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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

This is BS, most of these companies are looking for snowflakes from top 10 schools, who have been programming since they were in middle school.

I have plenty of competent friends who had a hard time finding anything better than an IT desk job after graduating from Stony Brook, NYU-Poly and City College.

Most smaller tech companies don't even consider training their new employees. Instead they want a 'ninja' who is comfortable with their tech stack and can hit the ground running straight out of school. To make things worse 90% of them think their analytics platform or social network for cats is the next Google, so they put their candidates through ridiculous interviews that have nothing to do with writing CRUD apps.

I even know people here at Columbia University who didn't get any good offers outside of finance.

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I don't disagree that companies are often looking for people who have resumes and skills far exceeding the simple, minor needs of particular jobs.

On the other hand, I have met many CS majors at local New York colleges, and even among the seniors who seem to be in the top half of the class, their knowledge of some basic things is almost universally absent. Such as software version control - they don't know what it is, they don't know the names of any version control systems, like git or perforce, and they don't know how to use any of them.

They study for class, mostly, but seem to have no interest in all of this outside of class. Not once in four years do you check a project out of github, fix a bug, and then send a patch and pull request? And that's among those who study and are in the top half of the class. Some kids don't even care about studying much and I don't know why they're even bothering.

I know what you mean, but I can't blame people for having other obligations or interests outside of programming. I went to a public high school here in NYC and have good friends who had to work their way through college, some of them even had siblings to support.

Knowing about git, tdd and etc is important but it's not something that can't be taught. It's as simple as pairing them with experienced engineers and pointing them to a few relevant books.

Learning things like git are very doable on the job.

In university, one should concentrate on learning things that are impractical to pick up on the job - calculus, statistics, theory, quantum mechanics, dynamics, etc. Stuff that takes sustained, concentrated focus to learn.

For example, although I got an engineering degree from Caltech, my practical knowledge upon graduating was about nil. But I found on the job at Boeing that the practical stuff was easy to pick up, and pairing it with the theoretical stuff I learned in school made for an effective combination. Others who did not know the math/theory, never picked it up, they'd spend their career avoiding it.

I'm with you in this. I would just like to add that learning calculus, statistics, quantum mechanics etc is important learning to apply it from young age is equally important.

I had a friend in school who was so very good in physics, he could just grasp every concept and get top grades. Once, we decided to make a video game or two in the computer lab during the sports periods (we bunked sports periods). We started with implementing simple projectile motion of ASCII characters, Simple Harmonic Motion of an ASCII gauntlet and lots of cool stuff and effects. I remember, even with his top notch knowledge of mechanics, he was unable to do simple things, and I ended up doing the games alone. Then after he avoided interacting with me, and rather completed his school homework during the sports period. He would come to the lab just to say that the game is not looking good, and I could have done this or that. I think he had inferiority complex. I scored lesser than him, and all the teachers heavily favored him. Our friendship became more formal.

I am sure he will get a very nice job.

The fact that you find it strange that these students don't do much programming and related stuff outside of class seems to be part of these high expectations - if they don't do much of these things outside of programming, then they just aren't interested enough, even if they get high grades.

Contrast this to some other, hypothetical study/profession where you are judged by your grades and work experience. Not your grades, work experience, and weekend projects.

This is not to say that these standards are necessarily bad, but rather that it is part of the higher standards that programmers have to live up to.

I'm taking Computer Architecture in grad-school this semester as a "make-up" from never having completed it in undergrad.

My partner for the programming projects had never seen git before, and proposed that we simply email each-other files. This is at Technion, the single best technical institution in Israel and one of the Top 50 in the world.

Goddamnit.

Going to have to disagree with you here. I didn't start programming until my second semester and wound up with three six-figure offers.

Do you not know what "most" means? How does one anecdote invalidate his claim?

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