6 ms·

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 yea

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.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Ya but if you're really honest with yourself, did you learn what you needed to "drive decision making across the org" in Uni? You may have I guess, but it seems like you really only get that confidence or those skills after you start doing whatever it is that you do. It's hard to imagine how anything I learned or could have learned in Uni, would have at all helped enough with any of even the least complex tasks once getting started professionally, that I didn't learn in technical college or on my own prior. That said, I wasn't a FAANG go-getter trying for a spot that required complexity analysis or whatever, or a game developer with a necessary background in maths and memory. I feel like the stuff you learn in Uni that's valuable, becomes encountered in only some special cases, and even then there's probably better environments for actually learning it rather than just figuring out how to test well on the material. I personally found the humanities and hard sciences a bit more compelling compared to any CS courses; viewing the CS testing and teaching methodology through the lens of having already been in industry, it pained me more than it might have otherwise had I been a naive impressionable student with no professional perspective. Sitting there writing out an ADT in Java with a pencil in a not large enough physical space, thinking "why did I decide to do this crap again?", but also not being able to respond to the artificial pressure of the classroom with a fabricated stress response.
    - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
      I think I agree with a lot of what you said - non-CS classes can be fundamental to learning some job skills (like writing, communicating, and deep thought). However when I say that it helps me drive decision making, I mean that I am literally more confident in what I'm saying because I'm reasonably sure of the boundaries in my knowledge. For example, I went to grad school and studied databases. On that topic, I probably know more than anyone I work with; so if I put forward a proposal that is related to DBs in any way, I can be quite sure that there are no surprising edges that will come back to bite me (i.e. no one will come along and say "well what about this?", at least from a technical perspective). That's because I know what I know, and there are things I don't know, but I also feel like I know what those are (e.g. I don't feel as comfortable with low-level programming, mostly because I actually skipped a machine organization class and never picked those skills up separately).
- xeromal 2y ago
  Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.
  - eYrKEC2 2y ago
    Bingo. A BS is a great filter for hard working and higher IQ. Guess who does really really good in sales? People who play varsity or college sports. Is it a rule? Nope. Is it a great heuristic? Yep. Does football teach you sales? Not really... but it does filter for certain traits, one of which is probably pure animal magnetism and the base desire of humans to be influenced bt the most fit individual.
    - stonogo 2y ago
      Team sports teach you how to work productively with people, including people you might not like. That skill directly transfers to sales.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        And it almost certainly also filters for competitiveness, probably more so than the typical technical curriculum does.
  - kjksf 2y ago
    The "washout" would work equally well if they were teaching non-BS. And what do we teach people for 12 years before college? Is college the first time people learn how to learn?
    - xeromal 2y ago
      The 12 years before is mandatory so it's no indication but it used to be when it wasn't. That's why high school diplomas don't matter as much as they did in say 1920
- itishappy 2y ago
  University can offer two things: 1. Equip students to do a job. 2. Equip students to find a job. These are surprisingly disparate, and I suspect the latter is a lot more significant than most people realize. Put differently: I suspect the real challenge is getting hired without explicit qualifications.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    I'm not sure about your #2. Self-promotion is not necessary at university, since the profs receive mandatory submissions. Very different from a job search, putting yourself and your paperwork "out there" in a targeted way.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      I agree about classwork, but I think many universities put a lot of effort into placing their students. Job fairs, resume classes, internships, student research, etc. Personally, I suck at self promotion. The career aids offered by my school made a world of difference.
      - bluSCALE4 2y ago
        Outside of internships, everything else is opt in.
        itishappy 2y ago
        Of course. Wait, you had required internships?
        ghaff 2y ago
        Some schools do have co-op programs of various sorts. But they're generally opt-in with various degrees of optionality.
    - pintxo 2y ago
      Replace „to find“ with „to be accepted“. There is still a lot of (stupid) company rules about hiring only people with an advanced degree.
- screye 2y ago
  If 100% of a job is easy enough for a fresh community college grad, then it is easy enough to be outsourced for 1/10th the cost. The 5% of the job that is hard, is what you're paid for. It is what keeps the job onshore, and it is what keeps fresh community college grads from being hired into it.
  - ojl 2y ago
    Just because he said he didn’t need a big part of the university courses doesn’t mean that it’s easy. He said that he learned most of the things at the job, which I mostly agree with. For some domains it’s important to have the proper educational background though. But mostly it’s a different kind of difficult compared to how advanced courses are difficult.
- codeAligned 2y ago
  There's always someone who will reply with something along the lines of "I don't use anything I learned in school on the job" or "Software engineering is not about coding, it's about X" With due respect, in my experience as someone who did not major in CS, it was a rough first few years because I had weak knowledge of data structures, almost no knowledge of computer networking (showed itself why managing containers etc), didn't know even the very basics of bash/linux. Nowadays, when I work with CS majors vs non majors, it has noticeably been more difficult to get the latter group up to speed and productive. Of course there have been notable exceptions (there always are when it comes to people matters)
  - hellisothers 2y ago
    100% likely depends on what you’re doing but I work in FAANGY tech and if anything CS majors lag behind people with real work experience, any real work experience. DA&A is not relevant to writing a CRUD app or service. It’s not relevant to collaborating or getting things done.
- _vertigo 2y ago
  I am a much better "engineer" for having taken the advanced classes, but more to the point, I was a much better programmer for having taken the advanced classes. The total amount of code I had written in my first two years of university was not very much; by the time I had taken some of the advanced courses I had written a lot more code and had thus become a better programmer (still not a good one, but better!). I had written probably 10x more code by the end of year 4 than the end of year 2 thanks to practicum courses, etc.
- tuyiown 2y ago
  Or, maybe, you learned way more than you think and that let you concentrate on the «important things».
- scruple 2y ago
  No degree here, 20 years in. Worked in embedded, medical robotics, AAA games...
  - satisfice 2y ago
    No degree here, either. Simply not a problem for most work involving software and code.
- prewett 2y ago
  I was got a non-CS bachelors, and then managed to get into development, partly because I had been programming all my life. But I went back for a masters and shored up the undergrad CS that I missed. Boy was that helpful! It wasn't necessary for 95% of my job, either, but it enables me to solve the other 5% that I would be unable to solve, or end up with something that barely works. I've found compilers useful (for parsing; didn't have time to take finite state automata), the OS class was excellent for understanding and to be able to write threaded programs that work. Data structures is simply essential (but I took a that in undergrad).
- nunez 2y ago
  100%. The tough let code style interviews mostly cover CS101 and CS102 topics that most of us stopped using the minute after matriculation.
garciasn 2y ago
I worked in the CC system and I am a huge advocate to what they bring to market--a low cost alternative to primary institutions, cutting the high cost of a Bachelors degree by at least 1/3; but, those CCs were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong. The only way for ANY college student to do this is through real-world experience (from an organization that is willing to take on someone very green or private repo work/portfolio). I am regularly asked by randoms on LinkedIn and/or my network as well as interns and/or candidates what they can be doing to improve their chances to get an internship or FT role. In those instances, I always recommend that these folks: 1. Come up with a project, end to end. 2. Develop the code and post it in a repo that can be accessed by companies during the hiring process. 3. Be able to explain the why behind the project, the entire process end to end, and--most importantly--why the work was important to do. These are the items I believe will put those green students toward the top 20% of their competition in the market. I find entirely too many candidates who have a lot of coding and theory courses and not a whole lot of application of those learnings. By being able to show management of a project from end to end, be able to explain the development process coherently, and provide the potential business value it brings is a big way for those folks to stand out from someone who can just write code. Many average four-year colleges aren't doing this for their students; CCs most definitely aren't.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > I worked in the CC system; but, they were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong. I haven't worked in the CC system, but I've been around the Belleuve/Seattle area CCs for many years. And at least for those, there are broadly 2 tracks. The first is what you say - the first 2 years of a bachelor's degree track. The 2nd track is a variety of certifications. Sometimes these are industry certs like Microsoft, Cisco, etc. And some of them are CC certs. But they aim to get people productive in 2 years.
- lispisok 2y ago
hinkley 2y ago
When Seattle built their light rail system they ran it past UW and nearly every community college in the region. It was already a known phenomenon for UW students to take CC classes to reduce the cost of genEd requirements but after the trains that just got easier. Much faster than the busses.
smcg 2y ago
Okay, but it's plenty enough for a paid internship. Many of these students are going to transfer to a 4-year after this, so I don't know why this would be different.
swatcoder 2y ago
That's not true at all. Our industry is swimming in auto-didacts, dropouts, bootcampers, and community college graduates. There's no licensure and most industry-adjacent academic programs spend a lot of time teaching concepts and abstractions far divorced from everyday industry needs. Committed tinkers who are ready to get their hands dirty and start learning the trade are historically very welcome. However, the job market is upside down right now, because we had an insane hiring bubble that has since burst, leaving countless people with real work experience in the candidate pool for jobs at all levels. In this kind of market, which we're used to seeing come and go, there's temporarily a lower-than-usual demand for candidates with less vetting, and so the auto-didacts/etc can expect to have a hard time getting attention for a bit. A lack of interest in community college graduates is an ephemeral market state that we're familiar with seeing sometimes, and definitely not a structural detail of the industry.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I think that's probably fair. I know very qualified people who are having trouble finding jobs. I don't personally care all that much but a number of opportunities post semi-retirement haven't really materialized. Which is fine but would probably have been different in different times.

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.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Ya but if you're really honest with yourself, did you learn what you needed to "drive decision making across the org" in Uni? You may have I guess, but it seems like you really only get that confidence or those skills after you start doing whatever it is that you do. It's hard to imagine how anything I learned or could have learned in Uni, would have at all helped enough with any of even the least complex tasks once getting started professionally, that I didn't learn in technical college or on my own prior. That said, I wasn't a FAANG go-getter trying for a spot that required complexity analysis or whatever, or a game developer with a necessary background in maths and memory. I feel like the stuff you learn in Uni that's valuable, becomes encountered in only some special cases, and even then there's probably better environments for actually learning it rather than just figuring out how to test well on the material. I personally found the humanities and hard sciences a bit more compelling compared to any CS courses; viewing the CS testing and teaching methodology through the lens of having already been in industry, it pained me more than it might have otherwise had I been a naive impressionable student with no professional perspective. Sitting there writing out an ADT in Java with a pencil in a not large enough physical space, thinking "why did I decide to do this crap again?", but also not being able to respond to the artificial pressure of the classroom with a fabricated stress response.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    I think I agree with a lot of what you said - non-CS classes can be fundamental to learning some job skills (like writing, communicating, and deep thought). However when I say that it helps me drive decision making, I mean that I am literally more confident in what I'm saying because I'm reasonably sure of the boundaries in my knowledge. For example, I went to grad school and studied databases. On that topic, I probably know more than anyone I work with; so if I put forward a proposal that is related to DBs in any way, I can be quite sure that there are no surprising edges that will come back to bite me (i.e. no one will come along and say "well what about this?", at least from a technical perspective). That's because I know what I know, and there are things I don't know, but I also feel like I know what those are (e.g. I don't feel as comfortable with low-level programming, mostly because I actually skipped a machine organization class and never picked those skills up separately).
xeromal 2y ago
Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.
- eYrKEC2 2y ago
  Bingo. A BS is a great filter for hard working and higher IQ. Guess who does really really good in sales? People who play varsity or college sports. Is it a rule? Nope. Is it a great heuristic? Yep. Does football teach you sales? Not really... but it does filter for certain traits, one of which is probably pure animal magnetism and the base desire of humans to be influenced bt the most fit individual.
  - stonogo 2y ago
    Team sports teach you how to work productively with people, including people you might not like. That skill directly transfers to sales.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And it almost certainly also filters for competitiveness, probably more so than the typical technical curriculum does.
- kjksf 2y ago
  The "washout" would work equally well if they were teaching non-BS. And what do we teach people for 12 years before college? Is college the first time people learn how to learn?
  - xeromal 2y ago
    The 12 years before is mandatory so it's no indication but it used to be when it wasn't. That's why high school diplomas don't matter as much as they did in say 1920
itishappy 2y ago
University can offer two things: 1. Equip students to do a job. 2. Equip students to find a job. These are surprisingly disparate, and I suspect the latter is a lot more significant than most people realize. Put differently: I suspect the real challenge is getting hired without explicit qualifications.
- euroderf 2y ago
  I'm not sure about your #2. Self-promotion is not necessary at university, since the profs receive mandatory submissions. Very different from a job search, putting yourself and your paperwork "out there" in a targeted way.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    I agree about classwork, but I think many universities put a lot of effort into placing their students. Job fairs, resume classes, internships, student research, etc. Personally, I suck at self promotion. The career aids offered by my school made a world of difference.
    - bluSCALE4 2y ago
      Outside of internships, everything else is opt in.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        Of course. Wait, you had required internships?
        ghaff 2y ago
        Some schools do have co-op programs of various sorts. But they're generally opt-in with various degrees of optionality.
  - pintxo 2y ago
    Replace „to find“ with „to be accepted“. There is still a lot of (stupid) company rules about hiring only people with an advanced degree.
screye 2y ago
If 100% of a job is easy enough for a fresh community college grad, then it is easy enough to be outsourced for 1/10th the cost. The 5% of the job that is hard, is what you're paid for. It is what keeps the job onshore, and it is what keeps fresh community college grads from being hired into it.
- ojl 2y ago
  Just because he said he didn’t need a big part of the university courses doesn’t mean that it’s easy. He said that he learned most of the things at the job, which I mostly agree with. For some domains it’s important to have the proper educational background though. But mostly it’s a different kind of difficult compared to how advanced courses are difficult.
codeAligned 2y ago
There's always someone who will reply with something along the lines of "I don't use anything I learned in school on the job" or "Software engineering is not about coding, it's about X" With due respect, in my experience as someone who did not major in CS, it was a rough first few years because I had weak knowledge of data structures, almost no knowledge of computer networking (showed itself why managing containers etc), didn't know even the very basics of bash/linux. Nowadays, when I work with CS majors vs non majors, it has noticeably been more difficult to get the latter group up to speed and productive. Of course there have been notable exceptions (there always are when it comes to people matters)
- hellisothers 2y ago
  100% likely depends on what you’re doing but I work in FAANGY tech and if anything CS majors lag behind people with real work experience, any real work experience. DA&A is not relevant to writing a CRUD app or service. It’s not relevant to collaborating or getting things done.
_vertigo 2y ago
I am a much better "engineer" for having taken the advanced classes, but more to the point, I was a much better programmer for having taken the advanced classes. The total amount of code I had written in my first two years of university was not very much; by the time I had taken some of the advanced courses I had written a lot more code and had thus become a better programmer (still not a good one, but better!). I had written probably 10x more code by the end of year 4 than the end of year 2 thanks to practicum courses, etc.
tuyiown 2y ago
Or, maybe, you learned way more than you think and that let you concentrate on the «important things».
scruple 2y ago
No degree here, 20 years in. Worked in embedded, medical robotics, AAA games...
- satisfice 2y ago
  No degree here, either. Simply not a problem for most work involving software and code.
prewett 2y ago
I was got a non-CS bachelors, and then managed to get into development, partly because I had been programming all my life. But I went back for a masters and shored up the undergrad CS that I missed. Boy was that helpful! It wasn't necessary for 95% of my job, either, but it enables me to solve the other 5% that I would be unable to solve, or end up with something that barely works. I've found compilers useful (for parsing; didn't have time to take finite state automata), the OS class was excellent for understanding and to be able to write threaded programs that work. Data structures is simply essential (but I took a that in undergrad).
nunez 2y ago
100%. The tough let code style interviews mostly cover CS101 and CS102 topics that most of us stopped using the minute after matriculation.

garciasn 2y ago

I worked in the CC system and I am a huge advocate to what they bring to market--a low cost alternative to primary institutions, cutting the high cost of a Bachelors degree by at least 1/3; but, those CCs were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong. The only way for ANY college student to do this is through real-world experience (from an organization that is willing to take on someone very green or private repo work/portfolio). I am regularly asked by randoms on LinkedIn and/or my network as well as interns and/or candidates what they can be doing to improve their chances to get an internship or FT role. In those instances, I always recommend that these folks: 1. Come up with a project, end to end. 2. Develop the code and post it in a repo that can be accessed by companies during the hiring process. 3. Be able to explain the why behind the project, the entire process end to end, and--most importantly--why the work was important to do. These are the items I believe will put those green students toward the top 20% of their competition in the market. I find entirely too many candidates who have a lot of coding and theory courses and not a whole lot of application of those learnings. By being able to show management of a project from end to end, be able to explain the development process coherently, and provide the potential business value it brings is a big way for those folks to stand out from someone who can just write code. Many average four-year colleges aren't doing this for their students; CCs most definitely aren't.

nordsieck 2y ago
> I worked in the CC system; but, they were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong. I haven't worked in the CC system, but I've been around the Belleuve/Seattle area CCs for many years. And at least for those, there are broadly 2 tracks. The first is what you say - the first 2 years of a bachelor's degree track. The 2nd track is a variety of certifications. Sometimes these are industry certs like Microsoft, Cisco, etc. And some of them are CC certs. But they aim to get people productive in 2 years.
lispisok 2y ago

hinkley 2y ago

When Seattle built their light rail system they ran it past UW and nearly every community college in the region. It was already a known phenomenon for UW students to take CC classes to reduce the cost of genEd requirements but after the trains that just got easier. Much faster than the busses.

smcg 2y ago

Okay, but it's plenty enough for a paid internship. Many of these students are going to transfer to a 4-year after this, so I don't know why this would be different.

swatcoder 2y ago

That's not true at all. Our industry is swimming in auto-didacts, dropouts, bootcampers, and community college graduates. There's no licensure and most industry-adjacent academic programs spend a lot of time teaching concepts and abstractions far divorced from everyday industry needs. Committed tinkers who are ready to get their hands dirty and start learning the trade are historically very welcome. However, the job market is upside down right now, because we had an insane hiring bubble that has since burst, leaving countless people with real work experience in the candidate pool for jobs at all levels. In this kind of market, which we're used to seeing come and go, there's temporarily a lower-than-usual demand for candidates with less vetting, and so the auto-didacts/etc can expect to have a hard time getting attention for a bit. A lack of interest in community college graduates is an ephemeral market state that we're familiar with seeing sometimes, and definitely not a structural detail of the industry.

ghaff 2y ago
I think that's probably fair. I know very qualified people who are having trouble finding jobs. I don't personally care all that much but a number of opportunities post semi-retirement haven't really materialized. Which is fine but would probably have been different in different times.