True Story

A company in the UK places add for "Programmer" and gets 40 applicants. The company tests applicants and find them to be mostly wankers and so places a second advertisement in the local paper. More CV's arrive and the girl who's employed to clean the office and empty the trash sees the advert and applies too - except that her spoken English is very poor (even for a graduate of a Russian University).

Everyone laughs and gives a copy of the test to the girl as well - the test is to write a short program that can parse a serial data stream from a port given the data format. Everyone gets a day to complete the test - the catch here is that there are some errors in the stream ... it's a real time, real life test.

When they look at the results - most of the submitted programs are huge and don't work or crash when errors appear - except for the Russian girls program - which works, it's tiny yet includes a test harness to demonstrate its operation and full error trapping and diagnostic dumps when the serial stream contained errors.

It's always something

"... who might of started on Cobol..."

The old guy might have demonstrated better English language skills as well.

Inadequate Standards for Such Technical Education → Low quality compsci garduates

Call me a nut - which I'm sure some people would be happy to - but I've been glad to avoid college about comp. sci, if simply to avoid having to inherit any one teacher's personal views of the matters involved with the same (as would well be required that one would at least discern and acknowledge, or just play along with, so in order to pass any one oh-so-beloved course)

I'm sure that most chief boffins would naturally hedge themselves at the accusation, but I proceed about it anyway: I myself don't feel I can be so sure that computer science is actually understood so very well, these days, even by persons electing themselves to teach about it.

I say that not to send off any alarm bells, but rather, to call for a lot more candor, in the comp-sci-school environment

@ Version 1.0

Girl geek, yay!

[I trust she got the job...]

Yes

Yes - She worked there for several years afterward - the people running the company were not fools.

We talked about it - her theory was that she'd been forced to learn to program efficiently because the machines and software that the Russian University could afford were old and very basic ... however on arriving in the UK (husband moved to take a job locally) nobody would even look at her qualifications because of her thick accent and everyone "knew" that the Russian Universities were antiquated.

"Maybe media studies people are working at mcdonalds"

What a waste of their talents, they would be far more suited to working in a cinema or maybe a newsagents.

What a service!

I'll get you off twice.

Wrong mentality

Perhaps employers should realise that a CS graduate is not there as a Microsoft or Linux monkey. You are not trained in university to be a Microsoft or Linux engineer. You are taught about the basic principles that govern the I.T world. You are learning a little bit of everything so you can specialise in the future in an area of your choice.

Someone with a "For Dummies" book will not be able to organise a company network or create a plan for future upgrades . They won't be able to design a network with X amount of server and workstations.

If you are looking for a Linux or MS monkey then go find someone certified by those companies. You will find their abilities quite limited to what their vendor provides. If you want a programmer then go find someone who spent their years programming because CS graduates usually only know the basic concepts of programming and can only do basic stuff.

If you want someone who can manage a group of MS/Linux/C++/SQL etc etc then that is what your CS graduate is for. He will at least be able to communicate with his team and understand what they are talking about and he will be able to plan a course of action on a given problem.

Employers are under the illusion that a CS graduate is a one-man-army that can magically solve any computer problem you throw at him.

Rubbish

Your comments are not even true. A decent CS grad will have spent most of their time learning to program, or learning about the algorithms behind the code. Are you trying to claim that most programmers are not CS grads? The course you're describing sounds like some dodgy post-grad "How to be an IT manager" crap or something.....

Whose Sights?

Who would expect a biology graduate to be able to remove your tonsils? Thankfully not the NHS, who take promising science graduates (and those that specialised in medical undergrads) and trained them up over the course of many years of blended practical and academic training that often continues throughout their working lives.

Perhaps the everlasting skill shortage crisis in computing (that feeds the careers advising beast) and the appallingly high unemployment rate is more to do with cheap employers expecting everyone else to pay for what most other businesses proved as part of the employee on-boarding process.

Since when was a 3 year degree supposed to be an apprenticeship? Undergraduate degrees are for giving a deep dive for anyone interested in further academic study and useful as a guide to the relative ability/intelligence of potential employees.

The computing industry was built by people that had no idea how to even operate a computer (they had very good typists for that), but had degrees that demonstrated they were far from dummies, which was useful because any specific computing skills they did learn in Uni were destined for obsolescence in a decade so they needed the smarts to keep up. Things have changed, no longer are slumming maths and science graduates being converted into computing gurus, but just because most graduates come with some languages and skills preloaded doesn't change the fact that the employer has still got to integrate a graduate.

Computing may have more than its fair share of opportunists (though hopefully less since the first dot.com bubble); some would be happier studying HNDs (e.g., perhaps focusing on much revered DBA/sysadmin skills), some should be planted in a field.. never to touch a computer... ever, some will go on to software design roles, and some will go wee-wee-wee at the thought of ever leaving CS academia.

Re: Graduate

>> barely anyone in my class hasn't got a job

Perhaps you mean 'almost everyone in my class has a job'?

The standard of students these days!

I get prospective employees (I don't even bother with anyone having less than an MSC from a UK University) to write about their journey to the interview. That way I find out if they can actually write with a pen, if they can spell, use punctuation, and actually construct a narative. So many fail on all of the above!!!

An earlier poster mentioned a Russian girl - I once employed a Ukranian who looked and sounded as though he'd had one too many fights with a bear (he was about the same size), but he was a wonderfully tight coder. The only problem I had with him was that he made a Chinese bloke learn English from Roger Melly's Prophanosourace! I swear that he thought "you dirty git" was the equivalent of "good morning", but again he was a good coder.

For an example to my daughter who is studying for GCSE's I sat a Biology past paper last week. I scored 100% - not bad for someone who has never studied Biology!!! Carefully reading the multiple choice questions always gave the answer, even when I did not know the specialist terms - papers like that are completely spoonfeeding the students, and it's no wonder that they get such high marks.

Your a credit to yourself....

... now go and teach the lazy scum who think that once they graduate they should be offered a job on a platter.

not good?

i have singlehandedly upgraded the entire network twice over weekends without sleep and without any problems at all. I have had 0 downtime since i took over (the company had at least 5 hours downtime per week before i took over) and I never had a problem that I could not solve within minutes. I have given them a fully redundant network with fully automated external backups as opposed to the mess they had before involving manual backups daily and severe availability problems.

Yes, I am good at what I do and I am confident and they themselves say that they have no complaints with my work. The problem is that the bosses prefer to give themselves a fat bonus than give me a decent salary. The only reason I am staying with them is because I am working on a PhD at the moment and due to the reliability of the network I got lots of free time to concentrate on my research. But that does not mean they should give me £9.50 per hour every time I have to go change some configuration or apply updates and audit the entire network's security.

First job is always crap

Your first job will always be crap. Deal with it. Build up your CV and then move on to something better.

My first job was $11 CAD an hour and the job sucked. Now I'm worth $40.

@First job is always crap

Agreed. My first job out of Uni bounced one of my paychecks.

They're paying it because you take it

Have some self respect man, leave!

RE: not good?

So you redesigned their infrastructure to the point that you near enough made your role redundant yet feel justified in whining that they aren't paying enough? Perhaps the reason you haven't demanded the pay rise you feel you deserve is because your employers realize that you've done all the work and don't really need you all that much.