1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

Just a few weeks ago:

"After grad job slump, big hiring is back at U.S. colleges"

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/us-economy-hiring-...

Those that are suited to it, yes. But I learned to program because I couldn't help it. It fit so well with my mind that every second was pleasure. And it got me a great job. But that's just good luck for me. That's the world happening to be aligned with my obsession and aptitude.

If the only demand right now was for people that could play a mean game of pick-up basketball, I'd be the one serving latte's.

Edit: You are right though. My little cousins that are coming up, even the ones that might not love programming, I am encouraging to learn what they can. Just be able to do the basics and it probably increases your worth as an employee by a large factor.

Too many people confuse a college degree with functional skills. College is a good place to gain functional skills, but in the age of grade inflation, a degree does not imply you've gained any.

While programmers in general are in short supply, Rails people are extremely scarce. This is surprising considering the learning curve for this platform is basically a few weeks of intensive training, perhaps even less for those familiar with some other MVC development model.

Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out back-end APIs to support these applications. Rails is great because it can get your product out the door and expose what kinds of difficulties you'll have scaling it by providing real-world data on how it's used. It's fast to ship and an essential first step.

They should. They'll also find it helpful to learn what a command line is and how to operate it. Oh, and HTML -- got to know HTML. And Javascript seems to be pretty popular these days... at least enough to operate jQuery. Then there's SQL, because even Rails developers will get their hands dirty at some point. Of course, we wouldn't want to start them with data programming because they've got imperative programming, object oriented programming, and MVC architecture to get on top of first. We'll start with simple syntax that as many as 1/4 of you will understand after a week of classes: "a = 10; b = 5; c = a + b; #What is the value of a now?"

After they get through that a quick course in Linux system administration with a refresher on the file system metaphor ("Its like Facebook... actually, no, it is wholly unique to your experience and every person you'll be working with has forgotten that twenty years ago it confused them, too, so expect not-so-good natured ribbing when you ask questions."), and how to use Google, StackOverflow, Github, and a version control system designed by a supergenius who doesn't care what your fingers think about getting bitten.

Sweet, that gets us to Hello World.

OK, now let's start doing useful work: meet your new friends, the letters A, P, I and the number "countless." Here's the Stripe API, go charge credit cards. Ugh, wait, you set the name value of the credit card text field in your HTML, which results in the credit card number getting written to production.log, thus causing us to fail PCI compliance. Don't you know anything?

Seriously: I think young college graduates would be very, very well served by skilling up on things that are commercially valuable rather than the blather that comprises a lot of what passes for education. That said, "just learn Ruby on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of commercially valuable work.