Not necessarily, it might mean it I'd an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.

Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won't even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.

There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry

Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn't suck.

The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with "10 years experience" on their resume for twice what they're paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.

Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you're unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.

That's when you can really squeeze'm

LMAO I THOUGHT YOU MEANT CODE APPLICATIONS. Like you developed 3000 apps. I was like no way...

As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:

No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don't mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the "good idea fairy" so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.

I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.

You know its bad when dude casually drops that he's a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.

Requirements for a job in Computer Science are, in order of importance, first, a demonstrated talent. Second, a demonstrated skill level. Third, demonstrated knowledge.

Just like being a top-tier pianist, all the knowledge, raining, schooling, and education in the world matters nothing if you do not first have the talent.

But you do not need talent to get into a Computer Science course, nor to graduate from one. You just need the knowledge and the marks.

That is why there are so many uneducated, untalented Computer Science graduates out there.

This is the thing the teachers and educators in Computer Science never tell you.

So coding trade schools need to be created.

It's not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.

Today's programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.

In USSR there was a program of "programming being the second literacy", with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).

BTW, Soviet trade schools ("primary technical school" that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn't considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.

Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of "we can live like this no longer", and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn't see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.

Damn. Didn’t know about that at all. I’m genuinely glad the direction where I live (Germany) is the opposite, that way more people are needed and searched for than there is demand.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)

My experience has been that computer science is a huge umbrella term to normies. Many people, including hiring managers seem to thing computer science is more of a trade education where people come out knowing everything about excel, windows, PowerPoint, file conversions, obscure knowledge of ancient software, expertise in setting up enterprise printers, etc

I was developing software for a position I was in, and everyone was shocked I was a developer... (It was a devops job where everyone basically edited yaml or json files all day long..)

Yup. We're hiring, but the candidate pool is a minefield of utter trash, so it takes a while to hire despite having hundreds of applicants. We don't expect much beyond basic competency, but apparently that's too much to ask sometimes.

Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don't even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.

The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the "new" guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was "qualified", meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).

The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices

Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you've got your fingers in the dam.

As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:

No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don't mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the "good idea fairy" so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.

I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.

There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry

Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn't suck.

The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with "10 years experience" on their resume for twice what they're paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.

Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you're unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.

That's when you can really squeeze'm

The way college works is a scam in itself. You don't need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That's insane.

Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a "computer scientist", just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.

I've worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a for loop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I'm greatly oversimplifying. My point is there's no "computer science" involved.)

After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That's so few people.

And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.

But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.

That sounds about right lol. I went to what is known as a REALLY good business school, and I learned more about how to run a business in a year as a service advisor and the owners right hand than I ever did in 4 years of school. I know nothing beats on the job experience, but still I thought I'd learn a little more of value than I did ....

Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you're a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn't even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it's competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that

/s

You know its bad when dude casually drops that he's a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.

Published earlier this year, but still relevant.

Published earlier this year, but still relevant.