Leading Computer Science Professor Says 'everybody' Is Struggling to Get Jobs

Asserting that the way it was done in the past is the best way will always get agreement from some, but the needs of industry change over time.

I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.

CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.

[0] https://htdp.org/

I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.

However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.

A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.

If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.

There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.

All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.

The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).

The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.

The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.

A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.

Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.

CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.

Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.

Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.

There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.

The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).

The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.

Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.

Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?

Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.

This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.

Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?

Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.

Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.

One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.

But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.

The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.

The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.

We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)

Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.

But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.

My proposal would be:

1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.

2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.

3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.

Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.

I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.

Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.

You mentioned it, the skill your graduates don't have: willing to work for lower wages

A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.

    I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs"

Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.

    To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs.

    IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business

If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."

   This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all 
   in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like 
   SAP. I have since retired 

Congrats on making it thru and retiring!

We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.

The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.

It's probably more cyclic than systemic and related to the larger economic trends, federal monetary policy, and growing protectionism. But tech is outsized in the economy, so I'm not sure which one is the horse and which is the cart.

Most people don't speak or write literally about this kind of subject.