Computer Science Graduates are the Least Employable in the UK | Hacker News Reader

Computer Science Graduates are the Least Employable in the UK

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29 pointssean-duffy54 comments

I used to run a university comparison site largely based upon HESA data so I have a reasonable level of expertise in this field.

The data is hugely flawed, primarily because under the title of "Computer Science" they're aggregating together all technology related degree. So it includes subjects like "Game Design" and "Multimedia" which have very low employability which brings down the average substantially.

There's also a strong correlation between university quality and employment rate. At the top CS departments employment is often in the high 90s.

I actually wrote to the government minister responsible for higher education (David Willets) on this precise issue expressing my concern that the poor classification of subjects was resulting in misleading news coverage which in turn would scare much-needed students away from studying Computer Science.

Here's the reply I got:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11248954/243427%20Signed%20letter%2...

(apologies for it being in PDF)

I wonder if this is due to graduating people who can't code Fizzbuzz.

My thoughts exactly. Most schools teach Computer Science, very few schools teach you how to actually program. People have to learn that on their own, and many people don't, and as a result, aren't able to actually program.

That's because Computer Science != Programming.

I'd say computer science should contain programming. Pure theory is for mathematicians.

I wonder if this is due to graduating people who can't code Fizzbuzz.

Eliezer, so far not many people on HN have believed my little anecdote about this, but there appear to be graduates with master's degrees in computer science from reasonably decent universities in the United States who can't pass "Write a program using a for loop to print the integers from 1 to 100" as an initial interview screen!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4603414

There may be some people with accredited degrees in computer science who are very lacking indeed in the most elementary programming skills.

The problem for UK devs is that everything is so London centric. I bet there's lots of open positions there and lots of talented but unemployed (or underpaid) developers in Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. I used to be one of them until I moved.

I've seen attempts to try and create a UK equivalent of "Silicon Valley". Where do they put it? London!!

Frankly, any attempt to put it anywhere else would just end up with a split between the anointed location and London. There's already a strong telecoms presence in west London along with a fair few IT companies anyway. When you have a genuine choice then fine, choose another region, but when the choice has already essentially been made by the market, why introduce potentially damaging artificial distortions to try and fight it?

Having said that, Cambridge is sort of it's own little world of specialist IT outfits but it just doesn't have the scale to become much more than it already is, or to develop synergies with other industries.

The other issue with Cambridge is that they think they can get away with paying people -- senior people -- £35,000 a year\. Even if you hate London you're better off contracting in the midlands where you can probably get £350/day if you're not completely hopeless.

\ based roughly on my experience investigating the job market there a few years ago.

I know developers with 3-5 years experience in Cambridge earning significantly more than that. Redgate Software, for example, pays its junior (i.e. zero experience) engineers £35k / year.

Really? That's good to know. Glad to know the salaries are higher.

Brighton is also fantastic for new media and I see lots of emerging companies all the time. The culture for growing talent and laid-back attitudes is definitely very strong here. We also have excellent places like The Skiff which are mixing pots for talent, and events like Farm which get talented people together with people that need it.

So yeah, we have a great freelancer culture and small agency culture, it's about whether we want to also foster the start-up culture too.

It's definitely not as bro-centric as Silicon Valley seems. We have great events like Bar Camp, but it's much less "in your face" seeming.

Brighton is also a lot smaller than London - so we have all the right things, and moreso than most cities, but it's less foreboding and intimidating than places like London. I'm also not sure how many people would be happy with risking becoming like those places. Things are really tight, and people still have their passion for coding. I hate to think of that being pillaged by greedy capitalists.

Bear in mind that this blog post is 2 years old and relates to stats that are 3 years old; and that finance was and is a fairly major industry in the UK.

When I went to university I took engineering instead of Comp Sci.

The reason being is that most places when they need an developer will hire someone with pretty much any background, and those that do care will usually take an engineer, math or physics grad as being equivalent to a comp sci grad.

On the other hand when a company goes to hire an engineer, they really can only hire an engineer as stipulated by law.

Living and working in the UK for over a year now as a Software Engineer in a medium-sized company I see this article as a bit of a shock because every month I'm aware of available positions (including graduates) for developers that "want to get their hands dirty", i.e., working on core software tools like compilers and linkers and despite working closely with universities it's not easy to find new recruits willing to work on low-level development.

I guess the reality can be different if we take into account the percentage of programmers that want to work on "web technologies" and that's a completely different market.

All in all I think if one is a good developer, he/she will not have any problems finding a suitable position working on very interesting problems.

Well, low-level roles are harder to come by, for one, but they also tend not to pay terribly well; especially as they're competing against Finance in London, which does.

Here's my top tip for attracting amazing candidates: pay them a lot of money. Simple as that.

Speaking as someone who used to hire low-level developers in the financial sector (i.e we could pay them an above average salary) I'd disagree.

There's only a handful of universities now which teach C to a decent level, and if a candidate doesn't know C already it's very hard to tell if they'll be able to conceptually handle pointers and indirect referencing. So there's actually a very small pool to recruit from compared to the number of vacancies.

If someone can't understand pointers, recursion, etc, then paying them extra money isn't going to make them understand.

A lot of finance companies have rejected me for placements for low A level grades despite high firsts in all my CS modules, solid extra curricular's etc...

What A levels did you get? I'm doing them now. It's looking like I'm going to end up with AAB, kind of disheartening seeing people around me with A*AA though...

I got BBC(Maths,Physics,Chem), My attitude to A-levels wasn't exactly great...Its not that bad tbh - Work hard at uni and you'll easily leave people that did much better then you at A-level behind in the dirt :) Also AAB gives you 340 ucas points which would be fine for every job I've seen.

The problem with unit grades is that they're not standardized across universities, so what might be a first at a lower-tier university might be a 2:2 equivalent at a top-tier university.

Hence companies relying on A-Level scores and university reputation when filtering.

What ECs do you have ? - that's probably your best bet of getting visibility. Assuming you're a second year student you might want to apply for a GSoC on a low-level project.

ECs are Formula Student (Mostly embedded systems stuff, also did a lot of sponsorship getting organisation type stuff last year), Cyber Security Challenge UK (Got invited to a conference, have been told to keep the dates of two more face to faces clear...) and general member for one of the uni's bigger societies.

I'd recommend contributing to an open source project that aligns with your interests, as that's much more understandable and verifiable to someone reading your CV.

I don't know what any of those academic terms mean but what have you coded and are most proud of?

At the moment me and two fourth years are basically writing all the code for a single seater formula style electric race car. This means Motor controller, battery controller, HUD, sensors, telemetry and getting it all to communicate. (on the way having to learn a lot about control, signal processing and learning a new platform) Its by far the most complex system I've ever worked on and coming together really well - the guys I'm working with really know there shit.

Understand the key word here being "placements" whereas we were talking about a, sadly, today, niche skill: low-level programming. Generally finance companies are exceptionally picky and the only way to get a job in finance is to have worked in finance. Yes, that is indeed a catch-22.

All I can say is keep at it but remember, especially for grads, they get a million CVs.

Well if we're talking about grads then yeah you're going to end up with programming newbies -- whether it's the right thing for CS programmes to churn out academics and not developers is a different discussion altogether -- but there's plenty of greybeards out there with C skills and what have you; and if they're smart, picking up C shouldn't be a huge challenge, nor should the other issues you mentioned. Again, with grads, it's hit and miss (is it ever not?) -- but senior developers who gun for low-level roles? Pay them enough and they will come.

I want to work in low level dev and I'm struggling to find anything...

Where have you applied so far ?

Arm, Qualcomm, various defence companies, Siemens(rejected A-level grades), IBM(rejected A-level grades), Microsoft(rejected A-level grades), HP, broadcom, BAE, Detica, Google for low level jobs.

Any low level companies?

Hey, do you have an email/twitter I could contact you on? I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind. Or you can shoot me an email (it's in the profile) if you prefer.

After just the other week observing a few articles on HN regarding the situation with jobs for CS graduates in the US, one article stating a 2:1 ratio between the number of available jobs for developers and the number of developers, this came as much of a surprise to me, as well as being pretty disconcerting since I'm in the UK and planning to study CS next year.

I'm very interested to hear the opinions on this from those actually in the industry, is the situation really that polar opposite between the US and the UK?

Your real education starts after you graduate, but nobody wants to invest in employee's education, regardless of their age.

Things only get better after a couple of years of experience. You have a better idea of what you're doing while being very cheap to employ.

The job market for developers is pretty good in the US, but graduates will have a tough time landing that first job. That's the way it's always been, though.

The article is two years old. I wouldn't read too much into it.

If you study at a good university, and learn useful things while you study, and build cool things in your spare time, then you will have no problem finding a job. The company I work for routinely pays £100k+ ($160k+) per year to fresh computer science grads if they're really good.

I find this figure hard to accept. £100k+ a year for a developer with no experience?

I've been doing software development for a while now, and know more than a few developers, and I guarantee you not one of them started on anywhere near £100k a year.

£100k a year is around what I know experienced contractual developers earn working for big Canary Wharf banks.

If this is true, then please let me know the name of the company and I'll apply right now.

That number includes bonus - but it's certainly accurate. These guys might have no commercial experience, but they certainly have plenty of programming experience (and are typically top 1 or 2 in their year at university).

I've emailed you the name of the company using the contact form on your website. We look forward to your application!

Well you've successfully called my bluff....

Unfortunately I have no particular interest in that industry, and more importantly, if I'm honest, wouldn't have a chance of getting through the application stage.

Really? Even my friends (from Cambridge) who went into finance aren't earning nearly that much in base salary. Is that including bonuses and other benefits?

It's including bonus, but no other benefits.

As long as you gain some experience in addition to your CS degree there are plenty of programming jobs around, though they are largely concentrated in London and Cambridge (Quant jobs in London, other more general programming in both locations, quite a bit of hardware around Cambridge too). The larger employers often recruit directly through University career fairs.

There's still a high demand for good developers in the UK, main issue in recruitment is sifting through the many applicants for positions who, even with experience, show no aptitude for the job.

Not terribly suprising...

I think that most computer science grads are not interested in building enterprise software or rails web apps, but would rather work on advancing the field of theoretical computer science. Unfortunately, I doubt there's much demand nowadays for this type of work.

I read CompSci at UCL graduating in 2006. Of the people I'm still in touch with, most do Java at ibanks or went on to non-computer work. The remainder are smattered about higher education, bioinformatics and the web-startup scene. Not a one has had trouble finding work, and they all studied a lot harder than I did.

And yet as an employer (not in the UK though) I have a hard time finding talented developers.

Here's the three step trick that works across the board:

1. Pay more

2. Offer amazing benefits.

3. Sponsor tech events and become active in a tech community.

That's what I say to everyone who "can't find anyone decent." Decent people can pick and choose at the moment. If they aren't choosing you, you're not giving them enough reasons.

Actually, you know, you just need #1 if you're hiring people who aren't in their early 20s, or something. Most "help us solve hard problems!" technology firms/startups in London simply don't pay that well, and that makes it hard to attract the older, experienced developers with families.

Hiring contractors is another way of quickly getting access to a very large pool of skilled workers, but I find that most smaller companies never bother, even though the TOC of having a contractor on board may not be all that much more than a permanent employee.

Just to add to your post, an (unfortunate) reality for many companies looking for good back-office (IT) developers is that many of the most qualified just aren't interested in the company's work or industry, which requires even more focus on #1 and #2. In my experience, many of these same companies don't understand why they can't find people, but can't fathom addressing #1 and #2.

I assume by talented you mean experienced. There is also the other talent of showing promise, but most companies don't bother with that and prefer the ones that the ones that come out the womb as objc rockstars.

Presumably cbgrey means "talented" because "experience" is often used to mean "not a fresh graduate" and this is a thread about graduate employment rates.

They can have been given their powers by a cat-god in an acid-induced hallucination for all I care, as long as they can pass a technical interview.

I see this a lot. Everyone expects a rock star who knows their entire stack. If you don't know their stack to the nth degree you are classified a junior and get paid 30-45k which is a joke in London. People like myself end up self-employed earning multiples whilst hearing on each job, "would you go perm for xyz?" (that boat has usually sailed).

The reality is companies need to get the right people in. Send them on courses, get them involved and pay them properly. Use contractors to fill the gap, pay the high rates then remove them when 'the right people' are ready (and/or offer contractors an appropriate compensation to go perm)

[edit] I think the London market is way out of wack. I've had offers to go perm at the equiv of 3~ months freelance pay, it just doesn't make even remote sense. Even more so when uncertainty is rife.

That's the same realization I came to, that it's actually less risky to be a contractor than an employee.

Better to be paid more and have a nest egg for the rainy days than live day to day on a salary and always fear the entire department getting chopped one day for reasons beyond your control.

Things will get much worse for everyone with the coming of intelligent software in the next couple of years. This is the calm before the storm.

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