> The entire country graduated less than 10k people from CS programs in 2010.
I've gotten into a debate with some friends about this: a degree on a resume is really great, but it's not necessary for the vast majority of programming jobs.
> helping a local company offering $95k salary and benefits
I hear that driving a truck in the North Dakota oil boom can earn you $150k, to start. Even in a Buyer's Market, you have to offer a realistic salary.
> well above average in their area
Average what? Average programmer?
> there were very few applicants
How did the company find candidates? I feel like a lot of companies expect applicants... This is like expecting the phone to ring and having someone ask you out on a date. Putting your profile up on Match.com isn't much better.
If you want to hire people an hour out of Philadelphia, have you considered training people who live an hour out of Philadelphia for the job?
Again, I've said this a few times, maybe I've been very fortunate to work at companies with enough gravitational pull, because we work hard to make sure people know they're supposed to apply. But since we've put that effort in, we have overly-qualified applicants lined up for openings that don't exist.
> many were completely incompetent
You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)
> You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)
In his defense, and as a recent grad with my CS degree this last year, the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development. Knowing algorithms / language theory / OS theory / theory in general doesn't mean you can throw together a Django app or use git. I had to learn those outside the classroom, because class projects were about convex hull and Monte Hall, not making useful software.
In 9 months since graduating I've gone from my favorite language being C, my experience being in Java and a smidgen of Swing (and still an incomplete knoweldge of the Java thread model, how to write for the JVM, and some others) I did know some CUDA / pthreads / openMP but from an elective on parallel systems, I had a touch of Python 2.7, and almost no sysadmin experience, to now my preferred language is Python3, I know and use qt for FOSS work, I learned html / javascript / C# / regular expressions / SQL / proper networking / the kde libs / pyside / simpy / numpy, I switched full time to Arch and learned Unix ground up, I learned about assembly, unicode, byte order marks, etc.
I never touched on any of that in school. Given, my school was a mediocre liberal arts place I went to just for the near-free scholarship, but I get the impression from other schools I encountered during ASM contests that the curriculum was similar.
> the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development
Oh, I completely agree. It's a Liberal Art, essentially. As opposed to a Trade School. I'm a huge fan of a liberal arts education, and I think the background of a Computer Science degree is fantastic, but I can't lie to myself that it's necessary.
I think the future is more mentorship, and once someone is a bit established in their career, that they will take continuing Liberal Arts education to improve themselves.
It was a class project my freshman year. I already knew the probabilistic parts to it from junior statics in high school, so I was bored out of my mind.
I've gotten into a debate with some friends about this: a degree on a resume is really great, but it's not necessary for the vast majority of programming jobs.
> helping a local company offering $95k salary and benefits
I hear that driving a truck in the North Dakota oil boom can earn you $150k, to start. Even in a Buyer's Market, you have to offer a realistic salary.
> well above average in their area
Average what? Average programmer?
> there were very few applicants
How did the company find candidates? I feel like a lot of companies expect applicants... This is like expecting the phone to ring and having someone ask you out on a date. Putting your profile up on Match.com isn't much better.
If you want to hire people an hour out of Philadelphia, have you considered training people who live an hour out of Philadelphia for the job?
Again, I've said this a few times, maybe I've been very fortunate to work at companies with enough gravitational pull, because we work hard to make sure people know they're supposed to apply. But since we've put that effort in, we have overly-qualified applicants lined up for openings that don't exist.
> many were completely incompetent
You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)