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>The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That's the thing, t
by learc83 14y ago
>The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework.
That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age.
> Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term.
The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies.
Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
- jlgreco 14y ago> That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
- learc83 14y agoIf you're talking about top graduates from top schools, or recent graduates working for some hip startup in the valley, then you're probably right, they're aren't many who didn't do extra outside of class. But the majority of programmers are those mediocre students who didn't do anything extra, and are now slaving away writing some internal purchase order management system for XYZ corp (in Java)--someone has to do that stuff.
- jlgreco 14y agoI suppose you are probably right. I guess where I am coming from is that I am not convinced that there isn't a labour shortage just because there are a ton of those mediocre Java-slaves bouncing around.