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Comment by eachro | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to meet a CS graduate from a decent school who hasn't been able to learn version control or write good unit test cases in less than a week.

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I haven't met a company hiring CS graduates that thinks they can easily learn things; they expect their future employees to have experience with all of their technologies already.

What's scary is that nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs with a CS degree except to get really lucky like they did.

Is this really the case? I know for a fact that large tech companies like Google, FB, Yahoo, MSFT, Amazon are pretty agnostic with respect to the specific tools and technologies that their prospective candidates can use.

Really? I feel like lots of people know how to get a programming job with a CS degree, and you in fact hit the nail on the head in your response, learn the technologies that employers are going to want you to have. Experiences to learn these things aren't very difficult to find, imho.

A CS degree from where? I am sure there are colleges out there that teach CS as mathematics, but in my experience that's very uncommon. Most graduates I've met have done at least some programming using real hardware and software and have been taught how to connect the abstract math to real applications. Not all are qualified to work as engineers, but I don't believe a different course of study would have been them any moreso.

I went to CMU. We built operating systems in C on SunOS machines. Never seen anything but Microsoft, Java, and Oracle in the real world.

In fact, that's the way the rest of (dare I say, real) engineering works: you get the theory and practice in your studies, and the mechanics in your first job. The software industry has been spoiled because, for the purposes of large swaths of it, the mechanics can be self-learned by motivated people with or without a degree. The degree (computer science or software engineering) is not supposed to teach the mechanics.

I have. I found very little correlation between having a CS degree and being able to code your way out of a paper bag, with exceptions for some specific colleges.

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