I interview CS graduates from time to time. Most of them have nothing up on GitHub, a mobile phone or tablet with nothing they've written running on it to show off, not even a Stack Overflow account. When I graduated in 1990 all my friends were doing CS because we loved it, we'd been programming since we were teenagers. Just as personal fun side projects I have stuff in GitHub, scripts I can show off on my iPhone and a few thousand points in SO. If a kid wants to be a programmer, nobody is stopping them. They'd don't have to get permission from anyone. My advice to kids doing CS is that if you want to be a programmer, then be one. Make that what you are. But most of them have no real passion or interest in the subject except as a means to a pay check.[/grumpyoldman]

Not everyone is like you. I don't have a Stack Overflow account. My Github account is sparse. I have never understood the lure of creating content for free for other companies.

I'd like to think I'm not that uncommon for a geek. I love coding. (I have been coding since the 80s, and professionally since the late 90s. You will find my name in a handful of credits files, and a number of mailing list and usenet posts.)

But I won't start using centralized services just because you or some recruiter decides it's the new cool place to be. Sorry.

I don't mean they have to specifically have this or that account, the point is building your own portfolio of work and a history of productive professional engagement has never been easier. Maybe you already have a work history that puts you beyond that kind of issue, but for those who don't there are numerous ways to build a presence. Don't like GitHub or programming phones? Heroku has a free tier and there's always Google AppEngine. SO doesn't float your boat? How about a blog on a subject that does? I can't even count the ways a young techie has to stand out from the crowd. I'm not saying it's required or in any way mandatory from my perspective, but given a choice between two otherwise similar candidates, the one with an engaging and accessible portfolio of work will win out.

Most of the software that gainfully employed engineers work on all day is owned by the company they work for (or consult for). If you disclose any details about it, you may be sued [google "Sergey Aleynikov" :-)]

Yes indeed. But I completely fail to see how that is relevant to my point. Im not saying anything about posting code that belongs to other people, even if you wrote it, and I'm mainly talking about those without a commercial track record. Although even then, having some spare time projects on GitHub never seems to have hurt my prospects in interviews.

It's perfectly valid for a CS grad working in industry to keep their work at work. You don't need to be spending 40 hrs a week at work + your free time at home on CS and programming to be worth hiring.

I don't think the phenomenon is unique to CS and engineering. I bet there are tons of people in medicine, dentistry and law that are primarily in it for the money.

Never mind people who do business degrees. It's almost expected that they are in it for the money.

This right here. You either have useful work experience or a portfolio of your work, or i'm trashing your resume.

It's also amazing how many CS majors waste their 3-4 years addicted to video games (LOL seems to be the big one right now). Those 1000's of hours are better spent building that portfolio that will net you $100k day 1 out of your degree.

Video game addiction is serious. Google for solutions, it can be fixed. It does not improve your resume to mention your lol rank.

I haven't gamed seriously in about 5 years, because I have been busy finishing up my undergraduate degree. Now that I've graduated and I'm employed I've started building a gaming rig, with hopes of getting back into the hobby. Now that I've read this I'm wondering if I should even bother. Perhaps I should focus on building my portfolio more. I find video games help me unwind so that I don't have a restless feeling when I'm focusing on what really matters. In adequate amounts I think video games are alright. I'm wondering what your threshold for "addiction" is though ...

Do you want to spend your life gaining work experience and building a portfolio to ensure maximum salary, or do you want to spend your life doing what you want do? Some people program as a hobby and convince themselves that anyone who has different hobbies is a worthless programmer, but that is nonsense. Build that gaming rig.

Do what you find enjoyable. There's little point fighting it. My personal threshold for addiction is "this is a mindless time filler keeping me away from other things I want to accomplish" which is enough for me to determine that the activity is only marginally more enjoyable than doing nothing. Plus, except for the pricy GPU, a gaming rig is mostly a good development rig!

I take your point, but I get enough pleasure from Kerbal Space Program that wouldn't blame others for needing their occasional gaming fix. But sure, being a productive and active person should come first.

> But sure, being a productive and active person should come first.

This viewpoint is garbage. Outside of work hours, a person has no obligation to be career-focused. Tech shouldn't require someone to be about their career in their free time as well.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I sure hope I am because this expectation to make CS your hobby to be a valid CS grad in the workplace is awful.

I agree with this. Even when I used to game seriously, I wasn't gaming all the time (some of my friends shocked me with how seriously they took the hobby). I really envy people who can dedicate their entire lives to doing one thing and one thing only 24/7 - whether gaming or coding. That is beyond me.

> I really envy people who can dedicate their entire lives to doing one thing and one thing only 24/7 - whether gaming or coding.

Similarly, I used to have a crippling envy of accomplished coders who were same age as me, which has long since evaporated.

Probably a symptom of ADHD, my life consists of many short distinct phases where I hyperfocus on an interest. Knitting, woodworking, programming, reading, etc. I do have several projects that I wish I could just dedicate a couple of months too, however! Seeing how far I could get in a dedicated week always makes me long for another month of intense focus.

That's not my point at all. I'm just saying that if you don't have a career history to demonstrate your ability and experience, there are still many, many ways to do that. I'm not saying it's a requirement, but it's a valid and useful option.

Interesting perspective, but consider time allotment for a day. You get 24 hours generally broken down into: ~8h sleeping, ~8h working/studying, ~8h "free time". Can't you argue that they're being productive by virtue of their day job or the courses they've taken?

I have hired plenty of excellent software engineers of various seniority levels who had no presence on the web WHATSOEVER.

Developers come in many different shapes and forms :-)

Thanks for the link. That's an important point.

I think part of the problem is the pace of change. That's both the reason for the bad data and the time lag issue. It's just impossible to make a decent guess at the necessity of acquirable skills on a useful timescale. Even technical skills that have a fantastic outlook from todays vantage point… Our visibility is not really that far, 15-20 years at a stretch.

For example, it seems like a good bet that for the next 15-20 the skills that allow you to write programs for a living will still be marketable, assuming a non trivial amount of re-skilling along the way. past that, who knows. For a 20 year old, that's one third of a career.

Take the skills required to be employed in the enormous and affluent financial sector. Accounting, finance, data analysis, math.

Can you imagine that over the next 15-20 years something happens (bitcoin?) that turns this business on its head and makes a big chunk of its employees obsolete?

For the opposite, can you imagine that 15-20 years from now gene-tech has created industries that demand geneticists the way programmers are now in demand?

Pace of change is itself a meaningful change.

I'm not sure you should choose a degree based purely on that anyway. Doing something you enjoy is important to stay motivated.

Another metric you could use is value for money. There is not a lot a CS course provides that you couldn't do yourself if sufficiently motivated. Whereas a Chemistry course provides a lot of facilities and kit. One of the reasons I went for EEE rather than CS. Pretty tricky to build a clean room or giant laser at home.

When I went to university in the late 90's we saw the same thing. CS degrees were so hot that they rationed entry into the program where I went. Fast forward to 2001 and you have the dot-com bust. At that moment in time I'm sure there were a ton of statistics like this discouraging people from going into that major.