Doing computer science and my dad keeps telling me im not going to get a job

[JACKDRUID]

well, as a direct competitor, I should tell you to go away.

However, as a fellow computer scientist, I should welcome you.

as long as you are good, you'll do fine. You do have to keep up with technology and love programming to do well.

even if you are not that good, you'll still be able to do stuff like simple website, tech support, help desk.. etc

if you are really bad, then at least you can say you can type 60+ word/min...

if you can't do 60+ world / min, its not possible to graduate...

 

[Chaotic42]

Join the military, do your IT thing there for four years, and if you want, get out and go work for the government.

 

[degibson]

Join the military, do your IT thing there for four years, and if you want, get out and go work for the government.

Can you elaborate on what kind of IT one might be expected to do in the military? Presumably we are talking about the US military? E.g., Do they require programmers to enlist? I figured they would probably rather hire civilian contractors for the nerdy things. Programmers+Guns =

EDIT: FYI I'm not claiming programmers work in IT, or that IT means programming. OP said 'computer science' and then Chaotic42 said IT, so I adopted Chaotic42's terminology for clarification... in my book, programming and IT are separate fields.

 

[Markbnj]

I'm sure the military does employ programmers directly, and I know they hire tons of contractors. Surely more of the latter than the former. From what I've seen most of what constitutes IT in the military is ops-related.

 

[degibson]

I'm sure the military does employ programmers directly, and I know they hire tons of contractors. Surely more of the latter than the former. From what I've seen most of what constitutes IT in the military is ops-related.

OK. But I still don't get it. "ops" in this context is a little confusing. ops = operations, as in computer operations, or ops = operations, as in special-forces-writing-code?

 

[Chaotic42]

Can you elaborate on what kind of IT one might be expected to do in the military? Presumably we are talking about the US military? E.g., Do they require programmers to enlist? I figured they would probably rather hire civilian contractors for the nerdy things. Programmers+Guns =

EDIT: FYI I'm not claiming programmers work in IT, or that IT means programming. OP said 'computer science' and then Chaotic42 said IT, so I adopted Chaotic42's terminology for clarification... in my book, programming and IT are separate fields.

3D0X4

 

[Markbnj]

OK. But I still don't get it. "ops" in this context is a little confusing. ops = operations, as in computer operations, or ops = operations, as in special-forces-writing-code?

Yeah, I meant operations as in computer systems setup, operations, and maintenance.

 

[tatteredpotato]

It seems to me (still in college for EE) that there are jobs if you make yourself appealing and make sure you know your stuff. I've just graduated with a degree in EE and I was appalled by how little most CS students at my school knew about programming. I know a lot because I read books and do other projects in my free time but many other students do no such thing.

 

[xSauronx]

Start looking for internships or part time jobs now. The experience will help you later.

this cannot be emphasized enough. get experience to go with that degree or youre gonna have a hard time finding something when you graduate. dont wait for something to come along, make something happen.

/and know your stuff front and back

 

[degibson]

3D0X4

Real programming. Thanks Chaotic42.
Also, I loved this:

Strength Requirement: G (aka, 40 lbs)

Scrawny, weakling Airmen programmers

 

[DT4K]

<snip>
in my book, programming and IT are separate fields.

They are not equivalent, but they aren't separate fields.
IT is a big broad field and programming is a subset of IT.
Just look at any large company's IT department. It typically includes network engineers, database administrators, developers, tech support staff, project managers, business analysts, etc.

Of course, you can define these things in a lot of different ways and have all kinds of arguments about what terms mean.
Programming is not software development and computer science is not programming, etc., etc., etc....

 

[Cogman]

They are not equivalent, but they aren't separate fields.
IT is a big broad field and programming is a subset of IT.
Just look at any large company's IT department. It typically includes network engineers, database administrators, developers, tech support staff, project managers, business analysts, etc.

Of course, you can define these things in a lot of different ways and have all kinds of arguments about what terms mean.
Programming is not software development and computer science is not programming, etc., etc., etc....

just a note, most companies "developers" translates to "HTML writer" And if they are lucky, PHP coder.

An actual software developer is generally a couple of steps ahead of the IT developer.

 

[DT4K]

just a note, most companies "developers" translates to "HTML writer" And if they are lucky, PHP coder.

An actual software developer is generally a couple of steps ahead of the IT developer.

I've never heard of an "IT developer".
At every company I've worked for, "developer" meant actual software developer.
I've had a few different titles: Software Engineer, Software Developer, Application Developer, Senior Software Application Developer.
All of them included business analysis, design, coding, debugging, testing, training, documentation, support, etc., etc., etc.

 

[beginner99]

...
Then to top it off, companies are still using crappy version control software like CVS.

One of the worst aspects of it though is dealing with coworkers and their lack of documentation. It seems like there are a lot of companies out there that just want to rush software products out the door and not take the time to document anything. You could very well be asked to figure out what some app that has 100,000+ lines of undocumented code is doing.

...

I'm the customer of a company that probably looks exactly like this in the inside. not to mention most of the employees have 0 understanding of the field their software is aimed at.

support is spread all over the world and most of them have a terrible english. If your mother tongue isn't english this males it almost impossible to communicate. I'm pretty sure companies will one day realize that 1 local expert easly has the value of 10 outsourced bad english speaking indians because you don't need like 90% of the time for communation problems...sometimes it actually leads to mail-only communication because it's just impossible to undertand them over the phone...

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

I'm sure the military does employ programmers directly, and I know they hire tons of contractors. Surely more of the latter than the former. From what I've seen most of what constitutes IT in the military is ops-related.

For software, they have people internally that do estiamtes for software projects before they go out to bid. This way, they can expect to pay $10M for something and when the bids all come in at $1M or $100M, they know somethign is wrong. If things come over what they thought, projects will often not get off the ground. This requires some experience though.

I also know that hte gov't is involved in rapid prototyping systems/concepts that requires software. You can get a job there. It's almost an academic environemnt. Soemone new out of school can get jobs like this.

 

[PandaBear]

1) Make sure you have at least a 3.0 GPA, preferably above 3.5 GPA

2) The closer you are to the low level (assembly, driver, firmware, OS, RTOS, embedded system, etc) the better your chance will be.

3) Internship > Grade. If your mom tells you to stay away from Internship and focus on getting 4.0, don't listen to her. I've saved the career of many friends and many parents I know finally regretted after their kids can't find jobs listening to them.

4) If you have a choice, go for R&D related field rather than IT / support / enterprise / diagnostic related field. It will pay off in the long run many times over.

5) If you have to choose between a not so good position in a good company vs a good position (i.e. R&D) in a not so good company, take the later. Your experience and what you learn will carry forward, but who you worked for wouldn't make that much of a difference.


There are jobs, but the easy and simple stuff got outsourced a long time ago. The hard stuff can't be done in India or China yet, and will probably not be if you stay ahead of the curve.

I'd say you can find a job with CS, CE, SWE, better than other field right now.

 

[sourceninja]

Honestly, thinking about it. Maybe the father is right.

We are in the process of hiring another programmer/analyst. The job is way under paid (read about 40k a year) and we got more than a dozen responses. A lot of these guys had master degrees and a decade or more of programming experience. And here they are fighting tooth and nail over a basically entry level position...

 

[Markbnj]

It doesn't matter how many people fight for an entry level position. Remember, there are a lot of people out of work right now who may have had some programming in the past. They didn't like it, and maybe they weren't very good at it, but all of a sudden it looks pretty good when the middle management jobs disappear.

Programming is a highly-skilled endeavor, not that many people can do it, and even fewer can do it well. If you're good at it, you'll eat as long as the world needs software.

 

[sourceninja]

I just can't understand why a guy with 20 years of AS/400 exp, COBAL, c++, etc would suddenly want a entry level developer position.

I mean you work for 20 years in the field, at least a decade as a developer, then you go backwards?

And it's not like it was just one guy. A good bunch of the guys had resumes that put mine to shame looking for a job as my subordinate.....

 

[Markbnj]

I just can't understand why a guy with 20 years of AS/400 exp, COBAL, c++, etc would suddenly want a entry level developer position.

I mean you work for 20 years in the field, at least a decade as a developer, then you go backwards?

And it's not like it was just one guy. A good bunch of the guys had resumes that put mine to shame looking for a job as my subordinate.....

Honestly that doesn't read like the most marketable skill set.

 

[KIAman]

I just can't understand why a guy with 20 years of AS/400 exp, COBAL, c++, etc would suddenly want a entry level developer position.

I mean you work for 20 years in the field, at least a decade as a developer, then you go backwards?

And it's not like it was just one guy. A good bunch of the guys had resumes that put mine to shame looking for a job as my subordinate.....

Don't worry. A lot of the crap people put on their resumes are just crap. We had an entry level position open up here and we got about 20 applications make it past HR. When we reviewed them, most were very experienced people with high level skills.

I personally weeded out 16 of them via a quick 5 minute phone interview. Those 16 had no clue what they were talking about. One made the excuse that I didn't give him time to prepare. Another 2 were mass sending out resumes and not interested in the job in the first place. The final 2 were interviewed and one of the guys said he had live examples of his programmatic interfaces with places like Walmart and Target. That experience would come in handy as we are looking to interface many of our disparate systems.

We were impressed and asked him to demo this. He went to a website that looked like it was made with Frontpage and it had html links to walmart.com and target.com.

The point is, there is a reason why those people are applying for entry level-like jobs. They either aren't dynamic and motivated enough to come out of dinosaur phase, or they over-pad their resumes to get past initial HR inspection. Also, just because someone has X years of experience, doesn't mean they were quality years. I can say for certain that more than half the people who has been employed at my work for many years aren't better off than when they first started.

The interviews will weed crap like this out. Become an excellent interviewer and you can land pretty much any job.

 

[sourceninja]

Honestly that doesn't read like the most marketable skill set.

Well, just from the local paper I found 10 AS/400 RPG or COBAL programming jobs. It's huge in manufacturing. Any one of those is going to pay more then the position here.

I know the guys might be crap. I was just shocked at seeing guys with master degrees in computer science and years of work experience in lots of programming areas applying for an entry level job. Maybe the job description wasn't clear enough and they will all bow out when they hear the pay.

 

[Markbnj]

Well, just from the local paper I found 10 AS/400 RPG or COBAL programming jobs. It's huge in manufacturing. Any one of those is going to pay more then the position here.

I know the guys might be crap. I was just shocked at seeing guys with master degrees in computer science and years of work experience in lots of programming areas applying for an entry level job. Maybe the job description wasn't clear enough and they will all bow out when they hear the pay.

I definitely wasn't saying that they're crap. Up here in the northeast those cobol/AS400 jobs go to offshore consulting companies or low dollar onshore body shops. In many cases the company has to run those ads before they are allowed to apply for an H-1B for an import. That they ran in the newspaper kind of confirms to me that they were essentially legal notices. Who looks for tech jobs in the newspaper?

Right now I'm seeing about five inquiries a week in emails from recruiters in the general .NET/ASP/Silverlight/WCF/C# space, most looking for more than five years experience with those technologies, and some architecture chops.

Bottom line is this: if you want to keep working as an actual programmer, and not slide into management as quickly as possible, then you have to stay relevant. Your skills have to be the less common, in-demand skills that employers have trouble finding.

 

[sourceninja]

Who looks for tech jobs in the newspaper?

The guys who applied for the job we posted in the paper?

We wanted local talent, so we put the ad in the paper first (and our website). Only after the initial response did we stick it all over the web.


I agree about staying current. Most of the guys who applied had relevant job experience for the position. It wasn't like they were only RPG programmers looking to bust into a C#.net position. It was more like guys who have decades doing RPG and a few years doing modern languages looking to suddenly go from a Sr. C# developer to a Jr. C# developer.

 

[PandaBear]

Well, just from the local paper I found 10 AS/400 RPG or COBAL programming jobs. It's huge in manufacturing. Any one of those is going to pay more then the position here.

I know the guys might be crap. I was just shocked at seeing guys with master degrees in computer science and years of work experience in lots of programming areas applying for an entry level job. Maybe the job description wasn't clear enough and they will all bow out when they hear the pay.

Once you get past an experience level, education doesn't matter anymore. I'd say after working in the field for 10 years we don't even look at degree, because if you need a degree to boost your reputation for a senior / staff level position, you aren't good enough to stand on your own feet.

Sometimes it is just bad luck because the company they worked for aren't doing well, and some I know that are out of work had such a bad luck that the entire industry collapsed (i.e. semiconductor equipment vendors like Applied Material laid off 18k out of their 20k staff during the dot com bust). Sometimes their skills are way too specialized to migrate to another field as experts demanding expert salary, so they are willing to take a chance to start from entry level, hoping to get in the door and prove themselves and climb up quickly.