CS Career fair cancelled at community college because no companies reached out

https://twitter.com/anpaure/status/1834576613742145982

by ajdude • 2 years ago

77 106 2 years ago

That's not surprising...I remember after the dotcom crash was in full swing I went to a career fair and there like 20 companies and 4,000 people searching for jobs.

ghaff15• 2 years ago

From what I've seen, things haven't hit dot-bomb nuclear winter. But at that time there were a lot of IT workers in the would you like fries with that category who never got back into the profession. I was very lucky to get rehired shortly after 9/11 but, to be honest, didn't really get a well-paying position until years later.

jordanb2• 2 years ago

The thing that saved the computer industry after the dot bomb was:

1) Broadband. A lot of the 90s business models that didn't work out at the time did work out a few years later as people got faster internet and

2) A little bit later there were smart phones.

The problem I see now is we need some other big thing to come along that would make a lot of business models that didn't work before suddenly start working. We haven't had any big platform shift since smart phones and the industry is now entering into a "maturation state." Kinda like aerospace in the 80s/90s after SST didn't work out and everything became about getting another 3-5% efficiency at mach 0.81 every decade.

I added more thoughts here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082

johnnyanmac3• 2 years ago

Not surprising. But always a good reminder that despite what they try to tell (lie to) you: the economy is in fact not in good shape. Or at least, companies forecast a bad economy even if they believe the current economy is good.

quantified2• 2 years ago

The post looks like it's SF area. Given that employers want 4-year credentials and there's a big Stanford/Berkeley/top-tier bias, what was the representation by companies prior to this at the community college level?

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I find this curious since the Federal Gov. recently said a 4 year degree is no longer needed for IT.

I wonder if some other type of thing is behind this. When I started out, one could get into development with just a high school diploma in some cases.

busterarm2• 2 years ago

Looking back over the decades in my career, only a handful of the really standout people that I've worked with had CS degrees. Most common were music degrees or being self-taught.

I understand how people recruiting are filtering for degrees, but I think outside of true entry-level positions it's completely silly to do so.

richk449• 2 years ago

(1) the actual message doesn’t say the fair is canceled - it is still on; the message says no employers specifically looking for software engineers will be attending.

(2) it says that IT employers will be attending the carer fair.

(3) it also says that they plan to have more government employees for software engineers at the next career fair.

renewiltord4• 2 years ago

Did CCSF have a lot of companies ever? Education there is free and pretty last resort. I signed up for Chinese (Mandarin) once.

Apocryphon2• 2 years ago

CCSF's cybersecurity courses are renowned, from what I recall.

renewiltord4• 2 years ago

That's interesting to me. Very cool.

j_maffe2• 2 years ago

The fact that it being free is used as an argument about its low quality is the most American thing I've read in a while.

ConradKilroy• 2 years ago

Thank you for stating this. Its annoying to hear free education = bad in all subtle forms.

linotype• 2 years ago

Well this kind of comment didn’t take long to surface on this post. Ooof.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

renewiltord did not claim education provided at CCSF is low quality because it is free.

However, the barrier to entry to a higher education entry is commonly used as a proxy for the quality of the student coming out of the higher education institution.

johnnyanmac3• 2 years ago

Dang, free higher education? Where are these schools in LA? would make learning 3d modeling much easier.

pknomad• 2 years ago

It's unfortunate but not surprising given that the job market is awful and worthwhile recruiting tends to be localized to top tier unis...

guywithahat2• 2 years ago

I think CS is starting to become more and more like being a lawyer. Nobody cares if you have the credentials unless it’s from a good school, but if it is they’re willing to pay a lot

dmoy• 2 years ago

In law it also depends a lot on how what rank in your class you were.

ghaff15• 2 years ago

The situation with law is that you need credentials from a good school, with a decent class rank, and probably a good clerkship to get your foot in the door with a well-paying white shoe law firm. Otherwise there are probably plenty of law positions but they may pay pretty poorly in many cases.

jordanb2• 2 years ago

That doesn't make sense because a lawyer's pedigree is valuable to the firm. They want to tell their clients that "we have Harvard lawyers working on your case."

Nobody really cares about the pedgree of a computer programmer. There are some narrow areas where they may want to have a highly credentialed person serving as "chief scientist" or something, to impress investors. A startup may want to tell investors that "our technology team is lead by an MIT PhD in AI" but beyond that the credentials of your dev team are not marketable.

gizmo686• 2 years ago

Everyone cares if you have credentials as a layer. It is illegal to practice law without having the credentials.

johnnyanmac3• 2 years ago

Yeah, I think people arguing about "they want 4 year degrees" and "they use professors as contacts" may be missing the forest for the trees.

Career fairs are a very effective advertising route (guaranteed real people, high chance people are developing in relevant fields, chance to network with future recruiting wings) on top of a way to try and get interns or junior level candidates. Especially small local businesses who have no chance attracting national talent.

To tell people that you aren't interested in I'm advertising (a business's favorite thing) paints a dire situation, reflecting how bad times really are. Especially in an area like SF

And as a fun little dystopia to end off on, there are many non-school career fairs companies go to in 2023/4 with no intention of even interviewing. A few will straight up tell you they aren't and just want to "bring brand awareness". Yay economy.

klodolph2• 2 years ago

I’m a fan of community college, but I’m not surprised that no companies reached out. It is rough to try and jump into an entry-level position after only two years of studying programming. If you want to be a programmer, the way community college fits into that plan is as the first half of a four-year program. You take intro programming classes in community college, transfer to a four-year college, and then take your 300-level and 400-level algorithms / compilers / operating systems / databases classes. You end up with significantly less student debt and the same credentials, although this is not without its drawbacks (mainly, you may transfer but end up needing three years of study instead of two; you have to really be on top of shit w.r.t. bureaucracy to de-risk this one).

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

I think it's just rough no matter what. I've worked with a lot of junior devs and the thing is I haven't noticed that the 24 year olds with a fresh CS masters do particularly better than code school grads who were working at walgreens or whatever the previous year.

Software development is a discipline in its own right that only very partially overlaps with a university CS curriculum.

adrianN• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at university.

bnchrch• 2 years ago

Same.

I feel like, outside of the work experience that was baked into my degree, I could've spent those 4 years and all that money in a much more productive way.

(Note: I don't regret it, I had a lot of fun, but in terms of becoming a professional I could've been much more efficient)

As a result, anyone who's come to me asking how they can "break into" programming, I strongly discourage them from University at all.

_dark_matter_2• 2 years ago

Idk I have a lot more confidence because I know what I know, that is, fewer known unknowns, and I have high confidence that there aren't unknown unknowns lurking around corners. This helps me drive decision making across the org.

xeromal2• 2 years ago

Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.

itishappy6• 2 years ago

University can offer two things:

1. Equip students to do a job.

2. Equip students to find a job.

These are surprisingly disparate, and I suspect the latter is a lot more significant than most people realize.

Put differently: I suspect the real challenge is getting hired without explicit qualifications.

screye• 2 years ago

If 100% of a job is easy enough for a fresh community college grad, then it is easy enough to be outsourced for 1/10th the cost.

The 5% of the job that is hard, is what you're paid for. It is what keeps the job onshore, and it is what keeps fresh community college grads from being hired into it.

codeAligned• 2 years ago

There's always someone who will reply with something along the lines of "I don't use anything I learned in school on the job" or "Software engineering is not about coding, it's about X"

With due respect, in my experience as someone who did not major in CS, it was a rough first few years because I had weak knowledge of data structures, almost no knowledge of computer networking (showed itself why managing containers etc), didn't know even the very basics of bash/linux.

Nowadays, when I work with CS majors vs non majors, it has noticeably been more difficult to get the latter group up to speed and productive. Of course there have been notable exceptions (there always are when it comes to people matters)

_vertigo• 2 years ago

I am a much better "engineer" for having taken the advanced classes, but more to the point, I was a much better programmer for having taken the advanced classes.

The total amount of code I had written in my first two years of university was not very much; by the time I had taken some of the advanced courses I had written a lot more code and had thus become a better programmer (still not a good one, but better!). I had written probably 10x more code by the end of year 4 than the end of year 2 thanks to practicum courses, etc.

tuyiown• 2 years ago

Or, maybe, you learned way more than you think and that let you concentrate on the «important things».

scruple• 2 years ago

No degree here, 20 years in. Worked in embedded, medical robotics, AAA games...

prewett• 2 years ago

I was got a non-CS bachelors, and then managed to get into development, partly because I had been programming all my life. But I went back for a masters and shored up the undergrad CS that I missed. Boy was that helpful! It wasn't necessary for 95% of my job, either, but it enables me to solve the other 5% that I would be unable to solve, or end up with something that barely works. I've found compilers useful (for parsing; didn't have time to take finite state automata), the OS class was excellent for understanding and to be able to write threaded programs that work. Data structures is simply essential (but I took a that in undergrad).

nunez• 2 years ago

100%. The tough let code style interviews mostly cover CS101 and CS102 topics that most of us stopped using the minute after matriculation.

garciasn• 2 years ago

I worked in the CC system and I am a huge advocate to what they bring to market--a low cost alternative to primary institutions, cutting the high cost of a Bachelors degree by at least 1/3; but, those CCs were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong.

The only way for ANY college student to do this is through real-world experience (from an organization that is willing to take on someone very green or private repo work/portfolio). I am regularly asked by randoms on LinkedIn and/or my network as well as interns and/or candidates what they can be doing to improve their chances to get an internship or FT role. In those instances, I always recommend that these folks:

1. Come up with a project, end to end.

2. Develop the code and post it in a repo that can be accessed by companies during the hiring process.

3. Be able to explain the why behind the project, the entire process end to end, and--most importantly--why the work was important to do.

These are the items I believe will put those green students toward the top 20% of their competition in the market. I find entirely too many candidates who have a lot of coding and theory courses and not a whole lot of application of those learnings. By being able to show management of a project from end to end, be able to explain the development process coherently, and provide the potential business value it brings is a big way for those folks to stand out from someone who can just write code.

Many average four-year colleges aren't doing this for their students; CCs most definitely aren't.

nordsieck• 2 years ago

I worked in the CC system; but, they were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong.

I haven't worked in the CC system, but I've been around the Belleuve/Seattle area CCs for many years.

And at least for those, there are broadly 2 tracks. The first is what you say - the first 2 years of a bachelor's degree track.

The 2nd track is a variety of certifications. Sometimes these are industry certs like Microsoft, Cisco, etc. And some of them are CC certs. But they aim to get people productive in 2 years.

lispisok• 2 years ago

Expecting college students to hit the ground running with whatever stack a company is running is bad and unreasonable and we should push back against it. Engineering, law, accounting, and medicine dont do this. Why should Computer Science? Dont reduce a university education into learning javascript frameworks.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

I went to the University of Illinois. That’s a solid tech school pretty much across the board, often cracking the top five in a number of subjects, including CS.

But the real secret of that school was that, at least when I was there, they had too much computer hardware for the number of students.

The number of hours in a day you could show up in a lab and not have a waitlist was fairly generous. Which meant a lot of the smarter students had no problem working on their own pet projects.

From a “hit the ground running” standpoint, a lot of these kids were only bothering with a 3.3-3.9 GPA because time spent getting three more points on a test or homework was time lost from working on your project, or talking to people about theirs.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

When Seattle built their light rail system they ran it past UW and nearly every community college in the region.

It was already a known phenomenon for UW students to take CC classes to reduce the cost of genEd requirements but after the trains that just got easier. Much faster than the busses.

smcg• 2 years ago

Okay, but it's plenty enough for a paid internship. Many of these students are going to transfer to a 4-year after this, so I don't know why this would be different.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

That's not true at all.

Our industry is swimming in auto-didacts, dropouts, bootcampers, and community college graduates. There's no licensure and most industry-adjacent academic programs spend a lot of time teaching concepts and abstractions far divorced from everyday industry needs. Committed tinkers who are ready to get their hands dirty and start learning the trade are historically very welcome.

However, the job market is upside down right now, because we had an insane hiring bubble that has since burst, leaving countless people with real work experience in the candidate pool for jobs at all levels.

In this kind of market, which we're used to seeing come and go, there's temporarily a lower-than-usual demand for candidates with less vetting, and so the auto-didacts/etc can expect to have a hard time getting attention for a bit.

A lack of interest in community college graduates is an ephemeral market state that we're familiar with seeing sometimes, and definitely not a structural detail of the industry.

ghaff15• 2 years ago

I think that's probably fair. I know very qualified people who are having trouble finding jobs. I don't personally care all that much but a number of opportunities post semi-retirement haven't really materialized. Which is fine but would probably have been different in different times.

willcipriano• 2 years ago

With rate cuts on the horizon I expect this to turn around over the next year.

spacemadness• 2 years ago

Let's all hope because when it's an employer's market, they tend to lean towards exploitation and burning people out that do have jobs which isn't exactly healthy.

busterarm2• 2 years ago

I've seen companies do some really stupid stuff recruiting-wise post-covid.

Like one company I'm familiar with that after a two-decade relationship with Waterloo, stopped sending recruiters there because the recruiters no longer wanted to travel so far. Literally their best hires came from there.

ggorlen• 2 years ago

CCSF alum here (AA, completed over 20 CS courses). I attended a similar CCSF job fair in 2017 and there were only 2-3 companies involved even then. If I recall, it was Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Mission Bit, maybe a third that must not have been interesting enough to stay in my memory. There were ~10 students at the fair.

The LLNL internship seemed too IT-oriented to interest me. Mission Bit involved teaching high school kids to code after school, which I did for over a year and received course credit at CCSF for.

So it's not that surprising to me that they went from ~2 companies to 0, even disregarding the major drop in attendance at CCSF since 2017 [1]. I didn't attend any other fairs so maybe I missed something, but I never got the impression that they were especially "bumping".

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2022/01/27/by-the-numbers-sf-higher-e...

manav• 2 years ago

I know the California CC system pretty well and have taken a few courses. In tech, there are usually two main paths: either transferring to a 4-year school for CS/Engineering, or specializing in something like Cybersecurity, AWS, Cisco, etc. For Software Engineering, there’s not gonna be any employer demand for those students at CCs since most people going that route tend to transfer to a university and their education/experience isn't really complete for that role.

tsumnia• 2 years ago

When I first started teaching college it was for my local community college. CS was situated with other tech careers like System Administration, Web Development, and IT Repair. One of the first issues I had to manage was requests to adopt a "Software Engineering" certification, which I fought against because unlike the other skills, CS doesn't benefit from holding a cert.

CS in CC is in a weird spot - many 4-year universities will only accept CC CS1 as an elective, meaning they'll need to retake CS1 when they transfer. There may be some partnerships between a university and their local CC, but outside of those are gray areas. This could be because the CC instructors haven't reached out to get the courses to transfer or due to quality assurance. I know my predecessor would post the solutions on a sheet of paper in the classroom and students could earn partial, but passing credit if they retyped it out.

Finally, local area companies may not need software development or don't need it in a continued employment fashion. The goal of for CC is to help give the community the skills people need to find employment - but with more focus on LOCAL employment. If there aren't any local software companies, CC graduates will need to compete against 4 year university students for the same entry-level position. As a consequence, the 2 year program only taught them how to program, but didn't give them those additional "why you program" skills or projects to build experience.

baby• 2 years ago

As an employer I'll tell you what the problem is: there's too many universities and all of them have different UIs. I'm only reaching out to the professors I know and they'll figure out how to advertise the jobs to their students. Career fairs? Even worse, who has the time to do that? We just want to increase our funnel, not increase the time it takes to reach out to junior engineers.

The proposal in these kind of situations is to have common job boards (like Who's hiring on HN) and check there. Students should do that and not assume that employers will come to them.

Good professors have relationships with the industry and will preemptively reach out for their students (that's what my professors did in my uni back in France).

The reverse API could also work, have a standard that all universities follow so that one can easily post job descriptions to all relevant universities.

CarpeQueso• 2 years ago

Stepping away from this particular case, what does a well-executed Associate's degree for computer science look like? At top-tier schools (at least in the US, which is all I'm familiar with), there's an expectation that most of the incoming students already have a reasonable familiarity with the basics of programming, but that's unreasonable to expect for everyone entering college. And since it's useful to have some practical familiarity with programming before taking an algorithms class, it further seems like getting some sort of software engineering two-year degree would be a good use of time before either entering the workforce or deciding to cover some theory in the following two years (algorithms, computer architecture, compilers, etc.).

What would a two-year degree like that cover? A variety of useful languages plus their most common frameworks? Basic data structures? Common industry tools (git, CI, docker, linux)? Even though it doesn't fit very naturally into the US college experience, I'm wondering if a well-executed two-year "bootcamp" (for lack of a better term) could actually fill a gap that exists right now. It at least allows people to choose if they're interested in theoretical computer science or not. Theory is quite helpful, but not everyone wants/needs to opt in to math, proofs, etc.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Finland has a model of high school alternate vocational programs. But standards and funding are so low it is mostly useless, places seem mostly day cares for students.

Applied science universities however are not as rigorous as traditional universities, but do offer suitable degrees with practise in actual software development with lighter load on pure computer science or advanced topics.

ghaff15• 2 years ago

In the US there are technical high schools in many states. Not sure exactly what the curriculum looks like. I'm sure it involves programming but probably not CS topics.

nijave• 2 years ago

Outside of courses, a college's alumni network is also pretty powerful. Four year colleges tend to have a pretty robust network where alumnis will advocate for their schools and come back to do recruiting including working with professors they had

In addition, colleges like to boast about their placement rates so they're incentivized to help keep that network robust

CS Career fair cancelled at community college because no companies reached out

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