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Comment by Aeolun

20 days ago

> There is a generation of completely unemployable "graduates" in the pipeline.

I feel like that was always the case, at least since like 10 years ago and by my definition.

I wasn't unemployable as a graduate, I found a job after all. But I was near enough useless and started from the ground up.

I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.

20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.

  • Yeah, I graduated around 2000 and had to learn how to work on a professional software engineering team.

    That doesn't mean my education was worthless—quite the opposite. It's just that what you learn in a software engineering degree isn't "how to write code and do software development in a professional team in their specific programming language and libraries and frameworks and using their specific tooling and their office politics."

    • Even professional software development as you know it may not stick around for very long. I believe knowledge and experience gained along the way can translate across different context and you can use that to pivot and adapt to the environment.

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  • That matches up with my general expectations of graduates. They should be smart, but are not expected to really know much.