Dear College Grads, Here's Why I Won't Hire You

I don't know if what I'm about to write applies to education in other countries, since my experience is based in Italy.

Well, there are a lot of things that your parents tell you "for your interest" when you're young and that you're supposed to understand when you grow up. For example, in high school, I had a fair amount (read: 5 years straight) of ancient Greek and Latin. I thought it was useless, why bother learning stone dead languages at all? The canonical answer was that in the process of studying those "useless" things I'd be acquiring a method for studying and exercise logic.

More than 10 years have passed since I finished high school, and you know what? I call bullshit with much more conviction that 15 years ago when I was first exposed to "agricola agricolae agricolae". If you want my logic to improve, why don't provide programming classes? It's a better exercise in logic and with a "secondary" effect I'm learning a job, and one of the more requested.

I'm a professional programmer, I never had a hard time getting a job, but that's because I self-taught myself how to program (starting way earlier than Latin classes), but it makes me angry nonetheless to think about some of my friends who are unable to get a decent job because, surprisingly, it seems like 2013 companies are not so much in need of people half-fluent in ancient Greek. This also extends to universities, of course, where providing real world skills (at least in most Italian universities) seem not to be an point that raises any interest.

One of our interns, lately, had troubles working on an application we developed with a Python backend, a fairly complex javascript-driven frontend that talked to a node.js server taking some data from a Java API. Turns out all he knows after 4 years of studying programming at the university is a bit of Prolog and some Fortran. He was also unable to ssh to our servers.

The actual article, of which this is a derivative, was submitted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686825

Some discussion there already.

Not sure why this is posted to HN. "College Grads" refers to basket weavers and Old English Literature majors, i.e. graduates as a whole, which is like trying to speak to politicians as a whole, or "Women, you should be nicer."