Job Market for CS Students
I recently talked to some master CS graduates. They are both working in US. What a shame that they have to move to US to find a job. They both said programming jobs are no more and many new hires are master graduates. It is all we discussed around here. No more programmer jobs in US. See the following reports to backup my opinions:
What we are going to do with our master students? I always promote the opinion that we ought to prepare our students for the job market. To fit the job market, it means to give them more training on project level abilities, like analyzing the customer requirements, selecting the fitting techniques and do the design and architecture work.
Many of the students around me do not know much about the IT industry and they do not know the trend of the technology. It is the responsibility of the supervisors to lead them into the right direction. At the meantime, the supervisors need to cultivate them the ability to analyze a problem, do the investigation, write reports and papers. And the basic line is to motivate them the ambition in their professional career and train them good working ethnic. I think these qualities can make them be hired.
Supervisors should be careful to use them as cheap labors to produce research results that won’t help them to get a job. I checked the master theses from some US CS departments. I think I know what I am going to do.
2 Comments:
One of the referred articles presents a certain point of view to which I'd like to add two points:
- The number of international students taking up post-graduate work in the US is on the increase so any loss in tech jobs would affect them too - and these students need H1Bs.
- The referred articles seems to blame the H1B system for the loss in tech jobs - I would be interested to know how many H1Bs go to folks who are on student visas and are doing their Master's. It would make sense to try to keep those students in the country... I would think.
By
Anonymous, at 5:24 AM
Essentially, business is about "making money" so industry will do all it needs to do to remain competitive.
Consequently, outsourcing of manual labour jobs is a very common tool for companies to reduce production cost.
Programming is the “manual labour” of the IT, so those jobs are and will be outsourced more and more.
Especially countries such as India, China, Hungary and Romania train highly specialized programmers who work for a fraction of what a local IT specialist would ask for.
Example: If you hire a programmer of one of the 3 largest IT suppliers in Europe, you will be charged 100 Euro (150 $ CAD) per hour. A programmer in Romania asks for 100 Euro a week (if even).
Take Microsoft Windows 2000. According to Microsoft, it took 15000 man-years to produce that operating system. Without outsourcing, such a task would be entirely unreasonable.
While this fact of globalization might not be what we wish for, it remains a fact and universities as well as students have to get used to it.
The question is: what should we do. I believe that western countries can’t compete with “cheap labour countries” when it comes to mass production.
When it comes to IT, I believe that one strength of our countries could be research: Make education better than the education in most other countries and provide the infrastructure needed for research and real innovation.
Another field could be highly innovative high tech industry that takes the latest research and makes it a product: Requirement Analysis, System Analysis and Project Management remain in e.g. Canada, while the programming of the “mass code” is done abroad.
A third field I see is consulting and customer-oriented work: While may be programming jobs will be outsourced, industrialized countries will still keep much business because not all business can be outsourced. Those companies need highly innovative IT solutions and they need consultants who know the market and suggest a system tailored to their specific needs. This requires specialists that not only know IT but also the language of the CEOs of those businesses, their culture and also business itself.
After all, I believe, IT students need more business knowledge and a broad view of the IT field.
Matthias
By
Anonymous, at 9:32 AM
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