Re: whoever you hire, make sure it isn't a college graduate

"Phlip" <phlipcpp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
It is hard to know what should go into a computing studies course.
The first career job is vital for students, but very few of them will get another chance to spend three years working entirely on their own development.

Companies won't hire grads partly because they learned the wrong technology > (C when C++ was hot, Perl when Ruby was hot, Java at any time, etc.).

When you listen to what companies say that they want and look at how they make hiring decisions you'll see two different things.

When you ask industrialists for their opinion of what should go into university courses they will usually say a few things about "relevance", by which they mean that they want to offload their training budget onto the students. Understandable, but the university exists for students first and employers second, and students should learn things that will lay the foundations of a forty year career, not a bit of technical training for the first post.

The other thing they ask for is "soft skills". Here they themselves usually don't know exactly what they are looking for. For instance "interpersonal skills" often boil down to "a manipulative attitude to other people". Somehow this is meant to extend to subordinates, clients and customers but not to the employers themselves. "Teamworking" is code for "obedience". If they dare not use the word, how can they expect to achieve it? Sometimes they just want maturity, which is unrealistic to expect from new graduates. The students who are too grown up tend to be the same as the ones with problems.

When you look at whom they actually hire, the best posts almost always go to candidates from high status institutions and with high status degrees. So mathematicians and physicists tend to be preferred for high paying financial jobs to computer scientists. The more theoretical, purely academic degrees are also usually those with the higher status.

--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: run-time error 3464 (data type mismatch in criteria expression) long int vs. string?
    ... Your first post said .Value, ... >>> changes a selection further up the line. ... >>> just came in from Amazon to see what I can learn about text boxes. ... >> students, ...
    (microsoft.public.access.queries)
  • Re: Nice fairly long work for an intermediate student
    ... the world's greatest music when compared to Mozart or Clementi, ... is still interesting and quite varied in my opinion. ... You can say that I don't understand what music is about and that's fine, but students on the other hand, would be unlikely to speak their mind with candor. ... That's lame since that was the first line of my first post. ...
    (rec.music.classical.guitar)
  • Re: fft
    ... students (or anybody else, for that matter). ... We were just discussing how to answer a certain online question in a ... Gordon's first post seems to have been based on pedagogical ...
    (comp.dsp)