Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work | Hacker News Reader

Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work

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25 pointsmadmotive44 comments

I'm personally more concerned with keeping CS as a study of the science of computing rather than adapting it to improve the job prospects of students. My feeling is that really so many people going into CS aren't looking to study the science. They're going for software engineer/architecture/analyst jobs that make them a decent salary.

Some of us went into computer science out of genuine interest in one of the most revolutionary sciences in our lifetime. If it hurts our job prospects, well, that's part of the sacrifice.

I think what we need to do is ask CompSci students what they're wanting to achieve after school. Universities need to offer (and encourage) a broader selection of software development degrees (software engineering, business software, etc) rather than try to dilute CS to be all businessy. I know some schools offer more, but I'm not sure they set student expectations appropriately. Businesses (maybe even more importantly) need to learn how to ask for the degrees/expertise they actually want rather than asking for CS all the time for every software engineering job.

If you're reading this and making hiring decisions-- you can help by changing the wording in your job postings. Stop asking specifically for CS degrees when you really just need someone with a degree who can hack with the best of them.

Kids these days don't want to be programmers, they all want to be "Certified Enterprise Solutions Architects" and whatnot.

Think about it, when was the last time you saw "programmer" as a job title? At the very minimum now it's "developer" or "software engineer". No-one actually wants to get their hands dirty with code. And I'll tell you why: in today's modern culture, nothing is right or wrong. Lines, boxes and clouds on a whiteboard and just someone's opinion, no more valid than anyone elses. But code, that requires you to say "this is right" and "this is wrong". Kids these days can't face the pressure of making definitive statements.

"For to learn, is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it. Hence young men are sooner persuaded than those that are more in years..."

That's Plutarch, complaining about the same thing almost 2,000 years ago.

And get off my lawn!

Your quote says young people have an easier time learning something new, so its actually the opposite of what the other person said.

Have you seen consultants from overseas in an internal IT dept? I think this is total ____, and it sounds like another PR ploy to lobby a raise for the visa quota. I work for one of the investment banks, and I would say a low ball estimate is 25%-30% of the back office IT, is visa related individuals in the US (either consultants or internal hires), not to mention the "24 hour" teams they like to implement with India. I don't have a problem with companies needing to import talent at all, but I do have a problem with companies driving the wages down by using these excuses of a lack of talent. Subsequently, paying these people below US market value. If a shortage was the case, companies should pay a premium of something in the ballpark of 10% more, because of the "lack" of demand. Instead, they look at this as a cost saving tool. It's so blatant, and its so obvious, just work in the back office of Wall St. for a month, and you will agree. I wonder what it's like on the west coast.

It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates. Someone who should be going to DeVry to learn the J2EE stack or .Net and is only doing so for the paycheck, not genuine interest in software development.

When I was in college (1996-2001), I would say an overwhelming majority of the CS students were there solely for all those tech jobs that their parents read about. They were only interested in learning something for either a grade in class or that someone might hire them to do it. Really, trade schools should be handling those types of people.

It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates.

No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

It doesn't matter what technologies you learned at college, high school, trade school, or from books. Whatever it is, it won't be enough anyway. You'll be expected to get to work, use what you know, and pick up what you have to. For the rest of your life.

More importantly, you will be expected to understand abstract ideas (people and tech), break down complex issues, develop effective work habits, and communicate intellegently with many different types of people. Aren't these exactly the type of things that college is for?

No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

That's simply not true. I agree that that is how it should be. But the vast majority of companies hire by key/buzzwords on a resume. You could be the greatest coder in the world but if you don't have "10 years Visual X+#" you won't even get past the HR screen. Everyone loses in that scenario, you don't have a job, the company doesn't have a worker. Sucks, but there it is.

So, it is the responsibility of the companies to make sure that they hire competent people and not only by the key/buzzwords. The ones who know how to hire will be more competitive.

I expect this is a significant factor in the productivity advantage of small companies/startups.

That's simply not true.

vast majority of companies

Based upon what data?

I've personally conducted over 2,500 interviews and hired many of them. That's what I look for. And no, I'm not in HR or a headhunter.

Jobsite/Jobserve are just shopping lists of skills. Even our own ads, by the time they've made it from us (actual technical people) through whatever means to actual ads (on the web/in the press), are like that. It's how things are done in the industry, at least for the kind of company that hires people its people don't already know (i.e. above a certain size).

That applies to everyone in any field, whether you went to school or not.

My point was that while IT (which to me, means IT department, not software companies) may want those things, what they hire for are the tech skills primarily. And by tech skills, I mean a laundry list of frameworks and APIs.

The skills you mention seem to be reserved for the managers at the places I've worked.

I see the current problems with the financial markets have already had much impact on CS/software hire, especially in London. I hope this is not a return to the bad days of UK CS job prospects, circa 2001-2002, after the internet bubble burst and 9/11.

Back then even very proficient students at leading universities had hard time finding jobs. These were people who did programming outside of uni courses, had good summer work experiences, built multi-threaded distributed desktop apps as well as web apps, and were actual 'problem solvers' with good skills in mathematic modeling and algorithm design and architectural design skills. However there was simply no market, regardless of how good they were.

Now, it seems as courses get diluted it really only harms all parties concerned and I often think the best thing someone with good A-levels should do is go directly into industry or in a startup/SME atleast before going to uni.

2001-2002 wasn't bad. I know it seemed that way but it really wasn't.

1990-1994 was frickin' nuclear winter for (almost?) all engineering in (almost?) all western nations. Senior staff in many offices would be left reading newspapers at their desks (superb people with no contracts and nothing to do) and there were extremely few junior positions to be filled. Any work which brought in food and paid rent was welcome, and most of that was stuff I never thought I'd see with a degree.

On the flip-side: After surviving that, bootstrapping a company from scratch was a breeze.

Where did you work?

At the time? Any place which would pay!

Here's the dynamic a recent graduate faces in a severe recession:

No companies in your field are hiring. Period. Contract work is out as well, since larger companies are now scooping up all of the 'crumbs' which used to sustain junior contractors. There are no boring Q/A jobs to temporarily take, no support jobs, no documentation jobs. Nothing.

You could bump your expectations down and try for work for which you are 'overqualified', but there are tons of experienced, desperate and unemployed people fighting for those jobs too. They will accept less pay than you and any employer with half a clue knows you will bolt the moment you get an offer that fits your qualifications anyhow, making you an inevitable cost and waste of resources to train. Barring an awesome network or family favours, those are out.

So, where does that leave you? I'm sure the seasoned Gen-Xers on the board remember :-)

My own low point was sitting in a basement, handling dispatch phones for a school board's janitorial service, while the 'senior manager' of the group was briefing me on the arduous tasks I'd be facing; at one point explaining to me how to add a column of figures by hand ('you have to carry the one here...').

Most of my friends have similar recession stories and we can all laugh about them now, but things can get far shittier far faster than you'd ever dream possible.

I wouldn't suggest you face the future with dread, but don't kid yourself when you plan out what your 'worst case scenario' could be. Bad economic times can be _really_ bad and it's often a struggle to get through them.

You will, though. It's all cyclical and prospects do improve with time.

So, where does that leave you?

http://news.ycombinator.com/apply

..and for those who don't make the cut?

A recent graduate in recessionary times rarely has the luxury of sitting back and waiting for the next application round. When there's rent to pay, food to buy and an empty bank account facing you, things can be a little rough.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply YC is the solution for everyone. I just wanted to point out that we're still funding, regardless of the economic weather. (The average startup takes longer to succeed than economic cycles ordinarily last, so we ignore them.)

Even if one doesn't get YC funding, working on a startup is probably better for your career than cleaning toilets.

Is this as close as it gets to a personal invitation on HN? :)

So you think that was hard? Try twenty years of recession mixed with 100% annual inflation in a third world country. That is what my parents went trough in the 70s and 80s. That is why I feel confident about the future, things can be wrong but at the end we will be OK. Just avoid debt, try to stay productive, and enjoy the roller coaster.

>So you think that was hard?

Not particularly, no. All I had to do was keep my wits and wait for the economy to turn around. These days, I can laugh off the entire experience and sum it up in a message board post.

As you say, in the end you'll be OK if you keep your head and plan for better times. Just remember that, no matter how bleak the environment might become, things will improve.

And in which country did you work?

I would estimate that the vast majority of IT jobs are not programming-related. Most are in technical support and admin. And an employer is just as likely (maybe more likely) to employ a liberal arts graduate to do technical support, as hire a graduate of a computing-related subject. I've worked in several smallish companies (circa 500 employees), where I was the only person in IT who had a computing-related degree. Furthermore, I was the only one who had any interest in IT per se, and the only one who had any knowledge of IT beyond what was required to do the job (even in that knowledge some of them were woefully ignorant). The truth of the matter is that there is a wide gulf between a university education and what employers actually want/need.

It will be funny when doctors and lawyers are outsourced. Programming was outsourced not because it is an easy profession but because it was the entire profession that enabled outsourcing, and so was looked onto as magical by people who had never seen computers or had as good a way to make a living before.

But there's really no reason why outsourcing will be limited to manufacturing and IT, especially as the kids of the 3rd world IT specialists grow up and choose new professions for themselves. You really only need surgeons, dentists, nurses, and pill dispensing machines on shore. American law books and internal medicine facts can be studied very well off-shore, and trials and meetings can be held via online video. Everything would be digital and operate even faster than ever before. Nurses would have two main specialties, consisting of taking care of the old and taking a patient's vitals for off-shore doctors and computers that are good at predicting events and prescribing solutions, to calculate.

This would also reduce the costs of healthcare for everybody. ;)

Without wanting to start a debate about licensing, unionisation and so on, I expect that to take decades. Much of the enabling technology is here now, but the medical and legal industries have decades (or even centuries) of experience in limiting entry to their industry and thereby maintaining high wages... er, I mean, "high standards". They won't let this happen without a PR war on whichever government is "allowing it to happen".

This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

Indeed. What bothers me especially is that these comments are made by managers with combinations of elite business degrees and experience which will enable them never to be limited in the kind of work they do. And yet, they are practically demanding that CS students be neatly packed turn-key packages that can do no more and no less than what is required of them in typical business programming roles. "Limited career prospects" cannot begin to explain what I see in this scheme of things.

> The figures point to the brutal reality behind technology companies’ complaints that universities are not tailoring their computer science degrees sufficiently to meet business needs.

This is idiocy. Computer science has as much to do with their business needs as pharmacists have to do with biology. That's why biologists have figured out how to make separate programs for them.

I really wonder how this can happen in the UK. Here in Switzerland it's the opposite. We have only like 300-400 people a year graduating with a CS degree and 2-3k jobs open. It's a real crisis, and companies are outsourcing to anywhere. Not to save costs, but because they simply can't find people. In my school ETH Zurich, in 2000 there were over 300 people starting CS, this year it was less than 100. I think salaries just have to continue raising until they meet bankers so that engineering and CS starts getting attractive again...

At dinner, we were discussing European countries that we might consider moving to. My friend mentioned that Switzerland is one of the hardest countries to get a work permit and later residency (ten years uninterrupted). I immediately started to wonder if the Switzerland IT job surplus is due to their pretty restrictive immigration policies, to say nothing of the notorious cleanliness standards (that you must adhere to when selling your home)

This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can outsource their career development responsibility to universities.

The quality (and curriculum) of comp sci courses in the UK varies dramatically. I know of Comp Sci graduates who don't know how to program. I also know of Comp Sci courses that don't expose the students to anything like client engagement or general business skills.

Another question worth asking is what exactly is an 'IT Job'? From the sounds of things the IBM chap wants a Comp Sci degree to mean an IT Consultancy Degree. How useful that would be to some other business that wants really good developers is another matter.

This seems to be a improbably high number. I live in Germany, and here the unemployment rate for CS graduates is among the lowest of any education, with the prognosis still being very good. Do any of you who live in the US or UK have had problems finding a job when you were searching for one?

It's not improbable at all. When I graduated (2002), I knew a few people who had a lot of trouble finding a job. They got killed on interviews with questions like "have you done any programming outside of class?", "what is the complexity of insert on a vector?" and "what is your preferred unix shell?" (note: resume had unix skills).

Eventually, they would up getting either non-computer related jobs or being hired by clueless PHBs. There are some BAD programmers out there. 10% would not surprise me.

I agree. When I started studying in 1998, the bubble was still growing and many of my co-students were only in CS for the money they thought they were going to make (and were they disappointed when we graduated!).

Some of the commentators in that article argue that CS degrees should be more relevant to the business world. I disagree - too many universities have already hobbled CS degrees to make them (apparently) more relevant to the business world. This leads the wrong people into CS and under-prepares the good students.

It's interesting that they mentioned medicine. Med students learn about a lot more than most of them will ever face in their careers. So medicine is hard and it takes a lot of work. But we expect this, because we expect them to have an integrated view of the body in order to diagnose us correctly.

So why do we settle on CS degrees that are patchworks of business communications, XML and web design?

My (not so humble) opinion: do justice to CS and push the standard up. Graduates from such degrees will be able to handle whatever you throw at them.

I think the problem is not so much the low standard, but the lack of reliable tests for the personal aptitude, and this should not only be a problem in CS. Universities should spend a lot of effort prior to someone beginning their studies, to find out if the person really wants to do what they chose, in a way that the person itself realizes that quickly. This phenomenon is still huge in Germany, I started studying CS in 2002 and after one year, 60% of the people in my year had quit, mostly because they did not have any idea what was expecting them...

At least the found out in the first year. They could have found out after four years.

There still were some dropping out every year after that, but the number was significantly smaller after each step.

10% would not surprise me.

Agreed. The notion that 9 out of 10 CS graduates are capable of useful work is beyond laughable.

There's a rider to that headline. The effect is in UK, not the US. Here in the US, I do find that in the entry-level employers are more than willing to recruit people who get on-the-job training.

That said, I hope they find decent jobs.

I actually learnt more outside my CS course, experimenting in my own time, than on it. People should be encouraged to experiment more in education and not spoon-fed.

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