Part of this is the employers fault - they don't want CS grads they want specific start-on-monday skills. It's no more reasonable to want a CS grad that knows VB than it is to hire a Mech-Eng and expect that they know how to change the fanbelt on a 1987 ford.

The mean reason behind the article is that 'CS' grads covers a wide range of courses, a lot of which allow anyone to walk in off the street and start doing CS.

Imagine if the headline said, "50% of MBAs can't find jobs" - but in the small print they admitted that they included all business-type courses, including learning to type for beginners.

It's the same here in Belgium. I'm a dropout but some of my friends are currently getting their CS degree and the majority of them couldn't write code, even if their life depended on it. They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

When I was still attending school I also noticed that the majority of the people really didn't care; it was just a small percentage of the group that loved CS & programming. But I guess that is something you see everywhere in life.

> They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

I still don't see why this is a bad thing. A plumber who didn't grow up dreaming of pipe repair can still fix things. You don't have to love a job to at least be minimally competent at it.

Just because they don't love their jobs is no excuse to be unable to do it. But I guess they're unemployed, so the problem fixes itself :)

No, I think it's different. Programming is so much harder than plumbing from an intellectual standpoint that there is a strong correlation between people who enjoy programming (and thus do it in their free time, and strive to excel at it) and people who are competent programmers.

You could probably spend two weeks with a good plumber, having never picked up a wrench in your life, and with the right tools be able to do 98% of the work a plumber ever needs to do.

Take someone who has never used a computer and put them next to the greatest programmer and teacher ever, and that person will probably be able to do ~2% of the work a typical programmer will ever need to do.

Since the intellectual barrier to entry is so high, hobbyists are likely the only ones to do it well, as it just takes so much of the brain power of someone to be able to be a good programmer. So someone who isn't using all of that brain power, or a significant portion of it, thinking about coding is simply just not going to be able to compete with someone who is.

Compare that to a plumber and I think your analogy falls a part.