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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how anyone can be hired "straight after college" unless they come straight to Google or Goldman Sachs who can afford _extensive_ training programs.

College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite. It is of more value if you want to do research or work on bleeding edge fields like advanced artificial intelligence or biotech, but if you just want to be a decent software engineer, it doesn't make economic sense anymore, in my opinion.

(Disclosure: worked 10 years in the industry before finally getting my degree — because I wanted to move to R&D).

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When I entered the world of work after graduating from a UK CS course in the late 1980s pretty much all employers expected that fresh graduate hires would need ~6 months before actually being a net gain in productivity. You also didn't need to have direct relevant experience as they were expecting to train you up in whatever it was they did.

Now managers expect everyone to "hit the ground running" and as one consequence employees are much more careful about only acquiring skills that will be of use when they come to move to their next role. Hardly surprising.

The Goldman Sachs graduate training program is a joke. Having gone through it, I doubt that technical training is even the point of it. I think they just get everyone together to have a big holiday so that when the graduates start real work, they have that prebuilt network to help them out. Thats not at all a bad thing, but their technical training is rubbish.

But for the front office, networking _is_ the job :)

Oh yeah absolutely, but I was just talking about the Technology division (where almost all CS grads go).

Most of the degree is waste if you want to be a software dev (IMHO).

The industry could do really well out of recognizing that it's a vocational occupation and switching to an apprenticeship model.

To zeroth degree approximation, colleges are cert-authorities

Vocational education normally is certification based.

Is a technically-focused university diploma fundamentally different than a trade-school certification, aside from the particulars of what material was learned?

Well the particulars of what taught is exactly the difference.

In computer science you will learning about generic concepts like parsers, compilers or whatever.

For vocational you would learn about something specific like asp.net mvc.

In my experience, your point is valid regarding some software jobs, but not all.

As I've worked my way into more technically demanding roles, it's been very useful to have a foundation of big-O analysis, the expressive power of different levels in the Chomsky hierarchy, (mathematical) optimization theory, graph theory, compilers, and/or computer architecture.

Many of these topics could be learned by a bright person on-demand.

However, some of the topics are important to be familiar with before taking on a project, because they let you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes.

Going to university doesn't mean you will learn any of these.

However obtaining a Computer Science degree should imply that you have.

Those can be learned outside of the university, though. Some certification that takes them into account would be useful. Having to waste 4 years and a ton of money just so you have a piece of paper showing people that you know what you knew before seems extremely wasteful.

It pretty often works that way. However, you need network of friends for that - someone who knows you and knows you are generally smart giving you a chance despite you knowing only a little.

School acts a bit like equalizer - it allows you to a.) create network b.) acts as alternative to experience in case you don't have network.

You mean devalue the dev role and pay them less Id bet that to progress to CTO/CEO you will still need a degree.

This is the unspoken down side to the German model if Hans take the vocational track he will be limiting his career progression.

> Most of the degree is a waste ...

a major part of the mission of any college is its ability to pick a curriculum that actually has value for the student's life and career - topics whose study will be truly worthwhile.

colleges are saying "of all the topics you might study, out of the vast ocean of knowledge which a person could not hope to master in ten lifetimes, we have selected a manageable but critical/valuable/useful subset."

based on your comment and many others, it seems colleges are failing at that part of the mission. it seems the world is simply changing too fast and most colleges fail to keep up.

Most people going into software jobs aren't doing a lot of actual development. I've seen people who aren't techy at all and know nothing about code do a 1 year masters and go into a well paid software dev job at very large companies on a decent salary. The only experience they have is maybe 6 months doing a bit of Java. But at the end of the day they're dealing more with bureaucracy than code and bug fixing of already established systems meaning they don't really need knowledge on good architecture and practices.

That's very hard to believe. What companies have you seen that at?

Many guys I know had very little experience beyond few classes in school. Everyone in our year found a job eventually including weakest students.

Plenty even studied physics or something similar instead of computer science and then got job in company desperate for people on the basis of "you are smart so we guess you will be able to learn". Actually turned out that if you have brain for physics or math, you can learn programming reasonably fast too. (And ended up being better then weak cs students.)

They would not be suitable for all companies and positions obviously, but grasping enough of basics so you can be useful enough to create part of frontend pages/load data from db/whatever with a bit of supervision is not that hard.

Very common in large businesses like Citi, AllState etc. I know several people who have followed this path. They usually turn out to be people who code very little for a couple of years and then move on to product management roles and things like that.

Having to maintain an older system for a while teaches you more about good architecture and practices then all the theory you can read. People who never had to maintain the thing tend to have very theoretical ideas about what is important and what not.

You don't know whether your code is maintainable until you had to maintain it for a while.

If you look at other degrees, it is quite possible to get hired right out of college.

Unfortunately, the job might just be management at the local box store. They tend to not care so much about what your degree is in so long as you have one. Nurses generally have no trouble finding work either.

"College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite". This very much depends on the field. I've seen administrative assistant positions that require a college degree, especially if it is at a large company. Sometimes it is just a legal requirement: A school superintendent in indiana needs to have a teaching license. The school business manager doesn't need that - merely a 4 year degree in business, though a masters degree is more normal.

You just have to expand the industry you are looking at to find it: obviously, there are lots of exceptions.

Some companies love college hires.

Big tech firms hold campus hiring events. Many companies aggressively go after college grads. Some even go after juniors for internships (which is great for the company - it's a several month opportunity to vet a candidate without commitment. If things work out, the candidate gets invited to come onboard when they graduate).

College hires won't get very exciting work initially. At a fast moving company, they're going to be learning on the job (which means they need to be dynamic/adaptable and curious). Unfortunately, this can mean picking up operational work that more seasoned engineers don't enjoy (however, still a great opportunity to learn and grow for most).

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