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[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:13PM (10 children)
CS grads are guaranteed a six figure income: $000,000. All zeroes.
In the real world, corporations take open source code straight from CS grads’ “GitHub resumes” and incorporate it into proprietary products and services that generate billions of dollars in revenue. Corporations don’t need to pay any coders anything because CS grads are naive enough to believe that showing off their talent by working for free will land them huge salaries at top tech companies. The reality is top tech became top tech by paying exactly nothing for top talent. Tech companies invented the myth of the lucrative job market for CS grads to guarantee an unending supply of young naive idiots for big tech to leech from. Anyone foolish enough to get a CS degree is unemployable for life.
Learn to Code, Earn Zero, Die Poor.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:24PM (6 children)
Ah yes, the "steal wholesale and don't bother to integrate at all" strategy of development. Have you ever actually worked in a corporate shop? The percentage of open source code that's "enterprise ready" to link into existing APIs is close to zero.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:08PM (2 children)
But try to convince an EE hardware manager that it's worth buying a tested certified stack instead of just copying one off github for free.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:12PM
I have done that before. Hell, I've pitched going from systems I know how to use and are currently working to ones that are more stable but less familiar to me and I struggle with quite recently(ask me what I'm putting off today). Maybe the reality you've experienced is so radically different from mine that we just see completely different kinds of behaviors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:56PM
I think an EE manager would recognize the value of the certified stack, and deprecate the github one. Many EE's still have an engineering mentality, while CS people don't mind winging it and dealing with the aftermath when it breaks.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:35PM (2 children)
You're asking the "no jobs exist for CS grads" guy whether he's worked a CS job before? Really??
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)
I was wondering what happened to the "no jobs exist for CS grads" guy! Hasn't been around for a while, and I was worried he had the misfortune of finding a job in CS. Thank goodness that appears not to be the case.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:34AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:17PM (1 child)
As someone who makes a six figure income coding for multinational corporations...
The problem I find is CS grads who _think_ they can just copy shit off github and integrate it into my enterprise codebase. Their resumes are easy to spot because they tend to copy their acronym soup definitions straight from wikipedia. I wouldn’t consider them for a $000,000 position.
I would sooner hire someone at my salary with a BA in Ballet and a MFA in Portuguese poetry if they could successfully bang out “Hello World” in three or more languages than most of the CS resumes I see.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:30PM
They do that because there are all too many companies that won't even consider you unless your resume includes a ridiculous number of buzzwords, particularly if the resumes have to go through some poorly-designed automated process first.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Friday November 15 2019, @09:04PM
I have done plenty of "jobs for CS grads" and I don't even have a CS degree. I do have a degree. And no, they don't steal open source code. They're usually pretty tight on license compliance. But then I don't generally work in the Wild West for cowboys and gangsters.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].