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Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Idk, I got my entry level job with 5 years of experience. That's what internships are for when you're studying in Uni..
And I wouldn't want to hire someone who hasn't that experience. It shows a lack of drive.
Drive or lack of opportunity? ‘Just get an internship’ is as dismissive pf an argument as ‘just get a job’
5 years of experience doesn't mean you need a job for 5 years
Just show me what you coded for the past 5 years. There's no lack of opportunity for your github.
Five years of experience straight out of finishing a four year bachelor’s degree means that you need to start grinding for your career when you’re still a high school kid. To put it extremely politely: this is an unrealistic expectation.
To be programming when your in highschool, yes. If you're not programming already in highschool, you probably shouldn't study computer science
...or just expect to take an internship or do Foss work for a few years after you graduate, to catch up with your peers
Lol, then what about these people with jobs after attending boot camps? They’re all there for their talent and experience?
Boot camps and certs are scams
Professional training courses and certifications: all scams.
Expecting people to do unpaid spec work when they’re 16: not scams.
Expecting people to contribute to FOSS software to get a job, def
Not only is this an out of touch and irresponsible expectation to put on high school kids, but if FOSS was nothing but a box ticking exercise for unpaid child labour, then the proportion of abandoned and unfinished projects would be worse than it is for Netflix Originals.
Or they can just lie on their resumes like everyone else.
Resumes don't mean shit. Tech interviews are hard. If you lie, you probably won't make it to the first whiteboard interview
And if you're skilled, you don't really need "experience." Just don't lie about your skills.
How is the whiteboard interview going to uncover the fact that you only have two years of experience instead of five?
If you're skilled, then you have experience. That's the point.
Experience doesn't mean you need to have had a paid job. Decide to make a game in Java? You'll have a lot of experience. Publish it on GitHub, and that's what your interviewer is looking for
And there's no way for the interviewer to know how many years of experience that game actually represents. If it's four instead of five, they'll never know. That's the trick.
You'd fail before the whiteboard interview. Its easy to detect people with little experience
I never ask how much experience someone has in an interview. I throw a hard problem at them and watch them work
Nope. The non-technical phone interview can be bullshitted, the technical phone interview can be passed with enough skill, and by the time they get to you then you aren't even checking for experience.
There are loads of people that get through this process by lying about their years of experience. You have confirmation bias.
The only thing experience is good for is getting better at lying on resumes and lying in interviews. It's a screening process to filter out people who don't know how the sausage is made.
Your classism is showing.
It shows a lack of ~~drive~~ access to resources that allow you to do an unpaid internship.
Internships for software are almost always paid, and compared to other disciplines, paid reasonably well. $30+/hr in Canada is fairly normal for dev/qa internships, and I've heard from several students that I've interviewed that they've made more in US companies. Some companies also offer raises for students that return for successive terms.
Who said internships are unpaid? Internships should be paid. Companies get marginal work for side projects for like 20x discount
you're acting as if internships are easy to get into. dont know about cs/programming ones. but other stems like bio/biotech are notirously difficult and competitive to get one, if you can even find it. so most people try to get into limited lab spaces at a uni instead, and all the internships ive seen require a very high gpa plus geared only for specific scientists.
They are. Almost all tech companies have cs internships. There's almost nothing to loose and a lot to gain.
But, again, there's loads of FOSS projects on github with tickets tickets that you can just start contributing to. That's also experience and highly valued.