Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, as a part-time sysadmin at a university I've seen more than a few examples of "students" in a computer science Master's degree program who are obviously in it for the perceived job opportunities. But they don't seem to actually care about the subject. They copy and paste code from google search results and if it doesn't work they are helpless. They don't make any effort to understand what is happening or why, or how to resolve their problems. They just complain that the systems "aren't working."

Something as simple as generating an ssh key pair and using it for authentication leaves them completely bamboozled. By their questions it is clear that most haven't bothered to learn anything about it.

They don't care about security, performance, best practices, or anything but completing their problem sets and projects and getting their degree.

I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in. And how they think they are going to get past even a half-hearted technical interview is beyond me.

Years ago in a university IT dept, I'd have to occasionaly serve copyright violation take-downs (we would handle them internally, and just remove the offending matter from the network. No one was ever outed). One time, looking for a machine serving up some movies or something, I tracked it down to a graduate student office, in a _network systems_ lab. When I finally found the grad student owner of said server, he was comletely dumbfounded that I could physically locate the machine by its IP address.

Big ancient companies who can afford to heavily manage and baby sit their programmers can use people like that. Not everyone needs to be a "rock star" in order to contribute.

Whats your country? I thought that was scenario of only India.

I can say this happens with undergrads at UC Berkeley.

That's scary. Berkeley CS is one of the more selective programs in the US. Aren't the Intro to CS courses supposed to weed the fakers out?

I think the weed out classes work in general. There are a few (very few) that get by with extra help from their peers though i.e. cheating.

It has nothing to do with fakers and everything to do with deadlines. When you have 3 large projects due each week and about a 100 pages of assigned reading it gets hard to find the time to dig around for details on trivial stuff that isn't working.

They weed the people who don't want to do the work for the classes. That's all. The classes don't necessarily teach practical things. There are only 2-3 classes you have to take which involve "heavy" programming: data structures, operating systems, and the intro course which used to be based on SICP (if that doesn't count, pick one from the required breadth). Ironically, if you take the software engineering course here, you can end up in a group where your entire role is "testing". About a third of the upper division CS classes involve minimal to no programming whatsoever. There are also plenty of nontechnical classes you can take outside of the department which count towards the major.

Also this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347363

It applies to the United States as well from my experience of being around other students in Computer Science :).

Many of the less knowledgeable students that are not interested in the subject matter past saying they have a degree in CS, simply copy and paste code they find online or from friends without ever figuring out how it works.

Professors I have had generally say, "You can use a code snippet or library you find and you cite it, but if I ask you to explain how it works, you better be able to do so."

It happens here, but, I think to a lesser extent.

India is just insane - 99% of people are in "IT" or "Computer Science" or "Software Engineering" solely because of the initial wave of people who made it to the United States as programmers.

You might be true but I think people here don't really care about being "programmers". They are non-passionate idiots who just want a job that can feed a family of four.

The so called IT revolution companies promise tons of jobs for these CS grads.

The problem with this attitude is that these same "idiots" also get called out when they follow their non-STEM passions in fields that don't have nearly the expected economic return that STEM fields so. Just watch any thread on college degrees/education.

What is a person with no interest or aptitude in STEM fields to do?

I always thought it was a good idea to major in what you love and then minor or double major in something that can get you a leg up in the job hunt. So if psychology is your thing, and you're really serious about succeeding there, do a second major in, say, statistics. That should give you a nice advantage in doing and interpreting research, and if you decide that clinical psychology or whatever isn't really your thing, being able to do statistics is a pretty desirable skill. You might not get a big data job with it, but it's not a bad investment.

I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in.

Think of all the people, more or less all of them driven, successful and highly intelligent who go into finance each year. How many of them are in it for pecuniary reasons? Most people get a job as a means of getting money, are to greater or lesser degrees alienated from their labour and are not achieving peak actualisation or anything close to it in their work. Those who do are living the dream and if you don't know anyone who does so it hardly seems a plausible goal, does it?

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