91–100 of 144 posts
I don't have anything against non-STEM fields and believe everyone should be allowed to choose what they want to graduate in, just letting people graduate while piling up debt only to end up jobless seem tragic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really wish someone could explain this to me. I'll try, although I don't have any special insights, I don't think it's mysterious. From goodside's comment: "I majored in CS." From yours: "CS and physics maajor". I probably don't have to tell you that there's tremendous demand for so-called STEM majors. I don't know about your friends' majors, but these are really both "isolated, non-representative examples". I th…
>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Ph…
You might not be learning syntaxes and compiler internals and what not, but there is a very heavy emphasis on logic and the nature thereof in philosophy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So he's an excellent learner and has a background in the field, and you're not willing to train him or let him learn on the job? "his ability to actually apply or use them to a problem weren't" probably describes 95% of college graduates.
A high GPA is not caused by a massive intelligence, it is caused by the ability to study effectively. Intelligence and GPA are often correlated but not always. Don't make that assumption. There's a ton of people I know who did poorly in their coursework but their design skills and ability are bar none. I don't look at GPA as much of an indicator anymore. It shows potential, only.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Ph…
"I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants." The problem is that this isn't just the case in a bad economy, it's the case always. People that major in the humanities generally don't have a lot of job prospects..they never did.
This isn't the case anymore, for a variety of reasons, but it certainly used to be true that graduating from college with a degree in anything gave you an advantage in the job market.
Nearly all of them were crap. There was a constant and persistent inability to demonstrate what they had to offer my company. There was a massive focus on class projects and a complete "meh" in terms of work history.
Now, some of these people might have been excellent hires. But they could not demonstrate their aptitude. The people I did contact did have a differentiating factor: it was that they did something... almost anything... out of the ordinary in their life and put it on their resume.
People I contacted included a YC company intern, someone who liked Haskell, and someone who had gone from total programming novice to real-time operating system coder in 4 years.
Danger signs included gaps in employment (why does $applicant's resume stop in 2008?), inability to spell correctly, and lack of knowledge of the tech world.
It's not hard to apply Sturgeon's law and lift yourself out of the drek that I saw. If you want help resume building, feel free to email me. I can help you tune your resume to demonstrate your awesome (at least to another CS geek! :-) I can't say anything about what other fields look for ).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CS field in America is about as easy as it gets, in terms of finding a job. Demand is absurdly high. That's not the case for every field. That's not even true for CS, as soon as you get out of the country. The column is about someone in (apparently) Canada, who doesn't seem like he's in tech.
Even in CS in the US it varies a lot by specialty and region. I know some sysadmins in the Midwest who've been having trouble finding work lately. It seems that even if you can do other things, having an N-year CV of doing Unix sysadmin work (and an age >M, for some N,M) puts you into a ghetto which doesn't currently have a lot of jobs. Especially true if you don't have a degree. CS has a reputation of caring less ab…
"Owning a home that's bigger than 500 square feet. (hint: that's not big.) " That's U.S. entitlement for you. 500 square feet is perfectly reasonable, I live on about the same, and I rent it (and I'm 31 years old). A 500 square feet small apartment in Barcelona is about 200.000 euros right now, and 80.000 here in Uruguay. I agree that it's not ideal for raising kids, but it's not something to whine about. Edit: as ot…
Please tell me when it was ever easy. Rumors of the job market being easy in the past are vastly overstated. Before the Internet, before entry to IT was as easy as it later became, I graduated high school as valedictorian and took the highest paying job I could find based on my skills: factory labor in a box factory. I got married a year after high school, we had a son, and THEN I started junior college. Before I got…
Imagine if you were laid off and no convenience stores, chem labs, or whatever you could find simply didn't exist. Instead of weeks to get back to you, it took months, and the factory never called you back. Then, someone from an older generation started with the same rhetoric you're on now.
I'm not saying that's the case, but just as you want 20-somethings to have some perspective, accept the possibility that it could just be worse now even compared to the struggles you had.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I chose to major in CS partly because of great job prospects. Had that not been the case I might have been a Physics and Philosophy major. My friends probably are an unusual sample of CS and Physics majors. However, they made choices which put them into this position. There might be some systemic privilege on their part, but they also helped themselves. Your last paragraph resonates with me. I cannot truly believe th…
I'm not surprised there's a glut considering I've still run across people who've asked me what a computer programmer even does.
Networking isn't a one-off kind of thing, essentially you are trying to be something of a 'friend' to this person, benefiting both parties.