Maybe it's a crazy idea, but universities are not, and were never intended to be, career training centers. Helping you get a job is just not the mission of these institutions. And it's just as well; it would be highly unfortunate for the academic field of computer science if the undergraduate curriculum focused on how to use current tools like Eclipse or Ruby on Rails or Angular.js. Universities are designed to give you a firm grounding in the fundamental concepts, which should give you the ability to understand whatever tools are in fashion in the industry with relative ease. Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.
Maybe it's a crazy idea, but they are equally not intended to be places where you go and learn nothing of value to anybody.
I mean, I get the whole academic focus thing too, but the described education wasn't focused on academic computer science either. It was simply useless.
Moreover, the idea that academics can be so strictly partitioned from practice is a rather silly one as well, at least in the computer science world. A program that claimed to be turning out really good computer scientists that, mysteriously, are incapable of actually driving a computer to do anything useful to anybody (academic or industry), would not be one that I would be paying much attention to. Even computer science academics are, on occasion, expected to be able to write an actual program every once in a while.
And I certainly won't believe anyone who claims to be really experienced at, say, using multithreaded programming, because they sat through a couple of classes and did a couple of homework assignments that didn't involve coding anything. It's really easy to think you know something, until you actually try to do it, and end up spending 15 hours debugging a terrible race condition. Which turns out to be something really, really simple in the end, and the real problem was that your "academic" knowledge still needed to be hardened with real-world experience.
And I'd observe that fully connects back to academia... it's the people who have actually tried things and used things and have some sort of real experience who will be pushing the boundaries forward, not some sort of semi-mystical "pure academics".
I realize it is a popular idea among society - that college is a career training center - but that is patently false.
It is an unfortunate idea too, because it leads to lots of people wasting thousands of dollars on an education they won't ever use in their career just for the sake of having the piece of paper they get at the end.
> Besides, if you're not doing any hacking in your free time outside of class anyway, you're probably not cut out for this career.
Bingo.
I really dislike this mentality and it unfortunately seems to be the expressed by a lot of engineers (at least ones that have an internet presence). Just because you don't spend all of your time hacking away doesn't mean you aren't cut out for this career nor does it mean you can't be a great engineer. This kind of mindset is only going to deter potentially good engineers from entering into the field.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that if you want to be a developer, it's helpful for programming to be an area of passion. But it's not at all obvious to me why that passion must be expressed in a certain way.
I really like math and computer science, and once I finish grad school, the plan is to have a job in applied math or statistics. Maybe even software. But in college, I didn't spend my free time programming, nor doing regressions just for kicks. In four years of university I did one personal project and two hackathons...total time invested, maybe 3 weekends? But let us not assume this means I'm not passionate about CS and math: I was a double major, I was a teaching assistant for 8 courses, I worked through the school as a private tutor for struggling students, I did research with professors, I published...and on my own time, I relaxed.
You should be pursuing a degree because it's a thorough & facilitated process of learning what you would be learning on your own anyway. You should be there because it's the fastest, most efficient way to get to the head of the pack of people who do have a tenacious passion for X and do spend a significant part of their free time on X. Every minute you're not doing something in X, you're not improving therein.
You think you're going to have a great career in X just by showing up for class and doing what's assigned? you think that will make for a good practitioner of X compared to others who live-and-breath the subject?
That you don't spend all your time on X doesn't mean you aren't cut out for this career and can't be great. The lead comment was "if you're not doing any X in your free time", not "if you're not spending all your free time on X". Don't wantonly construe the former as the latter.
But fact is, if you're not going above and beyond, you won't get above and beyond.
When treated as an objective rather than a place to learn, college becomes something to get "through" rather than some place to develop life skills.
The professional vocational degrees like engineering, medicine and law are intended exactly for career training. They are usually certified by practitioner guilds, for example.
You are quite right about computer science, but that is not a vocational professional program.
The OP studied engineering.
(edit: reading down a bit, someone spotted that OP studied Management Information Systems, which may or may not be engineering as generally understood.)
Medical school is absolutely not career training. It simply gives you the knowledge and vocabulary so that you can be trained to be doctor. The additional training, of course, happens in your residency.
You are utterly unprepared to truly be a physician when you graduate medical school, even if you have earned the right to be called 'doctor.'
Very true. If you want job training, go to a technical/vocational school, or enroll in a certification program. Those are both perfectly legitimate things to do, and there should be no shame in either.
Anecdotally, I'd say that of my CS class maybe only 5% did any serious programming work outside of class.
(I've rarely programmed outside of class/work since college. I've never had a problem getting a job. I just don't like sitting in front of a computer all the time.)
One of the things that continually frustrates me about people's attitudes toward higher education (at least in the U.S.) is that they don't recognize this fact. An undergraduate university education should give you a general competence, self-motivation, and curiosity. More particular skills can be learned elsewhere; if you spend your time in college learning Java instead of learning to be a well-rounded, thinking, educated person, you're making an expensive mistake. Particular skills go stale quickly, and, unlike other subjects you could study instead, they often lack intrinsic interest.
Companies used to hire people with general competence and then train them in the particular skills they need on the job. I'm not sure why people now seem to expect students to learn these skills at universities, at their own expense. It seems to me that the burden of this training should be on industry, not on universities and their graduates.
However, if you go back to the medieval roots of the universities, you find the Parisian model, which prepared one to be a cleric or a teacher of the same, and the Bologna model, where you learned law. Think of the account of the founding of Harvard: "One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/26/t...
The only applications I learned in CS/EE school were POSIX, the Microchip assembler IDE, and EAGLE. For every other one, I was on my own.
Had the author wanted us to actually feel bad for them, maybe they should've linked a github.
>According to Alan Morrison of PwC, "The new analytics is the art and science of turning the invisible into to visible...It's about detecting opportunities and threats you hadn't anticipated, or finding people you didn't know existed who could be your next customers. It's about learning what's really important, rather than what you thought was important. It's about identifying, committing, and following through on what your enterprise must change most."
And they wonder why linkedin isn't taken seriously anymore.
Although to be honest, the only place it says "engineering" is in the headline, which editors often mess with.
In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects.
Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
I never understanding these complains about how bad college education is. We talking about America here, the land of individualism, of self-interest, of self-discovery. It seems like everyone expects 5-year-old kids to pace their studies. Yet, funnily, if it's college, the professors have to decide what the students need for "real world." What gives? So elementary pupils know what they need to learn, but college students (aka 18+) do not?
On a closely related note: half of all technology workers have no formal education, the article said. Wait, if those workers can learn by themselves, can't our precious, innocent, poorly taught college students get off their behinds and study those, too? Rather than whining about how their professors are not familiar with, you know, "real-world" experience, why not focus on what they are familiar with? Can you go out to a real world and expect those to know the greatest and latest algorithms and languages and formal definitions, their pros and cons and applications? Or how, says, Windows applications and AJAX applications are similar and different. Or a thousands of those long-term researches that businesses just can't afford to do. No. That's why we need professors and researchers.
Geez. Get a job, will ya?
Or an alternative model, going back to 1916, is MIT's Practice school[2], where graduate students go into factories and apply their training on specific projects.
This reads largely like someone who is ignorant of the opportunities that were probably present at Penn State, assuming that a degree would just get him a job.
[1] http://www.northeastern.edu/coop/ [2] http://web.mit.edu/cheme/academics/practice/
What the hell was this guy expecting? "Hey, guys! I just graduated! Let the money river flow!"?
I got a job working telephone tech support for a networking company, hardly worth my time. Nearly two years later i got a job as a data analyst through a friend of a friend, working in SQL server and writing VB6 apps.
I should have spent some time researching and contacting companies while I was a junior and senior in college. I figured, like the OP, champagne would rain down from the heavens when I left school. It did not.
But there is hope. Keep plodding forward. What I learned in college has helped me through the years and it does still look good on the resume.
I feel like the Washington Post ought to be embarrassed to have printed this.
The comments there pointed out another article by the same author last year, explaining how he turned down multiple jobs to start his own web design company: http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_a...
Come on HN, you guys missed this cherry? I do like that you dug through the 22 year old's Linkedin profile to get his real degree, but yall missed a pretty big logical flaw there.
That said, there is a lot to analyze about the poor kid. First, he thinks that spending a year unemployed is abnormal. Granted the guy was in State College for a long time, and that is a pocket universe filled with football, cheap beer and cheaper dates. He's been sheltered with the Penn State pride and now is finally realizing that you gotta kiss a lot more ass than what he is used to in order to make it through an interview.
Second, he's at least misleading readers to his actual degree (as yall sought out online) and he thinks thats ok to do on a national level. A simple google search is going to ruin this guy. But as a voting, draft-eligible citizen, he's allowed to pave his own path.
Third, he's naive at best, ignorant at worst. Honestly, he seems harmless, and that is not going to cut it for the guy now that he dug this grave. He's got to get some beating in here before he realizes that he is the only one that will straighten his own back.
Best wishes to the poor guy. As John Wayne said: Life is hard, but its a lot harder when you're stupid.
I've done a lot of hiring over the years and recently in NYC. I can say in general I've always hired for Attitude and Aptitude. I can teach you anything if you have the right Attitude. I can't teach you to have a good Attitude and I can't make you have a better Aptitude.
One very real challenge in NYC is that big players are soaking up most of tech talent and there is a ground war between financial technology companies and other start-ups. That pressure has caused companies to go back to the drawing board on how they qualify candidates. For a while recruiters wouldn’t even look at a person without seeing some lofty education background in a resume. Now they’re looking for the scrappy problem solver that might be savvy based on their recent work experience.
I find this interesting because when I started in technology 30 years ago I had a hard time hiring for my companies and developed this “Attitude+Aptitude” concept with my teams. Over time it seemed like it was getting harder for people to get into technology jobs because it became accepted principle that you had to hire people with CS degrees to ensure success. Of course that was BS when it happened and I’ve always fought against it over the years. One of the best things for me about hiring in NYC was being able to tell the recruiting team what I was looking for and to tell them to stop looking for just CS degrees.
Recently I took a position as CTO in a San Francisco HQ’d start-up. I’ve been talking to my engineering team on how we filter candidates, again I’m preaching A+A but its clear they’ve been taught to look for CS degrees and Math majors. I’m working with them to broaden their thinking. I think this is an example that in general people are lazy about hiring and they’ll use anything they can as an excuse to not invest in finding out if a candidate is the right person. It’s tough, we’re all busy and have yet another meeting to run to or another customer call to deal with. It’s easy to think hiring is a pain and distraction from what you’re doing today. But, let’s be clear, the single most important thing you can do is scale your teams and if you don’t hire they’ll never scale and you’ll fail. To me the most important thing you can do in a company is hire well. The second most important thing is fire well, let people go if they’re not working out. You’re not doing them any favors and in the end their life will be better if they can find a place they fit in and can be successful and your world will be more successful if you focus on building a team that is a well oiled machine that smashes through problems like a hot knife through butter.
