3 ms·

>If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that And that's why a university degree is almost mean

>If you have just graduated University then it's likely that the only code samples you have will be from that And that's why a university degree is almost meaningless. I had code samples I could have sent a prospective employer before I even started college. If you went all the way through getting a CS degree and never wrote a line of code for fun on your own time, I think that's a perfectly legitimate reason to reject your job application.

jiggy2011 14y ago
What you are really saying here is that you are mainly interested in people who started coding before attending university. This is contrary to the view of most universities who are desperate to get people into the CS program who are not stereotypical 'geeks'. Perhaps the message they should be sending is 'if you haven't been coding for at least 3 years off your own back, don't apply for CS'. I'm not even sure that this idea is completely true, I know plenty of people who attended top UK universities for CS and the overwhelming majority of them didn't write OSS code while at university, it didn't seem to hurt their development skills too much though. In fact I'd wager that there are plenty of people doing cool things at google/MS/Apple etc who never wrote OSS code in their lives. Personally I hacked around on a few things while at university, but pretty much every few months I would look back on the code I had written prior and realise what a pile of junk it was. I didn't shed a tear when the disk it was all stored on died.
- eru 14y ago
  Not OSS code, but at least some pet projects?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    You might have some pet projects but I'm not sure if that really proves anything. For example I built PHP websites when I was at university but I would never show any of the code from those as a representation of the output I was capable of. Most of the programming work was very trivial (for example a form that sends an email) and the code quality wasn't great (because I knew the project would never have to scale and if I did I would just have rewritten it anyway). So it wouldn't prove anything beyond "can do rudimentary PHP" , I would think that having a high score in a difficult class (compilers, A.I etc) would be a far better signal to an employer.

jiggy2011 14y ago

What you are really saying here is that you are mainly interested in people who started coding before attending university. This is contrary to the view of most universities who are desperate to get people into the CS program who are not stereotypical 'geeks'. Perhaps the message they should be sending is 'if you haven't been coding for at least 3 years off your own back, don't apply for CS'. I'm not even sure that this idea is completely true, I know plenty of people who attended top UK universities for CS and the overwhelming majority of them didn't write OSS code while at university, it didn't seem to hurt their development skills too much though. In fact I'd wager that there are plenty of people doing cool things at google/MS/Apple etc who never wrote OSS code in their lives. Personally I hacked around on a few things while at university, but pretty much every few months I would look back on the code I had written prior and realise what a pile of junk it was. I didn't shed a tear when the disk it was all stored on died.

eru 14y ago
Not OSS code, but at least some pet projects?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  You might have some pet projects but I'm not sure if that really proves anything. For example I built PHP websites when I was at university but I would never show any of the code from those as a representation of the output I was capable of. Most of the programming work was very trivial (for example a form that sends an email) and the code quality wasn't great (because I knew the project would never have to scale and if I did I would just have rewritten it anyway). So it wouldn't prove anything beyond "can do rudimentary PHP" , I would think that having a high score in a difficult class (compilers, A.I etc) would be a far better signal to an employer.