Programming and employment

[Mira Yurizaki]

11 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

I'm pretty much right there with @M.Yurizaki when it comes to making people aware of you, personally. You don't need to know half as much to make $100K/year as a frontend web dev, but I can almost guarantee you that starting in the job portals will only get you part of the way's there. Know a guy, because the industry is too volatile.

To add to this, and it's anecdotal, all of my career building jobs except one I got because I knew someone. Most of them were from referrals.

 

And aside from my very first career job (which was an internship), nobody asked me about my education or what I did at school. They just wanted to know if I knew what I was doing.

[Angry Badger]

Whether or not a college degree matters or not might also differ a bit on a per country basis. 

 

I knew people who for example took a year in the US, and I was told that not having a degree there posed less challenges than not having a degree in my country. Here we generally have a lot of good candidates for most positions, including a lot of students with masters degrees, and a degree is therefore quite important if you want your resume looked at. The degree also gives a small guarantee that you at least know something about the most essential areas within software engineering, while candidtaes with no degreees are often wildcards; either skilled or horrible. 

 

A degree of course doesn't say much about how you perform, but it's an easy way to exclude those who are most likely to not have the desired skill set, and that's acceptable when you have a lot of candidates and limited time.

[Brenz]

4 hours ago, Samputio said:

None of the skills you listed, including writing good code, is dependent on if a person has a degree. 

A degree certainly isn't the perfect solution however actually being assessed goes a way towards identifying where people make mistakes and put them back on the correct path. The problem with learning online is there is too much incorrect or outdated information out there and people often end up going the wrong way and picking up bad habits.

 

4 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Though a lot of the what was listed in that post is either company specific or is not really useful or relevant in a wider schema of things. I find it more useful to be able to adapt quickly to what the company does rather than try to soak in as much as possible, only to find out you only really need like 10% of what you accrued. It is useful to know what those are on a higher level detail, but it's not useful to know anything specific unless you really need it.

Yes the list is based on my experiences however I feel most of the wider points are valid. Yes any version control experience is great and you could replace Linux with Windows but the rest should be relevant in most companies and if they aren't they should be.

 

Other qualifications/certifications can help as well as professional memberships. I'm a member of the BCS and have completed Certified Scrum Master training. Keeping skills up to date and learning new things is just as important once in a job.

[wasab]

20 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

Not true at all, just beucase you don't have a degree doesn't mean you can't have a paper trail. 

 

Github for projects and there are also package managers like pip, npm that you can publish a live package for other people to use.

 

I have a degree in computing science and it taught my very little of real world programming knowledge, things like version control, other paradigms of programming other than OOP.

 

It also showed me that education system is vastly out of date with most places (speaking from the uk) still teaching visual basic. @Nuluvius if free I'm sure will back me up on this.

 

Education is trash.

College degree is an overrated commodity. Education is more about you learning than being taught. It is a life long experience. You don’t need pretentious instructors lecturing on what and what you should learn.

[2FA]

5 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

To add to this, and it's anecdotal, all of my career building jobs except one I got because I knew someone. Most of them were from referrals.

 

And aside from my very first career job (which was an internship), nobody asked me about my education or what I did at school. They just wanted to know if I knew what I was doing.

I see degrees as showing you have some form of baseline knowledge, which is also how a lot of companies see them. Most of the job postings I look at require a Bachelor and like 1 year of experience, Associates and like 3 years, or just straight 5 years of experience for example. It's more about being able to back up your claimed skills more than anything.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, 2FA said:

I see degrees as showing you have some form of baseline knowledge, which is also how a lot of companies see them. Most of the job postings I look at require a Bachelor and like 1 year of experience, Associates and like 3 years, or just straight 5 years of experience for example. It's more about being able to back up your claimed skills more than anything.

If it's a degree by itself listed somewhere on the resume, I don't think that means much other than you memorized enough info to pass tests. What courses did you take? What projects did you do? That's the kind of thing I was told to put down if you had no prior software developer experience. It puts down a better anecdote of your skills than having a fancy piece of paper.

 

Which I'd argue applies to anything. I don't care if you were magna cum lade, an IEEE officer, or in an honor society. The bottom line is: can you actually do the job? I don't know how true it is, but rumor has it here in SoCal that companies don't really like the University of California (the fancier state schools) graduates and prefer the California State University students (the "lesser" state schools). And it's become a running joke that you go to a UC to become a professor, you go to a CSU to get a job.

[2FA]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

If it's a degree by itself listed somewhere on the resume, I don't think that means much other than you memorized enough info to pass tests. What courses did you take? What projects did you do? That's the kind of thing I was told to put down if you had no prior software developer experience. It puts down a better anecdote of your skills than having a fancy piece of paper.

 

Which I'd argue applies to anything. I don't care if you were magna cum lade, an IEEE officer, or in an honor society. The bottom line is: can you actually do the job? I don't know how true it is, but rumor has it here in SoCal that companies don't really like the University of California (the fancier state schools) graduates and prefer the California State University students (the "lesser" state schools). And it's become a running joke that you go to a UC to become a professor, you go to a CSU to get a job.

That rings true for any field. I wasn't trying to explain how to build a resume though my backing up comment was kind of implying that, was mainly just sharing my observations. Regardless of education though, I think *good* personal projects are really important for demonstrating your knowledge and skills as far as CS goes.

[AngryBeaver]

I am rather disappointed on all of the people against higher education. Seeing that as we move forward in the future those degrees are going to become more and more required for tasks.

 

Also, I saw it mentioned that they put the degree requirement there to weed out candidates. In a small company this might be true, but if you are talking about large fortune 500 companies if you do not meet those basic requirements your resume will literally be dropped from the system. There are some tricks that help you get around this, but for the most part you won't be considered.

 

I am not saying a degree reigns supreme, but I am saying for entry in to the field you either need a degree or good solid experience with a company to open doors for employment. If you wanted to code for my current company even at entry bug checking levels... you would need either 3 years of experience doing it, a 2 year technical degree in programming with 6+ months of experience, or a 4 year degree in the field.

 

Now once you had that entry level position, if you wanted to have many advancement opportunities then you would need to start furthering your education. The company for the most part pays for the bulk of that if you are interested, bu that is because they want people to have advancement paths... and without a degree in a large company your advancement is little to non-existent. 

[Samputio]

 

4 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

I am rather disappointed on all of the people against higher education. Seeing that as we move forward in the future those degrees are going to become more and more required for tasks.

That's an interesting sentiment because I hear the current train of thought being the opposite, that higher education is failing to teach the students the skills they need for their intended work place, and that they are becoming less necessary as a result. But you are the one who's in the thick of it, so your input holds weight, so I don't know what to believe now.

What do you think about the common statement "I learned more in 6 months on the job then I did in 4 years of school"? It's quite a damning statement when you consider the length and cost of higher education. 

A lengthy (and often expensive) course seems to only hold value as a door opener, and little more. Why is the default path towards university when instead an apprenticeship would be magnitudes more valuable to the individual as well as the employer? 

Perhaps an explanation towards the split we're seeing in this thread is a dissonance in how we're all defining "higher education"...

[programmer]

5 minutes ago, Samputio said:

That's an interesting sentiment because I hear the current train of thought being the opposite, that higher education is failing to teach the students the skills they need for their intended work place, and that they are becoming less necessary as a result. But you are the one who's in the thick of it, so your input holds weight, so I don't know what to believe now.

What do you think about the common statement "I learned more in 6 months on the job then I did in 4 years of school"? It's quite a damning statement when you consider the length and cost of higher education. 

A lengthy (and often expensive) course seems to only hold value as a door opener, and little more. Why is the default path towards university when instead an apprenticeship would be magnitudes more valuable to the individual as well as the employer? 

Perhaps an explanation towards the split we're seeing in this thread is a dissonance in how we're all defining "higher education"...

The sorts of things you learn in college tend to be different than what you learn in a job. For instance, being forced to write tons of papers is very different from what you'd do in a job - but it is still very useful. If you take at least some classes in person its likely to socialize you with people who's mindsets you'll encounter in your work. I probably will never need to know what a fluvial fan is or need to identify classical music but it probably broadens me in a way that just coding doesn't.

[AngryBeaver]

28 minutes ago, Samputio said:

 

That's an interesting sentiment because I hear the current train of thought being the opposite, that higher education is failing to teach the students the skills they need for their intended work place, and that they are becoming less necessary as a result. But you are the one who's in the thick of it, so your input holds weight, so I don't know what to believe now.

What do you think about the common statement "I learned more in 6 months on the job then I did in 4 years of school"? It's quite a damning statement when you consider the length and cost of higher education. 

A lengthy (and often expensive) course seems to only hold value as a door opener, and little more. Why is the default path towards university when instead an apprenticeship would be magnitudes more valuable to the individual as well as the employer? 

Perhaps an explanation towards the split we're seeing in this thread is a dissonance in how we're all defining "higher education"...

That is because you often learn a broad range of things in your area of major when going to school, but when on the job you learn specialized stuff like using their tools, software, etc. So you you learn very important things for THEM, and it might even carry over to other companies, but in general you always learn a lot of useful information when moving to a new job. That is just because of all the variables at play.

 

So lets take a look with a problem I have actually seen recently. If you look at someone in cyber security doing level 1 triage work. If they don't have a good education they still might be able to do the job true. The problem is for example I have 2 new employees. One got in because of certain situation around his circumstances and the other came here fresh from college.

 

They both have learned the tools and can do a decent enough job... that is until something new pops up or a problem occurs. The non-educated employee has a very hard time figuring out what to do, because all he knows is the little information he picked up here. The person with an education though... understands how the things leading up to his role work. He understands the networking behind it, the common tactics used by the opposing side, and just have a very broad knowledge of things he might encounter.. so in general he doesn't get tripped up by these things, but instead responds to them appropriately.

 

The person without an education actually makes day to day things harder on people of higher levels. Where as the person with one is much more self-sufficient. Can you guess which one will get promotions and have a long lasting stay with the company?

 

This isn't an uncommon thing and is generally why education DOES matter and is becoming more important. More and more jobs are asking for a degree, pay is becoming more and more reliant on your education level. If you want to advance inside a big company then you also will need to advance your education level. Sure you can land a job in HR for example with a 2 year degree, but if you want to ride that career path to an executive level position then you have better completed a grad school program.

[reniat]

I think there's a difference between "We think higher education should do a better job of teaching real and practical coding standards" and "Higher education is just a gateway to the industry and is useless beyond that"

 

The biggest thing you lose if you ignore academia is the breadth of knowledge. I went to college and took a bunch of classes that are not directly applicable to my current job, but I still am very glad I know them. Things like the machine learning, statistics beyond just the basics, how the internet works, how a CPU works/writing in assembly, etc.

(note these are things I know from college that *I* don't use, obviously there are plenty of jobs that do use some of these but even then a person in that job might have a different set of skills they learned in college they don't use but are glad to know)

In addition to my actual job, I also mentor new engineers in our onboarding program (~2 months time) and I absolutely wish colleges offered a few courses that were industry focused. An "industry primer" class if you will, taught by person who has relevant industry experience. Things like writing proper unit tests, satisfactory documentation, modularity and reusability, writing cohesive interfaces, etc.

 

tl;dr Colleges could absolutely do better, but I still think they are very valuable and don't exactly blame most companies for requiring degrees. (though the price for college in the USA is still stupid and i'll be paying back loans for way longer that I am comfortable with).

[MyName13]

What all of posters here (or most of them) don't mention is what field are they talking about?Some outsourced web app coding?Designing web sites in wordpress for a bakery?Software development in a serious software development company?Machine learning, digital signal processing, embedded systems, information security, operations research, some "Google level algorithm stuff", computer graphics, (online) banking, computer vision, R&D (that might require PhDs) etc...It would be useful to mention what exactly you're talking about because I've seen many web / mobile developers and even designers complain how colleges are useless (of course they are for these positions ).Such posts will really affect someone who would like to pursue a degree for some serious work, like me for example.I almost decided not to go to college at all because some dudes on the internet said that college education is mostly useless (that, and the fact that my country's market is all about web development and design).

[vorticalbox]

On 12/04/2018 at 8:05 PM, Samputio said:

None of the skills you listed, including writing good code, is dependent on if a person has a degree. 

It makes sense that a top 100 company would prioritise degrees for the sole purpose of saving resources, because those who have finished a degree have gone through a defacto filter, I get that part. 

Does a completed computer science degree come even half way close to guaranteeing a person will come away with the ability to write good code and to hit those requirements you've listed? By most accounts, the answer is a big no. I have seen this sentiment from @vorticalbox more than I have seen its counterpart.  

 

I don't understand how someone can think of going into a programming field of any kind without daily experience with the things you listed @Brenz, it's contradictory how it all hinges on having a degree which in itself doesn't seem to do a good job at actually instilling the very practices you've laid out. 

Of course, I'm not pointing out contradiction in your comment, it's the way the industry is currently shaped that is contradictory. High quality, free, open source education is on the rise and eventually employers will find themselves dipping into the pool. If I was an employer I'd be keeping a more watchful eye on on that space. 

All of the people in my computer science class were using xml to store data, no one used git or were even taught it and we were shown only OOP.

 

Good code comes with putting in effort not sitting in a lecture being taught visual basic and store information in xml rather than a database.

[MyName13]

22 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

All of the people in my computer science class were using xml to store data, no one used git or were even taught it and we were shown only OOP.

 

Good code comes with putting in effort not sitting in a lecture being taught visual basic and store information in xml rather than a database.

1)Damn, even universities in my country don't teach VB.

2)CS != software engineering...

[wasab]

3 hours ago, MyName13 said:

1)Damn, even universities in my country don't teach VB.

2)CS != software engineering...

Most college CS programs have a course call software engineering thanks to the job industry constantly pressuring the academia to teach these things.

 

CS however by nature is not about engineering. They prep students for graduate research. Computer scientists can code but just not the neatest code. They merely code enough to demonstrate and implement a proof of concept in whatever they are researching. They do not code commercial softwares that will be maintain for decades for consumer consumption 

[MyName13]

34 minutes ago, wasab said:

Most college CS programs have a course call software engineering thanks to the job industry constantly pressuring the academia to teach these things.

 

CS however by nature is not about engineering. They prep students for graduate research. Computer scientists can code but just not the neatest code. They merely code enough to demonstrate and implement a proof of concept in whatever they are researching. They do not code commercial softwares that will be maintain for decades for consumer consumption 

My point is that people complain how CS college degrees don't prepare people for software development when they aren't even supposed to be software developers.

[wasab]

1 hour ago, MyName13 said:

My point is that people complain how CS college degrees don't prepare people for software development when they aren't even supposed to be software developers.

One H&R has remaked that those without actual experience is a a temporary liability but those without theoretical knowledge is a permanent liability.

 

honestly, it is about whether or not you have the intelligence and underlying knowledge to pick up what is needed fast. Software is a constantly evolving techology. It isn’t a learn it once and be done with it endeavor. Degree is the best in demonstrating you have a good breathe in the subject matter I suppose.

[MyName13]

20 minutes ago, wasab said:

Software is a constantly evolving techology.

I keep seeing this all over and over again, but what exactly is evolving so fast in the IT and CS industry (ironically, at the same time I see how companies don't change tried and tested technologies for years or a decade, look at windows XP)?Can you name few examples?Having a new JS library of the month (every month) isn't progress.

[Mira Yurizaki]

15 minutes ago, wasab said:

 Degree is the best in demonstrating you have a good breathe in the subject matter I suppose.

Especially since a lot of schools aren't always up to date on the latest and greatest. Then again the latest and greatest isn't exactly the greatest

 

And, while I'm not advocating we replace formal education with this, you can get a cursory know-how on Wikipedia or the internet in general. The only thing I find formal education provides is structure and the ability to exercise what you've learned in a much easier fashion. For example, I had a class in how multimedia algorithms work. Without structure, I wouldn't really know where to start or go to next. Without the school's connections to MathWorks, I wouldn't be able to demonstrate the algorithms on Matlab (which I guess I could do in C or Python, but it'd be more work than necessary)

[wasab]

20 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Especially since a lot of schools aren't always up to date on the latest and greatest. Then again the latest and greatest isn't exactly the greatest

 

And, while I'm not advocating we replace formal education with this, you can get a cursory know-how on Wikipedia or the internet in general. The only thing I find formal education provides is structure and the ability to exercise what you've learned in a much easier fashion. For example, I had a class in how multimedia algorithms work. Without structure, I wouldn't really know where to start or go to next. Without the school's connections to MathWorks, I wouldn't be able to demonstrate the algorithms on Matlab (which I guess I could do in C or Python, but it'd be more work than necessary)

Algorithms have no need to be the latest and greatest Lol.

 

my intro CS course taught java swing as a GUI when Oracle is already retiring it in favor of JavaFX so yeah, much of the stuffs are outdated but they are teaching the concepts rather than what the industry actually uses. 

 

Techonology can be outdated but concepts can’t. All OOP languages, regardless however evolved will have abstract data structures like list, stacks, queque for example and unless some brilliant mathematicians figure out an algorithms that can factor infinitely many prime factors in an instant, we are going to rely on the same underlying encryption.

[vorticalbox]

3 hours ago, MyName13 said:

My point is that people complain how CS college degrees don't prepare people for software development when they aren't even supposed to be software developers.

Here in Scotland you have computer science or games development.

 

I did software development for 2 years before doing year 3 of computer science which had everything from database design to computer architecture to ethics to web services.

 

For the 5 years i was studying, software development (as said I did 1 year of CS)

 

We learnt OOP and some designs such as class diagrams, all materials were in visual basic.

 

There was nothing about version control, any other styles of programming, nothing about how to properly layout a project folder, nothing about frameworks.

 

I use none of what I was shown in eductaion in my actual job, I basically wasted 5 years of my life to have a bit of paper to say this guy did some stuff.

 

 

[wasab]

2 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

 

 

I use none of what I was shown in eductaion in my actual job, I basically wasted 5 years of my life to have a bit of paper to say this guy did some stuff.

 

 

But there are so many frameworks out there and github is version control software tool instead of a computer or science. Academia isn’t a trade school unfortunately. It shouldn’t be either otherwise edcaution would be job training and college would be vocational school instead of an instuition of professional intelligentsia.

[Techicolors]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned internships. a nice advantage about going to school is that opportunity to gain some industry experience. it might even become an offer down the road, so you have some jobs lined up by the time you graduate

[vorticalbox]

11 hours ago, wasab said:

But there are so many frameworks out there and github is version control software tool instead of a computer or science. Academia isn’t a trade school unfortunately. It shouldn’t be either otherwise edcaution would be job training and college would be vocational school instead of an instuition of professional intelligentsia.

But what's the point in being educated in things that no one in the industry uses? Or In the the terms of git what everyone uses yet you're never taught  it.

 

When I did software development course for 2 years I expect my money to give me something worth while but what I have is a very expensive certificate.