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Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

The Universities in Australia make so much money from international students that they're also disincentived to prevent cheating. Theirs been many anecdotes posted to the Australian subreddit of professors discovering cheating students and being strongly discouraged by the faculty to punish them.

Ultimately the universities are exchanging reputation for near term profits. When I hire in Melbourne for graduate software engineers the university they trained at is not a signal to me at all (despite all the advertising for say Melbourne University promoting how employees regard their distinguished degrees) and I rely purely on technical ability.

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Completely agree with both paragraphs.

And unfortunately, in my experience as both a university tutor back in the day, and now as a hiring manager for some candidates - international students, even those who studied at local universities - are by far the least qualified in all areas.

The international student game is a billion dollar industry that lines the pockets of university staff, allows constant round-the-year renovations of university facilities, and allows the universities to present themselves as "diverse and inclusive" learning environments.

The problem will never be solved as long as money is involved.

I’ve interviewed so many masters CS degree holders from prestigious schools.

0 of them, 0, could declare variables and get through hello world.

Ten years ago it felt like a huge gamble that I dropped out of the computer science program at college and just started writing code. But based on all I’ve heard, and based on my career experience, as long as I can write code halfway competently and communicate well with others, it sounds like I’m going to have a job.

It really helps alleviate hints of imposter syndrome, honestly.

You can still get value from a CS degree, it's just not an automatic pass to get into the industry.

For what it's worth, I also skipped uni (this was 25 years ago) and went straight into the industry. I'm not as talented as many, particularly in things like algo design but much of the day to day programming in Australia is fairly straightforward.

> that lines the pockets of university staff

This is of course only the administrative/management levels. The staff doing the actual teaching and grading are lumped with all the work “as part of the job”, and also the money doesn’t see the post-grad or research sides of the university.

I was responsible for helping with interviews at my last job, and there seemed to be no bearing between having a degree and technical aptitude. We’d do a two hour pair programming session where we’d discuss architecture decisions, why you write code a certain way, etc. and it seemed pretty difficult to fake out the process.

However sometimes people wouldn’t even get to that point! We had a person interview with a masters in mechanical engineering over video chat and I swear he was getting coached via a chat app or something during the interview, because he kept glancing at his screen, especially when we’d ask questions.

Another person who had a computer science degree and was a team lead with over six years experience very confidently asserted that “interfaces make software more secure”. Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt we asked him to explain what he meant by that and his explanation was basically “they just are”.

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