The data is hugely flawed, primarily because under the title of "Computer Science" they're aggregating together all technology related degree. So it includes subjects like "Game Design" and "Multimedia" which have very low employability which brings down the average substantially.

There's also a strong correlation between university quality and employment rate. At the top CS departments employment is often in the high 90s.

I actually wrote to the government minister responsible for higher education (David Willets) on this precise issue expressing my concern that the poor classification of subjects was resulting in misleading news coverage which in turn would scare much-needed students away from studying Computer Science.

Here's the reply I got:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11248954/243427%20Signed%20letter%2...

(apologies for it being in PDF)

Eliezer, so far not many people on HN have believed my little anecdote about this, but there appear to be graduates with master's degrees in computer science from reasonably decent universities in the United States who can't pass "Write a program using a for loop to print the integers from 1 to 100" as an initial interview screen!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414

There may be some people with accredited degrees in computer science who are very lacking indeed in the most elementary programming skills.

I've seen attempts to try and create a UK equivalent of "Silicon Valley". Where do they put it? London!!

So yeah, we have a great freelancer culture and small agency culture, it's about whether we want to also foster the start-up culture too.

It's definitely not as bro-centric as Silicon Valley seems. We have great events like Bar Camp, but it's much less "in your face" seeming.

Brighton is also a lot smaller than London - so we have all the right things, and moreso than most cities, but it's less foreboding and intimidating than places like London. I'm also not sure how many people would be happy with risking becoming like those places. Things are really tight, and people still have their passion for coding. I hate to think of that being pillaged by greedy capitalists.

Having said that, Cambridge is sort of it's own little world of specialist IT outfits but it just doesn't have the scale to become much more than it already is, or to develop synergies with other industries.

\ based roughly on my experience investigating the job market there a few years ago.

The reason being is that most places when they need an developer will hire someone with pretty much any background, and those that do care will usually take an engineer, math or physics grad as being equivalent to a comp sci grad.

On the other hand when a company goes to hire an engineer, they really can only hire an engineer as stipulated by law.

I guess the reality can be different if we take into account the percentage of programmers that want to work on "web technologies" and that's a completely different market.

All in all I think if one is a good developer, he/she will not have any problems finding a suitable position working on very interesting problems.

Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.

There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from compared to the number of vacancies.

If someone can't understand pointers, recursion, etc, then paying them extra money isn't going to make them understand.

Hence companies relying on A-Level scores and university reputation when filtering.

What ECs do you have ? - that's probably your best bet of getting visibility. Assuming you're a second year student you might want to apply for a GSoC on a low-level project.

All I can say is keep at it but remember, especially for grads, they get a million CVs.

I'm very interested to hear the opinions on this from those actually in the industry, is the situation really that polar opposite between the US and the UK?

Things only get better after a couple of years of experience. You have a better idea of what you're doing while being very cheap to employ.

I've been doing software development for a while now, and know more than a few developers, and I guarantee you not one of them started on anywhere near £100k a year.

£100k a year is around what I know experienced contractual developers earn working for big Canary Wharf banks.

If this is true, then please let me know the name of the company and I'll apply right now.

I've emailed you the name of the company using the contact form on your website. We look forward to your application!

Unfortunately I have no particular interest in that industry, and more importantly, if I'm honest, wouldn't have a chance of getting through the application stage.

There's still a high demand for good developers in the UK, main issue in recruitment is sifting through the many applicants for positions who, even with experience, show no aptitude for the job.

I think that most computer science grads are not interested in building enterprise software or rails web apps, but would rather work on advancing the field of theoretical computer science. Unfortunately, I doubt there's much demand nowadays for this type of work.

1. Pay more

2. Offer amazing benefits.

3. Sponsor tech events and become active in a tech community.

That's what I say to everyone who "can't find anyone decent." Decent people can pick and choose at the moment. If they aren't choosing you, you're not giving them enough reasons.

Hiring contractors is another way of quickly getting access to a very large pool of skilled workers, but I find that most smaller companies never bother, even though the TOC of having a contractor on board may not be all that much more than a permanent employee.

They can have been given their powers by a cat-god in an acid-induced hallucination for all I care, as long as they can pass a technical interview.

The reality is companies need to get the right people in. Send them on courses, get them involved and pay them properly. Use contractors to fill the gap, pay the high rates then remove them when 'the right people' are ready (and/or offer contractors an appropriate compensation to go perm)

[edit] I think the London market is way out of wack. I've had offers to go perm at the equiv of 3~ months freelance pay, it just doesn't make even remote sense. Even more so when uncertainty is rife.

Better to be paid more and have a nest egg for the rainy days than live day to day on a salary and always fear the entire department getting chopped one day for reasons beyond your control.