Attn: Computer Science Graduates

[Tsukuru]

I've just become a college freshman, and I'm still trying to decide what in the world I want to do for the rest of my life. To make a long thread short, what do you graduates with B.S. in CS or related major think of your current employment? Where is it you work, what do you like or dislike about it, and what did you wish you knew when you entered college that you know now?

This is a leap of faith; I'm assuming there are at least a few IT professionals within the member population here at AGN.

[AtmaWeapon]

I have not graduated yet, but I can tell you the single thing that will save your tail in today's job market.

A BSCS is worth squat. By itself, it makes good toilet paper, and gives off a little heat when you burn it. The market is diluted with thousands of people who chose CS as a major because "there's money in them computer machines." Because of this, companies are reluctant to hire recent graduates who do not have experience to show they picked up more than book knowledge.

To get ahead, you need to seek internships and jobs that relate to CS while you are in college. Ideally, your college will have a co-op program that allows you to work as part of your studies as opposed to along with your studies. I suggest this for ANY major, not just CS, for a simple reason. It gives you a chance to do what you would do if you had your degree already, and it's a lot easier to decide your path sucks when you haven't already invested lots of time and money into it.

Something I have found that seems to make you look like solid gold in CS interviews is to emphasize a willingness to learn. Acknowledge that CS is a field that can experience sweeping changes over the course of months, and try to cite instances where you had to make sudden changes to your plans on a project quickly in response to some unexpected and unavoidable change.

The key, as far as I can tell, is that employers are looking for flexible individuals that can perform many tasks, or learn how to do them quickly. Many IS departments are understaffed due to lack of funding, and if you can make yourself appear to have skills that make you worth 2 or more people, you have a much better chance. If your resume shows that you worked a year or more for a company and did good work in many situations, you will look like the God of Programming amongst the majority of other graduates who think a CS degree is a golden ticket to a rockstar lifestyle for sitting in a cubicle.

If you can't handle stress well, find another career path. I'm under pressure because my project was due Friday, and when I submitted it for approval I found out that my client wanted an embedded local database solution rather than a separate remote database like I had created. This means I have to move from mySQL to MSDE as a database engine, which means I have to learn to work with a crippled DB instead of a fully functional one. On top of this, one of our managers is off this week and I am taking over her responsibilities of scheduling for the company's most important project. I'm probably going to work 10-11 hour days for the rest of the week. I'm lucky, though, because I'm not part of the Network Group that has to be on call 24/7 in case one of our servers decides to kick the bucket (which they have started to do with increasing frequency :().

The plus side to all of this negativity is I am being paid remarkably well for my efforts. If you can manage to get in with a good, reliable company, you can get paid very well. I love to code, so going to work is a pleasure when I go to bed early enough. I understand more about computers now than I did 5 years ago, and it seems the knowledge I gain grows exponentially with each passing year.


Short version for the lazy:

It's hard to get a good CS job. If you take college seriously, get intern jobs, and polish your resume nice and good then your chances of getting good offers is very good. Choose your college wisely, though. My university (Mississippi State University) is recruited heavily because it has an incredibly strong College of Engineering that is recognized nationally. If you choose a college that has a poor CS department, you will have to work that much harder.

Make yourself stand out. Be a nerd. If you waste all of your time drinking beer and chasing tail you are going to find yourself working odd jobs to make ends meet. Have a passion for your work. If you don't think that writing a multi-user database app to control shipping between two departments for 6 months sounds like fun, you may want to reconsider your major.

[Rijuhn]

Sorry, I'm too young and I haven't finished my degree yet. I'm going for a masters in Architecture though, and then I'll travel the world making tons of money flying in my private jet, lol, j/k. The future is uncertain, I only care about today and tomorrow. Beyond that there's no reason for me to even consider what I should do.