development, and IT Repair. One of the first issues I had to manage was requests to adopt a "Software Engineering" certification, which I fought against because unlike the other skills, CS doesn't benefit from holding a cert. CS in CC is in a weird spot - many 4-year universities will only accept CC CS1 as an elective, meaning they'll need to retake CS1 when they transfer. There may be some partnerships between a university and their local CC, but outside of those are gray areas. This could be because the CC instructors haven't reached out to get the courses to transfer or due to quality assurance. I know my predecessor would post the solutions on a sheet of paper in the classroom and students could earn partial, but passing credit if they retyped it out. Finally, local area companies may not need software development or don't need it in a continued employment fashion. The goal of for CC is to help give the community the skills people need to find employment - but with more focus on LOCAL employment. If there aren't any local software companies, CC graduates will need to compete against 4 year university students for the same entry-level position. As a consequence, the 2 year program only taught them how to program, but didn't give them those additional "why you program" skills or projects to build experience.
baby 2y ago
As an employer I'll tell you what the problem is: there's too many universities and all of them have different UIs. I'm only reaching out to the professors I know and they'll figure out how to advertise the jobs to their students. Career fairs? Even worse, who has the time to do that? We just want to increase our funnel, not increase the time it takes to reach out to junior engineers. The proposal in these kind of situations is to have common job boards (like Who's hiring on HN) and check there. Students should do that and not assume that employers will come to them. Good professors have relationships with the industry and will preemptively reach out for their students (that's what my professors did in my uni back in France). The reverse API could also work, have a standard that all universities follow so that one can easily post job descriptions to all relevant universities.
CarpeQueso 2y ago
Stepping away from this particular case, what does a well-executed Associate's degree for computer science look like? At top-tier schools (at least in the US, which is all I'm familiar with), there's an expectation that most of the incoming students already have a reasonable familiarity with the basics of programming, but that's unreasonable to expect for everyone entering college. And since it's useful to have some practical familiarity with programming before taking an algorithms class, it further seems like getting some sort of software engineering two-year degree would be a good use of time before either entering the workforce or deciding to cover some theory in the following two years (algorithms, computer architecture, compilers, etc.). What would a two-year degree like that cover? A variety of useful languages plus their most common frameworks? Basic data structures? Common industry tools (git, CI, docker, linux)? Even though it doesn't fit very naturally into the US college experience, I'm wondering if a well-executed two-year "bootcamp" (for lack of a better term) could actually fill a gap that exists right now. It at least allows people to choose if they're interested in theoretical computer science or not. Theory is quite helpful, but not everyone wants/needs to opt in to math, proofs, etc.
- ghaff 2y ago
  In the US there are technical high schools in many states. Not sure exactly what the curriculum looks like. I'm sure it involves programming but probably not CS topics.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Finland has a model of high school alternate vocational programs. But standards and funding are so low it is mostly useless, places seem mostly day cares for students. Applied science universities however are not as rigorous as traditional universities, but do offer suitable degrees with practise in actual software development with lighter load on pure computer science or advanced topics.
nijave 2y ago
Outside of courses, a college's alumni network is also pretty powerful. Four year colleges tend to have a pretty robust network where alumnis will advocate for their schools and come back to do recruiting including working with professors they had In addition, colleges like to boast about their placement rates so they're incentivized to help keep that network robust
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

77 points by ajdude 2y ago

That's not surprising...I remember after the dotcom crash was in full swing I went to a career fair and there like 20 companies and 4,000 people searching for jobs.

ghaff 2y ago
From what I've seen, things haven't hit dot-bomb nuclear winter. But at that time there were a lot of IT workers in the would you like fries with that category who never got back into the profession. I was very lucky to get rehired shortly after 9/11 but, to be honest, didn't really get a well-paying position until years later.
- jordanb 2y ago
  The thing that saved the computer industry after the dot bomb was: 1) Broadband. A lot of the 90s business models that didn't work out at the time did work out a few years later as people got faster internet and 2) A little bit later there were smart phones. The problem I see now is we need some other big thing to come along that would make a lot of business models that didn't work before suddenly start working. We haven't had any big platform shift since smart phones and the industry is now entering into a "maturation state." Kinda like aerospace in the 80s/90s after SST didn't work out and everything became about getting another 3-5% efficiency at mach 0.81 every decade. I added more thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I'm very glad I didn't go to work for Boeing in the early eighties when I had a job offer without even an interview out of school. I had to actually ask to get flown out to Seattle to meet with some folks. I'm not sure where I'd put my bets these days. Blockchain ended up pretty much a bust even outside of the crypto-scammers. Quantum feels like it's receding and I know folks that have exited from day to day involvement. Not sure what's past Kubernetes/containers/etc. and many folks seem to get annoyed if I press too hard on the question. Of course, there are always new innovations but unclear to me what's game-changing which may imply compensation that's very ordinary engineering/professional levels as was the case outside outside of SW in some locations for the past couple of decades. Which people with visions of $500K comp pages for ICs may find disappointing.
    - cranberryturkey 2y ago
      AI is the obvious one
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Maybe. We'll see how it plays out and whether it's a positive or a negative from an employment perspective and what types/levels of employment it affects. I actually think AI is probably a big deal but the details are very unclear to me.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I basically agree. There were a lot of things: Web 2.0, smartphones (as you say and mobile more broadly), broadband had been coming in but really blossomed and a lot of things associated with it... So there was definitely a dot-bomb with a lot of knock-on effects in the tech sector but people who were able to wiggle through a few years to the other side, like I was albeit with not great comp, were mostly OK and generally weren't as affected by 2008 as a lot people outside tech were.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Not surprising. But always a good reminder that despite what they try to tell (lie to) you: the economy is in fact not in good shape. Or at least, companies forecast a bad economy even if they believe the current economy is good.

quantified 2y ago

The post looks like it's SF area. Given that employers want 4-year credentials and there's a big Stanford/Berkeley/top-tier bias, what was the representation by companies prior to this at the community college level?

jmclnx 2y ago
I find this curious since the Federal Gov. recently said a 4 year degree is no longer needed for IT. I wonder if some other type of thing is behind this. When I started out, one could get into development with just a high school diploma in some cases.
- busterarm 2y ago
  Looking back over the decades in my career, only a handful of the really standout people that I've worked with had CS degrees. Most common were music degrees or being self-taught. I understand how people recruiting are filtering for degrees, but I think outside of true entry-level positions it's completely silly to do so.
  - rvnx 2y ago
    There is this thing also: when you have a project or a passion, you don't waste 4 or 5 years for a degree, when you already spent everyday during 5 years learning these skills. Many talented people just skip the school and go straight to work (for themselves or others). The courses also are usually outdated. Learn AI by yourself with the videos of Karpathy and you will know state-of-the-art. Follow courses from your local university, and you will learn the perceptron and OCaml.
- richk449 2y ago
  (1) the actual message doesn’t say the fair is canceled - it is still on; the message says no employers specifically looking for software engineers will be attending. (2) it says that IT employers will be attending the carer fair. (3) it also says that they plan to have more government employees for software engineers at the next career fair.

renewiltord 2y ago

Did CCSF have a lot of companies ever? Education there is free and pretty last resort. I signed up for Chinese (Mandarin) once.

Apocryphon 2y ago
CCSF's cybersecurity courses are renowned, from what I recall.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  That's interesting to me. Very cool.
j_maffe 2y ago
The fact that it being free is used as an argument about its low quality is the most American thing I've read in a while.
- ConradKilroy 2y ago
  Thank you for stating this. Its annoying to hear free education = bad in all subtle forms.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    It's even more annoying when hearing it about health care.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      And it's even more annoying when people use it to say that open source is bad.
- linotype 2y ago
  Well this kind of comment didn’t take long to surface on this post. Ooof.

pknomad 2y ago

It's unfortunate but not surprising given that the job market is awful and worthwhile recruiting tends to be localized to top tier unis...

guywithahat 2y ago
I think CS is starting to become more and more like being a lawyer. Nobody cares if you have the credentials unless it’s from a good school, but if it is they’re willing to pay a lot
- dmoy 2y ago
  In law it also depends a lot on how what rank in your class you were.
- ghaff 2y ago
  The situation with law is that you need credentials from a good school, with a decent class rank, and probably a good clerkship to get your foot in the door with a well-paying white shoe law firm. Otherwise there are probably plenty of law positions but they may pay pretty poorly in many cases.
- jordanb 2y ago
  That doesn't make sense because a lawyer's pedigree is valuable to the firm. They want to tell their clients that "we have Harvard lawyers working on your case." Nobody really cares about the pedgree of a computer programmer. There are some narrow areas where they may want to have a highly credentialed person serving as "chief scientist" or something, to impress investors. A startup may want to tell investors that "our technology team is lead by an MIT PhD in AI" but beyond that the credentials of your dev team are not marketable.
  - guywithahat 2y ago
    Contact firms care a lot, although I think the degree is intended to convey competence. An exceptional programmer is worth a lot more than two mediocre programmers, and so if you can be convinced someone is exceptional they can make a lot of money. Although I don’t always agree with the logic, going to a top school can help convey this sentiment

klodolph 2y ago

I’m a fan of community college, but I’m not surprised that no companies reached out. It is rough to try and jump into an entry-level position after only two years of studying programming. If you want to be a programmer, the way community college fits into that plan is as the first half of a four-year program. You take intro programming classes in community college, transfer to a four-year college, and then take your 300-level and 400-level algorithms / compilers / operating systems / databases classes. You end up with significantly less student debt and the same credentials, although this is not without its drawbacks (mainly, you may transfer but end up needing three years of study instead of two; you have to really be on top of shit w.r.t. bureaucracy to de-risk this one).

giraffe_lady 2y ago
I think it's just rough no matter what. I've worked with a lot of junior devs and the thing is I haven't noticed that the 24 year olds with a fresh CS masters do particularly better than code school grads who were working at walgreens or whatever the previous year. Software development is a discipline in its own right that only very partially overlaps with a university CS curriculum.
adrianN 2y ago
I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at university.
- bnchrch 2y ago
  Same. I feel like, outside of the work experience that was baked into my degree, I could've spent those 4 years and all that money in a much more productive way. (Note: I don't regret it, I had a lot of fun, but in terms of becoming a professional I could've been much more efficient) As a result, anyone who's come to me asking how they can "break into" programming, I strongly discourage them from University at all.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  Idk I have a lot more confidence because I know what I know, that is, fewer known unknowns, and I have high confidence that there aren't unknown unknowns lurking around corners. This helps me drive decision making across the org.

willcipriano 2y ago

With rate cuts on the horizon I expect this to turn around over the next year.

spacemadness 2y ago
Let's all hope because when it's an employer's market, they tend to lean towards exploitation and burning people out that do have jobs which isn't exactly healthy.

busterarm 2y ago

I've seen companies do some really stupid stuff recruiting-wise post-covid. Like one company I'm familiar with that after a two-decade relationship with Waterloo, stopped sending recruiters there because the recruiters no longer wanted to travel so far. Literally their best hires came from there.

ggorlen 2y ago

CCSF alum here (AA, completed over 20 CS courses). I attended a similar CCSF job fair in 2017 and there were only 2-3 companies involved even then. If I recall, it was Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Mission Bit, maybe a third that must not have been interesting enough to stay in my memory. There were ~10 students at the fair. The LLNL internship seemed too IT-oriented to interest me. Mission Bit involved teaching high school kids to code after school, which I did for over a year and received course credit at CCSF for. So it's not that surprising to me that they went from ~2 companies to 0, even disregarding the major drop in attendance at CCSF since 2017 [1]. I didn't attend any other fairs so maybe I missed something, but I never got the impression that they were especially "bumping". [1]: https://sfstandard.com/2022/01/27/by-the-numbers-sf-higher-ed-enrollment-in-6-charts/ https://sfstandard.com/2022/01/27/by-the-numbers-sf-higher-e...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

manav 2y ago

I know the California CC system pretty well and have taken a few courses. In tech, there are usually two main paths: either transferring to a 4-year school for CS/Engineering, or specializing in something like Cybersecurity, AWS, Cisco, etc. For Software Engineering, there’s not gonna be any employer demand for those students at CCs since most people going that route tend to transfer to a university and their education/experience isn't really complete for that role.

tsumnia 2y ago

When I first started teaching college it was for my local community college. CS was situated with other tech careers like System Administration, Web Development, and IT Repair. One of the first issues I had to manage was requests to adopt a "Software Engineering" certification, which I fought against because unlike the other skills, CS doesn't benefit from holding a cert. CS in CC is in a weird spot - many 4-year universities will only accept CC CS1 as an elective, meaning they'll need to retake CS1 when they transfer. There may be some partnerships between a university and their local CC, but outside of those are gray areas. This could be because the CC instructors haven't reached out to get the courses to transfer or due to quality assurance. I know my predecessor would post the solutions on a sheet of paper in the classroom and students could earn partial, but passing credit if they retyped it out. Finally, local area companies may not need software development or don't need it in a continued employment fashion. The goal of for CC is to help give the community the skills people need to find employment - but with more focus on LOCAL employment. If there aren't any local software companies, CC graduates will need to compete against 4 year university students for the same entry-level position. As a consequence, the 2 year program only taught them how to program, but didn't give them those additional "why you program" skills or projects to build experience.

baby 2y ago

As an employer I'll tell you what the problem is: there's too many universities and all of them have different UIs. I'm only reaching out to the professors I know and they'll figure out how to advertise the jobs to their students. Career fairs? Even worse, who has the time to do that? We just want to increase our funnel, not increase the time it takes to reach out to junior engineers. The proposal in these kind of situations is to have common job boards (like Who's hiring on HN) and check there. Students should do that and not assume that employers will come to them. Good professors have relationships with the industry and will preemptively reach out for their students (that's what my professors did in my uni back in France). The reverse API could also work, have a standard that all universities follow so that one can easily post job descriptions to all relevant universities.

CarpeQueso 2y ago

Stepping away from this particular case, what does a well-executed Associate's degree for computer science look like? At top-tier schools (at least in the US, which is all I'm familiar with), there's an expectation that most of the incoming students already have a reasonable familiarity with the basics of programming, but that's unreasonable to expect for everyone entering college. And since it's useful to have some practical familiarity with programming before taking an algorithms class, it further seems like getting some sort of software engineering two-year degree would be a good use of time before either entering the workforce or deciding to cover some theory in the following two years (algorithms, computer architecture, compilers, etc.). What would a two-year degree like that cover? A variety of useful languages plus their most common frameworks? Basic data structures? Common industry tools (git, CI, docker, linux)? Even though it doesn't fit very naturally into the US college experience, I'm wondering if a well-executed two-year "bootcamp" (for lack of a better term) could actually fill a gap that exists right now. It at least allows people to choose if they're interested in theoretical computer science or not. Theory is quite helpful, but not everyone wants/needs to opt in to math, proofs, etc.

ghaff 2y ago
In the US there are technical high schools in many states. Not sure exactly what the curriculum looks like. I'm sure it involves programming but probably not CS topics.
Ekaros 2y ago
Finland has a model of high school alternate vocational programs. But standards and funding are so low it is mostly useless, places seem mostly day cares for students. Applied science universities however are not as rigorous as traditional universities, but do offer suitable degrees with practise in actual software development with lighter load on pure computer science or advanced topics.

nijave 2y ago

Outside of courses, a college's alumni network is also pretty powerful. Four year colleges tend to have a pretty robust network where alumnis will advocate for their schools and come back to do recruiting including working with professors they had In addition, colleges like to boast about their placement rates so they're incentivized to help keep that network robust

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]