Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work

Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by ulf on Friday July 04, 2008 @08:22AM (#236163)

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?

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by yummyfajitas on Friday July 04, 2008 @09:27AM (#236195)

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.

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by wynand on Friday July 04, 2008 @09:36AM (#236202)

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.

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by ulf on Friday July 04, 2008 @10:05AM (#236218)

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...

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by huherto on Friday July 04, 2008 @05:56PM (#236605)

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

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by ulf on Friday July 04, 2008 @06:08PM (#236610)

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

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Re:Financial Times: IT graduates struggle to find work by mynameishere on Friday July 04, 2008 @01:38PM (#236355)

10% would not surprise me.

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

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