Same: so many people signed up because they heard IT payed well and has many offers. Half the class dropped after the first year when they realize it’s not for them.
I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.
Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.
If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.
Part of the problem is that no one seems to really have a good Idea what should be taught in an academic setting for programming and system administration. There isn’t an equivalent to ABET, which handles engineering curriculums, and it doesn’t seem like the industry or academia is there to create a curriculum yet.
I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering. Another set of skills might be aligned with data center management. Another might focus on distributed web application engineering. That’s where I ended up, and nobody ever taught me in college when would be an appropriate case for implementing a cache, what options exist to solve that problem, how to administer them, etc. When I hire for entry level DevOps people, there’s usually a skill gap between “I’ve built some cloud servers” and “I have specific experience managing redis caches and ElasticSearch clusters.”
I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering.
There are.
My university (and many others) offered Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Computer Engineering is sort of a middle ground between EE and SE, where you learn hardware concepts like circuits and semiconductors (for hardware development), but there are also algorithm-based courses.
Each of the programs has many options for elective courses, and you can focus on databases, algorithms, security, web development, or whatever you want. The core concepts are the same, and it’s more about learning broad concepts and skills, rather than focused skills. Things like Redis and Elasticsearch didn’t exist when I took my database course - the practical portion was mostly just SQL. Things like Docker came even later. But the broad concepts I learned allow me to jump in and use “new” technologies as they mature and stabilize.
None of the programs were just “coding bootcamp”. Coding was almost inconsequential to my degree (CompEng), though I understand it’s used more heavily in Computer Science degrees. I had a single first-year course that was supposed to teach us programming - all the other courses just assumed a basic knowledge. The focus was more on the design, the logic, and the algorithms. Anyone can code - the bootcamps have that right. But not everyone can design and implement a distributed system efficiently and securely.
Yup. Felt fucking lost after getting my CS degree. Ended up going down a completely different path where the degree didn’t matter. Still nice to have in my back pocket so I can at least grab some certs and have a half decent resume if needed, but I probably would’ve been fucked fresh out of college.
Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.
Wish I had dropped sooner and taken a year or two for a tier-1 university entrance exam. Now I’m in debt, jobless, have a useless tier-3 degree and obviously, didn’t learn any useful skill.
Same: so many people signed up because they heard IT payed well and has many offers. Half the class dropped after the first year when they realize it’s not for them.
I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.
Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.
If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.
Part of the problem is that no one seems to really have a good Idea what should be taught in an academic setting for programming and system administration. There isn’t an equivalent to ABET, which handles engineering curriculums, and it doesn’t seem like the industry or academia is there to create a curriculum yet.
I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering. Another set of skills might be aligned with data center management. Another might focus on distributed web application engineering. That’s where I ended up, and nobody ever taught me in college when would be an appropriate case for implementing a cache, what options exist to solve that problem, how to administer them, etc. When I hire for entry level DevOps people, there’s usually a skill gap between “I’ve built some cloud servers” and “I have specific experience managing redis caches and ElasticSearch clusters.”
There are.
My university (and many others) offered Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Computer Engineering is sort of a middle ground between EE and SE, where you learn hardware concepts like circuits and semiconductors (for hardware development), but there are also algorithm-based courses.
Each of the programs has many options for elective courses, and you can focus on databases, algorithms, security, web development, or whatever you want. The core concepts are the same, and it’s more about learning broad concepts and skills, rather than focused skills. Things like Redis and Elasticsearch didn’t exist when I took my database course - the practical portion was mostly just SQL. Things like Docker came even later. But the broad concepts I learned allow me to jump in and use “new” technologies as they mature and stabilize.
None of the programs were just “coding bootcamp”. Coding was almost inconsequential to my degree (CompEng), though I understand it’s used more heavily in Computer Science degrees. I had a single first-year course that was supposed to teach us programming - all the other courses just assumed a basic knowledge. The focus was more on the design, the logic, and the algorithms. Anyone can code - the bootcamps have that right. But not everyone can design and implement a distributed system efficiently and securely.
Yup. Felt fucking lost after getting my CS degree. Ended up going down a completely different path where the degree didn’t matter. Still nice to have in my back pocket so I can at least grab some certs and have a half decent resume if needed, but I probably would’ve been fucked fresh out of college.
Fellow sysadmin here, how would you create a portfolio? Just list various projects you’ve worked on?
Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.
Wish I had dropped sooner and taken a year or two for a tier-1 university entrance exam. Now I’m in debt, jobless, have a useless tier-3 degree and obviously, didn’t learn any useful skill.
Sad to hear. I hope you find your way.
Hitching teens/young adults with huge debt is such a fucked up system.