Last night I went to a Birkbeck training session for prospective mentors. I did not realise before I turned up that all, or almost all, the would-be mentors would be MSc Computer Science graduates.
In the end that fact alone turned what could have been a pretty dull way to spend a Friday night into something quite interesting – I don’t get to talk to developers very often at all, and now I was in a room full of them.
And one of them – a chief executive of a start-up with a fascinating back-story (but he didn’t say ‘put that on your blog’, so I won’t) – told me what he regards as the best way for a would be developer to get their breakthrough job: go to github, find a high profile project from a commercial outfit (he suggested the Chrome browser from Google) and fix a few bugs.
His claim was that he knew several people – including two with jobs at Google – who had got work in this way. I have no reason to think he was doing anything other than telling the truth.
Interestingly, he was pretty surprised when I talked about the poor employment record of computer science graduates – there plainly is some sort of disconnect between the firms recruiting (who say they struggle to fill jobs) and the graduates (who struggle to get recruited).
Related articles
- The Top 10 Schools In The World For App Developers [RANKED] (businessinsider.com)
- PhD Web Science University of Southampton (phdland.com)
- Can Obama Convince High Schools To Teach Kids To Code? (forbes.com)
- What Hackers Need (recoding.blogspot.com)
- Want a job? Major in computer science (utsandiego.com)
- NYC to teach computer science and software engineering in 20 schools (computinged.wordpress.com)
- ‘Teach computing’ primaries urged (bbc.co.uk)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 