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Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-(

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Patricia Shanahan wrote:
> Kevin Doyle wrote:
>> Lew wrote:
> ...
> 
>>> I live in the Silicon Valley area of California and there is mad
>>> hiring going on here
>>> for computer programmers, with a special category in many companies
>>> for recent graduates.
> 
>>> You should be prepared to show major competency in algorithms,
>>> various languages
>>> and major concepts like data mining and logging.

>> Thanks for that, Wow most of those topics are not covered in
>> university training, at least not in the university I attended! Data
>> mining and Algorithms are usually the reserve of a PhD or higher. The

As Patricia suggested, you did likely get some algorithms training if you 
took more than one computer programming course. If they taught you how 
to search a linked list or a tree, for example, that's algorithms.

Data mining is rather advanced, and I don't mean you have to know that 
area specifically. But the competitive edge for new graduates is to know 
a little bit more than what they taught you at university. Anyone can 
graduate knowing only what they taught you; it takes the better 
candidate to extend their learning past that.

Your competition has been studying that stuff, no doubt. They aren't 
waiting for a professor to show them the way.

It doesn't have to be data mining as such, but a good familiarity with
databases generally, whether relational like Postgres or key-value 
like NoSQL or map-reduce like Hadoop, helps. It's just that the great 
majority of programs need a data store, so dealing with data stores 
is a fundamental programming skill.

I bought this book, and I don't often buy books due to the plethora 
of free information on the 'Net:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms>

It's the seminal work on the subject. 

>> Comp Sci education system in the USA must be miles ahead of  what we
>> have in Ireland/Europe?? 

They teach us to use but one question mark to indicate an interrogative.

Kidding aside, I don't know how the system is in the USA except by 
interacting with interns and recent graduates at work.

I certainly don't know how to compare it to that in the UK or Ireland or 
the rest of Europe, or anywhere else for that matter.

But I'll bet it's the same here as there - the candidates who get hired 
are the ones who do more than the minimum learning at school.

> I would expect at least algorithms to be covered at some level in a
> first degree course, even if it is not called that and is scattered
> around other courses, such as data structures.

Otherwise they aren't teaching computer science.

> It is very important to understand that university education is just a
> start on learning how to learn. In addition to the sorts of topics Lew
> mentioned, universities tend not to give students the feeling of working
> on a large project.

It's also true of the myriads of topics I didn't mention.

> Have you considered joining an open source project? That can build
> practical experience, a portfolio of bugs you have fixed and features
> you have implemented, and contacts that may help you find a job, just as
> a job would.

This is in line with doing more than the minimum. Nothing substitutes for 
practical experience.

Writing your own programs privately is good, too. I have written several Java 
EE programs over the years, for example, that have never left my computer. 
But I learned servlets, JPA, configuring application servers (ASes) like Glassfish, 
JSP, XHTML/Facelets, and much more on my own by building applications, 
sometimes the same one in more than one way to compare frameworks or 
idioms.

University, as Patricia says, "is just a start on learning how to learn." You need 
to practice on your own just as with any art.

-- 
Lew

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Thread

No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Kevin Doyle <kfrdoyle@gmail.com> - 2012-08-14 11:35 -0700
  Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2012-08-14 16:34 -0700
    Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Kevin Doyle <kfrdoyle@gmail.com> - 2012-08-15 14:01 -0700
      Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-08-15 14:17 -0700
        Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2012-08-15 14:31 -0700
        Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Gene Wirchenko <genew@ocis.net> - 2012-08-15 19:08 -0700
          Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Kevin Doyle <kfrdoyle@gmail.com> - 2012-08-16 07:50 -0700
            Re: No Jobs for new computer guys :-( Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-08-16 08:47 -0700

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