Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
Even in europe there is no workers union for IT. Atleast not that i know of. IG metal and Verdi didnt answer my email about that
There’s a couple in Norway for engineering / technology, NITO and Tekna
Would you happen to know of any for germany?
No idea!
Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren’t necessarily directly compatible.
CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.
It’s not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they’ll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.
An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they’ve even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn’t).
Computer science is not IT.
ooof got some bad news for you there.
Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?
Personally, I’ve been able to avoid IT jobs so far.
IT as in information technology is a stupid broad category, and the only people who say otherwise are just trying to not be painted as in IT.
Network engineer, IT. Software Dev, IT. Program manager for that big roll out, still IT. Call center meat in a seat, IT.
My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.
CS education is notoriously prone to boom-bust cycles.
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don’t mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the “good idea fairy” so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
You know its bad when dude casually drops that he’s a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.
I work in pharmacy and casually joke about being a legal drug dealer all of the time.
Not all drugs are street drugs!
Oh you guys have the HARD shit, I don’t even compare.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’…
Hey, its a new legal industry. And selling drugs lets me sleep much better at night compared to having to pretend whatever new bullshit they are pushing is not terrible.
We have all been conditioned by the media to think of drug dealers as bad people, but if you aren’t violent and only selling to consenting adults there is nothing inherently wrong or evil about it, other than braking the law. You are providing a valuable service to your community, like every other job.
It does depend on the drugs though. If you’re shotting crack and heroin to your community then you’re just a predator preying on your own people.
Yeah, also. if it’s the illegal kind there’s a huge price payed in blood in the countries that manufacture and transport them.
The war on drugs sucks but it’s a fact that buying illegal drugs fuels an industry of violence.
A lot of drugs are very addictive and ruin people’s lives. I’m well aware a lot of lives were ruined by the stigma attached to to drugs, but to swing from they are evil criminal people to just equating drug dealing with every other job is insane to me.
If someone breaks their arm doing a skateboard trick, do you blame the seller of the skateboard?
Consenting adults know the risk of taking drugs, if someone gets addicted the blame doesn’t fall on the dealer.
Not to mention that the vast majority of drug users dont become addicted or have their lives ruined. Rather they have their lives significantly improved
Also have to point out in my case it is very much legal. I am no different then someone with a liquor store (well maybe my stuff is potentially less harmful).
is insane to me.
Of course, it goes against all values that you were taught.
You have no idea how many of my closest friends have been to jail for drugs. I think that is a problem with the system, but im not going to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and act like we were being upstanding citizens.
Getting people addicted to things is bad. It doesn’t matter if you are a drug dealer, a casino, or a social media app.
People are not so much harmed by most drugs but by the circumstances. It’s not worth talking about dealers as long as society is cruel to the point of people needing an escape.
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with “10 years experience” on their resume for twice what they’re paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you’re unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That’s when you can really squeeze’m
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don’t even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was “qualified”, meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
When android and ios were taking off, I’d see job requirements saying 8 to 10 years experience in Android development.
It hadn’t been out 8 to 10 years.
Oddly a very common occurrence. It was normally one or a combo of 3 impossible things:
- Experience needed with a thing that has not existed for the time asked for (like your example)
- Experience needed with a thing that does not exist at all (typos or just full on bullshit like “5 years in QQR8F deployment”)
- Or my favourite, Experience needed in a tool/program that is only used by the company like our proprietary call management software.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices
Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you’ve got your fingers in the dam.
HA, not at that sort of place. Unions where never even allowed to be talked about, they instafired anyone that even hinted, illegal or not they did not let that happen.
Edit: oh and everything did fall apart, but like a lot of large companies, they don’t care/notice. We used to joke around that we where in the business of getting out of business, and business was goood
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
Most of my social circle is in tech and we’re spread across or have worked for basically every company in our city and that isn’t really a thing here.
If you know a big chunk of your city’s skilled developers and you collectively agree all the firms suck… might not be a bad idea to start organizing and withholding your labor as a unit.
I only know a handful, we’ve all just moved around a lot through our careers.
That was a ride and i love your last sentence.
You’re dead on about the 5% of what you learned thing. I’m on like my 20th tech job and pretty much every one has been different. What I learned in school has applied to only the most basic aspects of any of those jobs. Everything else was learning as I go and just generally understanding how PCs and software work. I have done fairly well with upward mobility (currently about as high as I can go without taking another leadership position) but I had to bust my ass to do it and it was only because I always stood out because of that so I would be first choice. There were never enough promotions/mobility to go around to everyone that was deserving.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
My experience is so different to yours.
Work a lot with what I studied, need the algebra very often. I still have people randomly contacting me for interviews. People move a lot, it’s rare to be in the same function for over 3 years.
Hey man I hear you, so how much gor a quarter?
cheapest I have in store is $20, the fanciest is $40. All in CAD of course.
just learn to code
There were recent CS grads in my coding boot camp 8 years ago.
Computer Science is not learning to code.
In fact, most high end University Computer Science departments do not at any point teach a coding language. Coding languages are taught, in Canada, at Community Colleges and such.
Computer Science is all about developing, perfecting, and discovering the algorithms that are then transcribed to computer code by the junior IT technicians (code junkies). Coders are a dime a dozen. It is the Computer Systems Designers, project architects, and project developers that make the big money.
A coder can only make good money if they have mastered a computer language that is not very common, like Kubernetes, [Kubernetes,] (https://kubernetes.io/) And you will not learn that from a 'Kubernetes-for-Dummies book borrowed from the library,
Kubernetes is not a programming language. It’s a program written in a programming language called Go. Working with Kubernetes involves writing in a data serialisation language called YAML but YAML is not a programming language (IIRC) because it’s not Turing complete.
(I’m just a “code junky” btw)
Kubernetes is definitely not a programming language. It is not a program. it is a complete system. It is an approach, a method, a tool, a way to organize, a way to think about tasks,
Kubernetes is just yaml
Kubernetes produces yaml using AI techniques from extremely complex procedures. The goal of Kubernetes is to generate the yaml that will allow a teenager to port the entire NASA launch operation system onto the device of her choice so her technophobe brother can completely operate the ISS including all resupply launches and docking procedures from her smart phone.
I feel like I need to point out, just in case anyone is reading this and falling for the smug tone, that the entire content of both these messages is embarrassing bullshit. I have no idea what drives any human to teach others their uneducated guess on topics and dress it up to make it look like they are a mr knowledge professional. When I think about it, it’s not even passable as a troll joke, it’s just feeble attempts to seem relevant… which is kinda sad. Hope you find human connection soon. I don’t imagine you want my advice now, but try to be more honest to the world, you will be automatically more honest to yourself then.
Most of what is written about Computer science by computer scientists is embarrassing bullshit to the uninitiated. But the ones that usually refer to it as bullshit are the ones that have absolutely no idea what the entire field is about, not even an inkling of how the resident gurus think, nor even of what is being talked about. It is the ones who call it ‘bullshit’ that are the ones trying to pretend they understand in depth what it is all about. You do not want us to be honest, you want us to speak in terms that you might have a chance of understanding. Unfortunately, the language of Computer Science, like science in general, has to be absolutely precise so as to not be misinterpreted. It can not be ‘dummed down’ without losing much of its utility to other scientists.
I could have said "Kubernetes defines a set of building blocks (“primitives”) that collectively provide mechanisms that deploy, maintain, and scale applications based on CPU, memory[29] or custom metrics.[30] Kubernetes is loosely coupled and extensible to meet the needs of different workloads. The internal components as well as extensions and containers that run on Kubernetes rely on the Kubernetes API.[31][32]
"The platform exerts its control over compute and storage resources by defining resources as objects, which can then be managed as such.
“Kubernetes follows the primary/replica architecture. The components of Kubernetes can be divided into those that manage an individual node and those that are part of the control plane.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes
But that is just a very fancy way of saying that Kubernetes developers look at a very complex computing environment consisting of many hardware vendors, several operating systems, several architectures, (some incomparable) but one common application outcome, and integrating them all together into one centrally controlled and managed interface using a common instruction set and command structure…
I should clarify that ‘YAML’ is used facetiously and generically to refer to the concept of ‘yet another markup language’ as an allegory, without specifically meaning Kubernetes produces the true implementation of ‘YAML’ the formal system. Maybe we should coin a new term ‘YAMLized’. That is, 'reduced to ‘yet another markup language’.
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Thank you for pointing out that CS <> programming.
CS is mostly math, cryptography, signal processing, image processing, information theory, data analysis/storage/transformation, etc.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
Yep and the parents and adults pushing them we’re often basing things on how it was FOR THEM. The job market changes constantly. I’ve got a worthless degree i deeply regret
I’ve got a worthless degree i deeply regret
Meanwhile, not far from this comment is someone claiming no one regrets getting their degree, lol.
Not surprised. Anecdotally I’ve met loads who do and loads who say “I don’t regret going to University but…”
When I started college I was in for biochem. Quickly realized there aren’t many jobs and most pay pretty shit, so I switched to computer science. Did some research and found that while there are good paying jobs, good luck finding them. Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in, and I had a full ride that I didn’t want to waste dropping out). Graduated and now I’m a mechanic and make more than I would have if I stuck with my original bio degree. I also love what I do for a living despite the possibility of making more doing something else. Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because “somebody said I’d get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don’t have right now”. Not saying young adults weren’t fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It’s not like you were FORCED to go to school.
Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in
I specifically avoid hiring students from business majors because they are only into the networking and not doing work lol.
That sounds about right lol. I went to what is known as a REALLY good business school, and I learned more about how to run a business in a year as a service advisor and the owners right hand than I ever did in 4 years of school. I know nothing beats on the job experience, but still I thought I’d learn a little more of value than I did …
In fairness they are very social and make great spreadsheets.
Business as a major should be abolished.
There is always free time to self educate. Being a programmer means constantly keeping up with the news, new technologies, and adapting to new standards to keep the code clean, maintainable, extendable, readable, and relatively fast.
This is what we say now instead of expecting training and apprenticeship programs.
It’s propaganda
It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.
The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.
A isn’t anyone’s fault.
B isn’t anyone’s fault.
C is where businesses have gone sour, but it’s not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)
It’s not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody’s responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that’s on you. You can take what your job gives you and that’s it, and you’ll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that’s not going to make you very successful.
I really don’t want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don’t invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There’s a ton of reasons why that’s the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there’s a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn’t really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.
You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you’re a good worker, but that isn’t fast. It was never fast, and most people aren’t satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn’t get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don’t want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.
I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you’ll enjoy your jobs much better if you’re passionate about what you do, and you’ll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.
None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you’re replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he’s trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn’t knock them for that.
Well said, I do enjoy my field and my employer. I worked for quite a few different companies. One I was all on my own and had to learn myself - my seniors hardly ever had time to explain shit to me so I was left alone with documentation and asking least possible amount of questions. Then, I had a team leader who was passionate about explaining stuff and telling me what to do, how, and why.
Everyone is different, do what you like, chase what you desire, and do the job you enjoy.
On the other hand, I am now in the boots of a senior, and I am desperately trying to show more junior colleagues how exciting it is to explore the work we do - nobody seems to care, nobody seems to implement whatever co shit I try to show them, nobody wants to change their ways, and I feel like fighting windmills.
If you want to be successful, you have to either be super lucky, or be passionate and constantly improve to reach new heights.
I think the biggest systemic issue in most places is that most people don’t actually know how to train people, including most senior staff. Very few people are actually natural trainers/instructors, so they have to be trained in how to train, and the expectations that they do so has to be part of company culture as well as time baked into the workday to do it, because it DOES take time. It pays off huge in the long run but it can be hard to see the forest through the trees if the management themselves don’t know or understand the value.
As much as I hate corporate jobs they’re generally better than small companies about having a formalized training program. It’s a shame because there’s so much garbage in corporate culture that a lot of small businesses don’t want to implement the good with the bad.
One thing I’ve seen over the years is that a TON of businesses have NO IDEA how to be functional. It’s a person that started in their garage and managed to grow and they just do stuff, and keep just doing stuff and hiring more people to do stuff and quickly outgrow the garage but don’t introduce sound business practices that you need to run things effectively. It’s crazy how many businesses are like that.
Well, then “their” plan backfired, because the cost is still as high as ever for senior and lead engineers, it’s just the enty level jobs that are ever rarer (and FAANG rarely hired entry level anyway).
I’m halfway through my bachelor’s CE, but really thinking about dropping and doing a trade instead.
I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
If there’s no hope for getting a job, it doesn’t mean they’re not passionate.
It’s really not like that, programmers will always be extremely sought after. Just not bad programmers that haven’t really coded anything yet. Those are in quite an abundance. After giving the thirtieth intern a try and some lessons, it starts to feel hopeless when they turn in something that is using divisors on tick to solve a problem the engine already does and doesn’t notice the cpu cap because they are on a monster beefy developer station
The most important aspect is motivation to improve and do cool shit. That can, also, be said about a lot of professions. The best thing you can do is to find what is most interesting to you and spend at least a few hours a week learning about it or engaging with it. It could be new features of a language you know, a programming methodology that is new to you, learning about/contributing to a FOSS project you like, or anything else.
School and work will almost definitely force you to engage with the parts of development you don’t like, as well will give you an opportunity to engage with the parts of development you do like. It’s on you to keep yourself engaged and improving in your skills.
Don’t. Just finish it and join an electrical union with your math skills. After you complete your degree. I went into electrical after getting laid off from a malware defense software oem. Get your degree. It carries you further than without it. You can always join the Electrician union nearest you right after you graduate. Check for their sign up times for the year.
I’ve never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I’ve been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I’ve met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).
It’s expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).
Can’t agree more.
CE is neat because most companies will treat you as if you had a CS or EE degree. Can always pivot to HW or FPGA
Even if you don’t get a CS job you should still get your degree anyway, it will make getting other jobs easier. A degree is better than no degree.
Might not be the best use of that time and tuition money though
I’ve never met anyone who regretted getting their degree.
I have met people who regretted not getting one because it closed doors for them (including talented people who were otherwise doing well at their jobs) so if someone is really going to forgo their degree, they should acknowledge it’s a risk.
I don’t necessarily regret getting a degree, but I would have perhaps focused on a more in-demand degree if I knew how the economy was going to change.
✋ Now you have.
Hi there, now you have my curiosity.
Which degree was it, why do you regret getting it?
Computer Systems Tech with honours and a Computer Sci advanced degree with honours.
I would have been better off just working, my 3 years in school (including being on the board of governors and student union) was a waste of time and money. Not saying school is always a bad choice but watching people who drop out of high school make double your income from working in retail (since oddly there is potential upwards movement) once you do get a job in the industry feels bad. Then continues to feel bad when you bust your ass off for no advancement or additional pay while those same people are now working less then 4 hours a day in a middle management position. Then it gets downright frustrating when you have been in the industry for over a decade and shopped around to find out all the companies are shit and when you realize you have made a poor choice in career those same drop outs are entering into lower executive roles while being paid to take college courses (I have 3 examples of this sadly) and telling you that you should “go to school and get an education”.
And to see the money being made in oil and gas… or some of the trades?! Urgh, I should have just started my own buisness instead of going to school. I had the same skills before and after I graduated anyway.
I don’t think going to school prevents you from transitioning into a management role, nor does it seem to have prevented you from obtaining a career in the industry.
I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame your degree for a lack of management positions, you could always transition into management like others have done. I don’t think those others got hired into management specifically because they didn’t have a degree, or because they were high school dropouts. It’s entirely possible they only got into their roles through nepotism, which would have nothing to do with a degree or a lack of a degree anyway.
With that said, yeah, the money being made in the trades by business owners… yeah, that would have been nice, but even then there’s no guarantees that everyone can start their own successful business and make well into 6 figures and beyond.
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren’t in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them…
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
… and you just give up?
You are not ‘unemployed’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a ‘discouraged worker’, who is also ‘not in the labor force’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
…
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and… you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely ‘underemployed’.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs… you may also be ‘overemployed’.
…
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers… did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn’t.)
You’ve also got measures like LISEP…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are ‘functionally unemployed’, by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure ‘doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job’.
…
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of ‘did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?’ would be ‘are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?’
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
- sincerely, a not unemployed but technically ‘out of the the labor force’ econometrician.
Well yeah, when the tech industry went through multiple waves of massive layoffs, that’s going to be the case in the short term as things shake out.
And everyone and their dog is trying to get into tech. The industry is bound to get saturated eventually…
I’d it’s already saturated if we’re looking at high unemployment in the sector.
Not necessarily, it might mean it I’d an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.
Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won’t even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.
Yup. We’re hiring, but the candidate pool is a minefield of utter trash, so it takes a while to hire despite having hundreds of applicants. We don’t expect much beyond basic competency, but apparently that’s too much to ask sometimes.
Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.
People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.
I rag on those too.
Our “coding challenges” aren’t all that hard, they’re similar to what you’d do on the job.
For example, we use React on the FE and Python on the BE, and here’s what we do in the first round:
- FE - basic React state use - store input from an input tag, and render in a label
- BE - write a SQL statement to join two simple tables to query something; just a SQL playground, no Python needed
And here’s what the more in depth second round looks like:
- FE junior - array functions (lots of examples with tests) or moving data between multiple components
- BE junior - simple web server (or fake one, just need a function that takes opaque data) with somewhat complex logic; we’re looking for code style (do they separate controller logic from service layer logic?)
- FE/BE senior - structure an app from scratch given very limited requirements; the point is to see what questions they ask to clarify requirements
For BE, we let them use whatever language they want, because Python is simple enough that they can learn on the job. That’s actually why we picked it, our BE requirements are simple enough that the language doesn’t matter, so we went with something familiar to ease hiring (performance-sensitive code is written natively and wrapped).
The first round is designed to take 5 min and we allot 20 min, the second round is designed to take 20 min and we allot an hour. They are asked follow up questions about changes they would’ve made if they had more time, and getting the right answer is secondary to any explanations they make. We’ve hired people who failed the challenge, provided the code was clean and the expansion was reasonable.
We’re not looking for rockstars who nail some complex challenge, we’re looking for competent professionals who can write decent code under pressure, because we will have sev 1 prod bugs and we want people who can diagnose and fix them while feeling confident enough in their fixes to make the call on whether it can go to prod that day. The challenges merely confirm what they’ve given as answers to the questions (most of which are way more complex than needed, we just want to gauge breadth of knowledge).
Yet we keep getting applicants who are surprised that we ask them to do basic coding in a technical interview. Some can’t even write syntactically correct code in a language they picked…
To the tech people listening… I was high up in many areas for a few decades but I left it all behind. There is still a massive talent-acquisition problem, not just in tech but every industry, that is just waiting to be solved. The departments and staff tasked with hiring are not competent, nor capable of connecting qualified applicants to jobs. The entire hiring system is broken as fuck, and the “job boards” and apps didn’t fix it, they made it far, far worse for everybody on all sides.
Exactly. Our recruiters aren’t tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we’re not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they’re not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.
And that’s unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they’re now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn’t apply themselves at all.
There are good candidates in that mix, it’s just hard to find them. We’re happy to train a promising candidate, and we’ve hired interns that we’ve offered full-time positions to. We don’t even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they’re our support person for our blue collar users, and they’re really good at it).
If you’re not a big flashy tech company, you’re not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you’ll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.
What you are describing is a constant. Everything is scaled up. I don’t believe for a second that it’s difficult to hire unless you’re talking about these idiots who say things like “Don’t I deserve to hire the best candidate for the job?”
It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn’t give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don’t want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).
It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I’d call pleasant on all angles.
And most importantly a lack of companies willing to train their employees. They’re all pointing fingers at every other company to do the training for them, then wondering why they can’t find anyone with the training they want. Whodathunkit
It’s really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.
Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we’re not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren’t qualified at all.
Kinda glad I took the community college IT/infra route when I went back to school a little bit ago, but still scared for the future lol.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech. Used to be full of other people like me and I really liked it. Now it’s full of people who are equally as enthused about it as they would be to become lawyers or doctors.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
I guess that anyone who managed to make the effort to join Lemmy is already on the right track.
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
I’m going to amend your timeline slightly, but only to note that Y2K masked what likely would have been a bit of a slump in the late 90s. Hiring around Y2K was crazy — but once the crisis date passed (with little fanfare due to the tremendous amount of work and money poured into remedying the issue), we definitely hit a slump as many of those extra hires weren’t really needed in a post-Y2K world.
…at least until we get to Y2K+38 in a few years. And maybe Y2K+40 two years after that 😛
The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.
The numbers aren’t too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.
It’s important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there’s no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don’t have to do it this way but that’s how it’s been decided for a while now.
I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn’t find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.
This should be common knowledge. I recall in the 1990s there was a huge push for truck drivers. Everywhere you went “Be a truck driver! Own your own business! Make six figures!” And only a decade later, employed drivers struggle to make ends meet.
If you see a huge push for a particular job - you better plan your exit.
Nursing in the early 2000s, CS in 2010s. I’m guessing whatever University of Phoenix is pushing, stay the fuck away from.
One eight hundred, five five one, eight nine hundred. Diesel Driving Academy!
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question.
You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
they don’t want to scare people away form an impacted majors, they probably lose money if they arnt butts in the seat, if people arnt willing to pay for a major with no jobs the uni lose money and they probably have to shut that program down. it seems state uni around here on care about putting as much butts in seats of undergrads as possible so they can have thier cash cow, they dont care what happens to those 3-4years in, just push them through like they are in high school.
biotech is another one i bring up on other forums, its one of those it looks likes in demand, but they really arnt keen on hiring people. its gatekeeped at the scientist level, unless a student is aware that labs exists in thier universities they are out of luck. and state unis here do a good job of not telling or hiding the labs under an obscure category. Professors are very reluctant to even talk about thier labs at all; some have an ego issue(they dont want students to ruin thier reputation, eventhough we arnt even a threat thier field, as we arnt in grad school, i had a professor like this) and labs are usually filled up, so theres very little chance to get into lab if your lucky. CCs dont have labs. that is the part that universities dont warn students about, if you had labs in your unis all this time, isnt ir prudent to look for these labs, although i suspect they dont want the PIs to get inundated with students requesting to get into thier labs, thats why they are very hush hush about it.
i also think bio unemployment is skewed towards health too, because a significant amount of them are held by women, who are likely to be employed in the field over men, first its likely they are going into NURSING, dieticians, PHYSICAL therapy where all the jobs are, plus CLS which is a niche grad job. on the research side its the same for women ive only seen a majority are in the labs volunteering(apparently at my uni some of them only wanted women because lab manager/PI was being a creep), otherwise the biotech side have a pretty large unemployment, but its lumped in with all bio majors.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It’s not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today’s programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of “programming being the second literacy”, with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools (“primary technical school” that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn’t considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of “we can live like this no longer”, and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn’t see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
Coding trade schools effectively exist already — diploma granting Community Colleges exist for this reason. Here’s one, for example.
But that’s not a University. We shouldn’t change the role of a University to match that of a diploma-awarding Community College. Challenging employers to see such students as being as useful hires compared to a University educated developer is likely a different story, however.
The grads coming from less rigorous 4 year programs are already lacking. Computer programming is complex enough that I would be very reluctant to learn from a trade school that took less than four years.
An electrician’s work or a plumber’s work are also complex. Or carpenter’s.
Come on. This is not about complex theory being used, this is about messed up instruments, where layers upon layers of bullshit are laid to deliver upon hype.
People writing compilers and operating systems and cryptography libraries are those who need real education. People who make websites or Android apps on the framework of the day - need knowledge that is a thing in itself with no fundamental value.
I don’t doubt that the trades are complicated, but I have no gauge for how effective trade schools are for trades. I have reason to be skeptical of trade schools for computer programmers.
What you describe might be true for Canada, but it doesn’t apply to all universities. Many universities have two primary tasks: research and education. These are two separate tasks with overlap.
I do find it understandable if publicly funded universities place restrictions on how many students they accept per program as it’s their duty to give back go society.
That’s not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I’m not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That’s why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I’d have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won’t catch me claiming they’re professional training factories.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don’t need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That’s insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a “computer scientist”, just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I’ve worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a
forloop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I’m greatly oversimplifying. My point is there’s no “computer science” involved.)After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That’s so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
I disagree on one point: the job of the education system is not to produce new workers, but to produce citizens. If I were I charge, I would force all stem students to take humanities courses. We have enough narrow-minded tech Bros.
What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you’d study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you’d choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you’d continue past high school.
I find it hard to believe the true numbers are this low. Every job posting gets many hundreds or even thousands of applicants. It’s a shame so much talent is wasted by so many people being unemployed and doing “unproductive” things like spending months applying to jobs.
It’s also just a general pattern that when a skill is in high demand, the jobs pay great. Everyone wants great pay, so the flood the schools to acquire that skill. Eventually things reach a saturation point.
And also there are always charlatan programs that take your money to hand out worthless certifications. As time goes by, these “educations” mean less and less, a lot of people just nab them online because they want to make better money fast, and there are fewer and fewer real jobs unfilled. Until we arrive at a point like this.
It’s a supply and demand issue.
Yes my point is that it’s a feature of using the market to decide these variables in the economy, that includes the supply-demand dynamics. If we used some form of planning at the macro level that takes data from the industry and educational institutions, project long term direcrion, and propagate targets or at least expectations down the industry and educational institutions, we could save a ton of real resources and parts of people’s lives, and reduce the negative social effects of this process. Effects that destabilize the whole system if they grow to any significant proportions.
the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes
They kinda do, but only the part where they increase program sizes after demand exists and only wind down when the market is saturated. They can’t really work too far ahead if they don’t know ow something will be in demand and they don’t want to tell students to not do something they offer just because there are too many graduates. Add the four or five years to graduation and you get a system that lags behind reality even if the planning was better.
But a well designed post secondary education means graduates can go into similar or related fields, they aren’t limited to what is on their diploma except in their own minds.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ does track this a bit, but I don’t know if universities use the info or if the site is intended for individuals instead.
This explains why people gave me a hard time for getting an anthropology degree…
its like psych degree, i heard people complaining in person about thier psych, yea you arnt going anywhere without a GRADuate degree for these majors, PSY-D/ PHD are the only options for that field, i assume thats what thier saying to you? anthropology might be more difficult, i assume your only going to be teaching at a university witha grad degree, but faculty positions are super-competitive asf, especially if its not a really in-demand degree.
There’s a lot of jobs in the private and public sector for people with anthropology degrees. In the US, anthropology is taught as a four field approach encompassing Biological Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Archaeology.
Each of the subfields have different levels of hireability based on a bachelor’s degree.
I personally only have a bachelor’s and live well. I have a home and live comfortably. But, to your point, I have essentially capped out my earnings. I can’t make more without obtaining a graduate degree.
that last part is probably what makes these degree unattractive, and i doubt they are in demand?
Depends on the subfield. Archaeology is in high demand due to historic preservation laws.
But yeah capping out is annoying, but also common in a lot of fields.
Undergrad psych degree is pretty popular with social workers.
So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
Also trades have boom and busts too
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won’t escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that’s if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
Correct, and the other problem is that if you live in a house with 6-8 other people, and don’t even have anywhere to park a vehicle (as in, not even on the road outside) then it’s never going to work. I imagine what it’d be like if I did a trade, but I couldn’t get to work in the morning because another tenant decided to sleep-in and block my vehicle from leaving the drive. Just ridiculous.
and trades are usually only employing a specific demographic and they have
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
Edit: and other heavy machinery operators
An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.
Damn. Didn’t know about that at all. I’m genuinely glad the direction where I live (Germany) is the opposite, that way more people are needed and searched for than there is demand.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)Same issue here. My company is freezing any hiring this year. And next year won’t be looking good either. And to add on top of that, most big companies are outsourcing to Eastern Europe short-term because it’s cheaper, or directly to India, as was the case with Amazon Romania that laid off a bunch of its workforce and then hired back a few of them to make workshops for the people in India that are going to pick up their jobs to do the exact same thing.
Also the pay in the sector in Germany sucks ass. It’s really bad
Nope,same story here,just not as extreme: https://www.heise.de/news/Wirtschaftsinstitut-IT-Fachkraefte-sind-in-Deutschland-deutlich-weniger-gefragt-10544518.html
From by experience, that doesn’t exactly equate to forced unemployment here. I do know of a friend from computer science in the UK who struggles to get past any interview, but I don’t perceive the market to be this hostile in Germany, even if not quite as vast as in the past.
Because at the moment we don’t have a “hostile” job market yet - as written in the article, the market is only rapidly cooling down. As the market before was massively undersaturated it just means that people currently have less choices - but they still have their share of opportunities. But tbh, pure anecdotal, it pretty much reflects what I hear from graduates atm. The market for newly graduated has cooled down definitely, unless they have a ITsec background or have a fair share of experience already.
Thing is: there’s lots of vacant jobs in IT because of the unwillingness of adequate pay in Germany. Either the employers don’t see the value in hiring motivated people or the motivated people are unwilling to work for peanuts.
Entry level in Berlin was like ~36k for IHK Fachinformatiker für system integration. As a result my last company started to hire in Eastern Europe because no one could afford to live on that even in one of the cheapest cities. And it wasn’t a small company by a long shot. Just greedy bastards
Entry level at my company is 55k, in a much smaller city, in a field that’s not super competitive salary wise (i.e. not automotive industry), so I’d slap a huge YMMV on your comment.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.
After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.
I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.
I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)
I was in a similar boat. Graduated right around the housing crash. If my wife didnt work at the time, we would have been in a terrible spot. It look a good 6 months to get my first job. After that, I haven’t had any issues popping into jobs.
Sounds like you got a raw deal. Our industry has many highs and lows when it comes to jobs and work available.
My buddy graduated and took a gap year. That year happened to be the dot com crash. So he kept backpacking for another year then started looking for work. 😁
For me, even graduating in 2022 with an MSc, 6 months is a short time to find a job
2008 was a very difficult job market for sure. Even around 2017 when I graduated it was quite difficult from now. Entry level positions have evaporated in the last 6-7 years
3000? That’s hyperbole right?
I have twenty years experience and it took me 300+ applications to get my current job.
Times are changing.
No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.
When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.
I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.
Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.
LMAO I THOUGHT YOU MEANT CODE APPLICATIONS. Like you developed 3000 apps. I was like no way…
I thought that at first too and I wasn’t gonna say anything but I was thinking to myself “bro is definitely writing some really shitty code”
Lol well I guess it’s easy to get confused. I was submitting job applications to write computer applications.
I was submitting app apps.
It sounds like the same amount of effort that it would take to make a really good open source project, or contribute to an existing one.
I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t get a job with something like that under your belt. Also 3000 applications is probably a bit shotgun rather than targeted and HR would be able to pick up on it
You’re right that my time was wasted, and knowing the outcome, I wish I could go back and do more project work before trying to enter the job market.
But I don’t think that is a financial possibility for most Americans. Going to school drained my savings, when I graduated I had almost nothing except for school debt, medical debt, and high rent. Saying “I’m gonna take off and work for free for a year” never really seemed like a possibility.
And as for my apps, the 3000 were not shotgun, they were all personalized, custom cover letters, keywords, etc. It only averaged out to 3/day. I did not track the apps where I used AI to submit them- the AI ones were definitely shotgun.
It’s not your fault, but it sounds like you and probably a lot of other people were misled about what having a degree actually does.
The most important thing someone looks at when you apply for a job is that you are interested in the thing and capable of doing it. The degree doesn’t really do that but the personal projects do. The degree might be a nice to have on top and helps to convince some people, but you always end up working with people without one anyway.
I’m not sure I was misled, what you said was explicitly taught to us at University. I think my degree is the #1 thing on my resume, but of course I also had projects, a few certificates, and multiple attempts at more specific fields.
Back when I was applying, my GitHub activity was pretty solid green.
It’s weird because everywhere I’ve ever worked routinely hires people who don’t even know how to make a commit, or anything at all really.
For some reason even those people are somehow jumping ahead of competent people like you in the queue. It’s also annoying for us because we have to deal with the bad ones that HR delivers.
Oh god someone that actually knows how to create an issue, do a PR, submit PR, them merge all in that order is a smaller amount of people then we care to admit. I’ve had to teach many many people over the years with coding experience how to use git… Or github like interface. Change management is hard when devs don’t know how to work in s team setting.
Well believe it gramps, most of the open source projects contributors now either just do content creation as a side hustle or are permanently looking for work, at least in my experience
“most” open source project contributors are looking for work? Lol ok bud
IDK about most. But, I’ve seen many OS contributors say they’re looking for work. Seen one recently saying he won’t be contributing much to the project anymore because he’s housing-insecure. Seen maintainers for popular projects get laid off and are now looking for work. Seen people with 10+ and 20+ years of experience not being able to find a job after many months.
Yeah there are obviously unfortunate cases. But to put another unsourced number out there I would say 90% of open source maintainers are employed in some way or even directly to work on that thing.
The point of bringing it up is that those people would gladly give a pass on an interview to someone they already know contributes than some random graduate they don’t know.
Yeah. Broken economy, broken world, etc etc. it’s like a bad dream that won’t end. IRL is the doomscroll now.
I don’t blame you, just be thankful you’re so out of touch you find it hard to believe.
Well to see it from the perspective from the inside: we always have hundreds of openings, and I’ve seen openings for months and years without suitable candidates. Sometimes lots of bad applicants and sometimes no applicants at all.
That’s for the niche openings. For regular graduate stuff new people start every single day.
It’s hard to match up that with the fact that some people apparently aren’t getting a single application progressed.
I agree, but until that’s clear I remain quite skeptical.
the 2020-23 isnt exactly a time they were hiring at all, they froze for like 2 years. and students were barely learning at all since the classes were all online, and there was no way to find volunteering work. if you go back to look at your university reviews on yelp(yea they have it for universities) its pretty dismal out there.
he said he handcrafted alot of them, so it was pretty targeted.
2020s was probably the worst time to graduate or even attend a 4-year university. they were starting to lock down, and they were laying people off and hiring freezing everywhere, that dint stop till maybe mid 2022, the effect was pretty devasting, i was still working a chain store and many people from IT to electrical engineer just got freshly laid off. and then the '23 massive tech layoffs began too i dont see this going to reverse for CS majors anythime soon, since CS has been having issues like since early 2010s of getting hired.
on students who were attending universities for the first time, or halfway through thier degree in the 2020s, i looked at reviews of my universities, most of them said they dint learn anything at all, so it puts them at disadvantage already, especially if its all only ONLINE courses. if you been in a regular course where the professors only uses powerpoint , you arnt learning anything a professor did this with BIOchem(for life science students, which is allegedly easier than the other biochem for scientists) and then when exam times came, they were almost as tough as my CC chem classes.
There was even a class action suit against UW for their negligence during covid. I guess the case is already settled, so I’m looking forward to my meager restitution check.
And I actually feel lucky that most of my serious classes were complete before Covid lockdown, bc the quality of education during covid was absolutely pathetic.
my school the same, it was a state uni, communter school and everyone said it was terrible(based on the reviews, and personally prior the pandemic too. there was one that stuck with me, a woman said she transferred to another university ucla because she dint find herself getting any opportunities at the school, or furthering her career track and she saw her fellow classmate struggle to get a career after they graduated.
A degree in CS is valueless for actual working jobs. You need to write software and show that you know what you’re doing. And if you can do that, you may not even need a job from anyone else. The time when companies would just overstaff and have paid interns is long over.
I’d be happy to review your resume and code samples and provide feedback if you want.
What CS subfield? I think it really depends if you were able to specialize somewhat. At least systems programming and lower level coding seems to be somewhat in demand once you get into the field. Even given the current economy we aren’t really getting much interest from students.
Over the years I have tried a handful of subfields.
I always felt particularly adept at assembly language programming, so I had a couple projects doing that, and applied to every relevent job I could find.
As a math nerd I enjoyed data science and machine learning, I had quite a few projects like a neutral network from scratch in Matlab, and many data analysis and computer vision projects in R. I was always aware this field is very competitive and my chances were low here.
I had a friend get a job in the biomedical field, so I tried to follow that, I have Python projects doing basic gene sequencing and analysis, even a really cool project that replicated evolution.
Another friend landed a government job, so I followed his advice and got some security certs.
I also had smaller projects and attempts at databases, finance programming, and video games.
be willing to move
you’re offering salt in the middle of the Pacific
I fled from the Midwest because there were no good jobs outside of the oil and gas industry, and ended up in the Seattle area. Saving up and moving cost 2 years of my life, Im not sure I could do it again.
…and I did apply to some jobs on the west coast, although most of my apps were around Seattle.
But please tell me, where should I have went instead of Seattle?
Honestly Seattle is a pretty good place for tech jobs, it’s just that the cost of living isn’t much better than California or other big tech hubs.
yea that’s understandable
