Posts tagged ‘jobs’
A job is a strange outcome measure: Udacity drops money-back guarantee on finding a job
Udacity has dropped a money-back guarantee that they were offering to students in some of their Nanodegree programs. The guarantee (with stipulations and caveats) was that students would find a job after getting the nanodegree, or they would get their money back.
An article in Inside Higher Ed (quoted below and linked here) describes some of the tensions. Other for-profit coding schools offer similar or better guarantees, but others do not. Ryan Craig, quoted below, suggests that Udacity might not have been hitting its targets for job placements. Does that mean that Udacity was doing something wrong?
A job is such a strange outcome measure for any kind of educational program. I know some techniques for evaluating someone’s knowledge of programming, and I know how to create educational opportunities that might lead to successful evaluation. There are factors like student attitude and motivation and whether students engage in deliberate practice that are not entirely within my control. Even then, I’d be willing to say, “I can design a program where the majority of students will achieve this level of proficiency in coding.” But a job? Where I can’t control how the students interview, or where they apply, or what the companies are looking for (if they’re looking at all)?
A job is not a well-defined outcome measure for an educational intervention. That may be what the students are seeking, but they are being unrealistic if they think that any school can guarantee them that.
Ryan Craig, managing director of investment company University Ventures, noted that none of the major employers associated with Udacity will publicly commit to hire or interview nanodegree candidates. Craig pointed to a 2017 report from VentureBeat, which stated that of around 10,000 students who had earned nanodegrees since 2014, around 1,000 had found jobs as a result. “A placement rate of around 10 percent should spell the demise of any last-mile training program,” said Craig.
Craig said the effectiveness of Udacity’s job guarantee was likely very limited for students. “Money-back guarantees don’t address the real guarantee that students are seeking: a job,” said Craig.
Daniel Friedman, co-founder of coding school Thinkful, wrote in January 2016 that Udacity’s guarantee was vaguer and weaker than the guarantees offered by his own company and others such as Bloc and Flatiron School. Such guarantees are common at coding schools, though Friedman noted that some schools have had to drop guarantees because they conflicted with state regulations.
Most jobs requiring CS skills do not require a CS degree #CSEdWeek
I am excited about this new report from Burning Glass and Oracle because it provides evidence for the claim that the vast majority of people who need CS skills will not be CS majors. I will be joining folks from Burning Glass and Alison Derbenwick Miller and others from Oracle Academy in a Twitter chat about the report Wednesday, December 6 at 4 pm PT/7 pm ET. Hope you can join us.
Only 18% of these jobs specifically request a computer science degree
While many employers are looking for workers with strong computer science skills, they are not necessarily looking only at job seekers with computer science degrees. Only 18% of jobs in the categories listed above specifically request a computer science degree. (Most postings do request a bachelor’s degree generally or a degree in another major.) Programming and data analysis jobs are the only categories that have significant demand for computer science degrees. For all other categories, fewer than 5% of postings request a computer science degree.[1] This means that students in a broad range of education programs can enhance their job market value by including computer science in their education pathways.
Source: Rebooting Jobs | Computer Science Skills | Burning Glass Technologies
Where the STEM Jobs Are (and Where They Aren’t): Ignoring health care and end-user programmers
The NY Times linked below attracted a lot of attention because it claims that CS is the only field where demand outstrips supply. There’s a big asterisk on the graph below — the claim that there are more life sciences graduates than jobs “does not include health care occupations.”
This report still underestimates the demand for CS in industry. Here at Georgia Tech (and at many other schools, as I read Generation CS), a huge part of our undergraduate course load comes from students who are not majoring in CS, but they expect to use CS in their non-software-development jobs.
“There is a huge divide between the computing technology roles and the traditional sciences,” said Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist. At LinkedIn, researchers identified the skills most in demand. The top 10 last year were all computer skills, including expertise in cloud computing, data mining and statistical analysis, and writing smartphone applications. In a recent analysis, Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, focused on the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment forecasts in STEM categories. In the decade ending in 2024, 73 percent of STEM job growth will be in computer occupations, but only 3 percent will be in the physical sciences and 3 percent in the life sciences. A working grasp of the principles of science and math should be essential knowledge for all Americans, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, an expert on science education and policy. But he believes that STEM advocates, often executives and lobbyists for technology companies, do a disservice when they raise the alarm that America is facing a worrying shortfall of STEM workers, based on shortages in a relative handful of fast-growing fields like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and computer security.
Personality Tests Are Fun But Don’t Capture Who You Really Are and Should Not Be Part of Hiring
Annie Murphy Paul has been trying to convince people for years now that personality tests don’t really work — they’re not valid, they’re not reliable, and it’s not clear what they’re measuring. This issue is important because the Tech industry still believes in tests like these when hiring. (Or so I hear — as a professor, I only know the hiring process from student stories.) They introduce significant bias into hiring. How do we get rid of them?
Twelve years ago, I tried to drive a stake into the heart of the personality-testing industry. Personality tests are neither valid nor reliable, I argued, and we should stop using them — especially for making decisions that affect the course of people’s lives, like workplace hiring and promotion.
But if I thought that my book, The Cult of Personality Testing, would lead to change in the world, I was keenly mistaken. Personality tests appear to be more popular than ever. I say “appear” because — today as when I wrote the book — verifiable numbers on the use of such tests are hard to come by.Personality testing is an industry the way astrology or dream analysis is an industry: slippery, often underground, hard to monitor or measure. There are the personality tests administered to job applicants “to determine if you’re a good fit for the company”; there are the personality tests imposed on people who are already employed, “in order to facilitate teamwork”; there are the personality tests we take voluntarily, in career counseling offices and on self-improvement retreats and in the back pages of magazines (or, increasingly, online).
Source: Personality Tests Are Fun But Don’t Capture Who You Really Are : Shots – Health News : NPR
The Problems with Coding Bootcamps: Allure with little Payoff
Audrey Watters weighs in below on why Coding Bootcamps are failing. She argues that bootcamps aren’t filling a real need, that there really isn’t a huge untapped need for coding skills.
Kyle Thayer and Amy Ko just published an article at ICER 2017 about their analyses of bootcamps. Kyle has a nice summary as a Medium post (see link here), but I recommend reading the actual ICER paper, too. Kyle’s summary is balanced about the strengths and weaknesses of coding bootcamps, while I think the results in the ICER paper are much more critical. This one quote, about the nine months (!) following graduation, was particularly compelling for me, “I pretty much devoted my time to [my bootcamp’s] prescribed job hunting methods, which means financially, I have no money. [. . . ] And that [sacrifice] reflects on my family because now we’re low on funds [. . . ] and now instead of selling our house and buying a house, we’re selling our house to pay the debt that we’re in and then go rent until I can find a job.”
Kyle’s visualization of the paths of his 26 interviewees is rich with detail, but can be confusing. Here’s a slice of three of them.
What I didn’t get at first is that the gray area to the right is planned (or even imagined). So P18, above, has already had one partial bootcamp (half-moon), one complete bootcamp, and still doesn’t have the desired job (the star in the upper right hand corner). Of his 26 interviewees, only three have their desired job in the software industry. Several have less than desirable jobs (including one that has an unrelated job and gave up). Nine of the 26 had already dropped out of a bootcamp.
When I read Kyle and Amy’s study about the struggle and pain that the bootcamp attendees go through, including difficulties finding jobs beyond what was expected, and then read Audrey’s piece suggesting that there might not be as many jobs available as people think, I wonder what is the allure of bootcamps. Why go through all of that when there isn’t a guaranteed (or even likely?) payoff?
Within the past week, two well-known and well-established coding bootcamps have announced they’ll be closing their doors: Dev Bootcamp, owned by Kaplan Inc., and The Iron Yard, owned by the Apollo Education Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix). Two closures might not make a trend… yet. But some industry observers have suggested we might see more “consolidation” in the coming months.
It appears that there are simply more coding bootcamps – almost 100 across the US and Canada – than there are students looking to learn to code. (That is to say, there are more coding bootcamps than there are people looking to pay, on average, $11,000 for 12 weeks of intensive training in a programming language or framework).
All this runs counter, of course, to the pervasive belief in a “skills gap” – that there aren’t enough qualified programmers to fill all the programming jobs out there, and that as such, folks looking for work should jump at the chance to pay for tuition at a bootcamp. Code.org and other industry groups have suggested that there are currently some 500,000 unfilled computing jobs, for example. But that number is more invention than reality, a statistic used to further a particular narrative about the failure of schools to offer adequate technical training. That 500,000 figure, incidentally, comes from a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection about the number of computing and IT jobs that will added to the US economy by 2024, not the number of jobs that are available – filled or unfilled – today.
Perhaps instead of “everyone should learn to code,” we should push for everyone to learn how to read the BLS jobs report.
There isn’t really much evidence of a “skills gap” – there’s been no substantive growth in wages, for example, that one would expect if there was a shortage in the supply of qualified workers.
Tech jobs rise, but ‘silicon’ vision a stretch: The world beyond just computing
The world is about more than computing. It’s easy for those of us who live and work in CS to see it as CS-centric. I work in a section of Atlanta that is bursting with high-tech startups. I found this article compelling — not because it threw cold water on the vision of Atlanta as a “Silicon Valley East,” but because it painted a picture of how much more diverse the economy in Atlanta really is.
In reality, metro Atlanta’s relationship with the tech sector is, well, complicated.
Georgia boasts about 280,000 tech jobs, according to Technology Association of Georgia president and chief executive officer Tino Mantella — the great majority of them in metro Atlanta. But information technology jobs only make up about 3.5 percent of the area’s labor market, down from a peak of 4.7 percent in the 1990s, federal Bureau of Labor data shows.
And California, home to the real Silicon Valley, dominates venture capital investing — the lifeblood of tech startups — with 56 percent of spending compared to the 1 percent in Georgia, Mantella said.
via Tech jobs rise, but ‘silicon’ vision a stretch | www.ajc.com.
UToronto TA’s and graduate student instructors on strike: Pay and teaching are inversely correlated in Universities today
The graduate student Teaching Assistants and Instructors at the University of Toronto are on strike. I wouldn’t normally be aware about graduate student labor disputes in other countries, but UToronto has an active CS Education research group and at least one (very) active CS Ed PhD student, Elizabeth Patitsas who was in the ICER Doctoral Consortium last year. The website on the strike (see link below and here) is interesting in describing the situation for Canadian PhD students, both what’s different than in the US (Toronto PhD students pay tuition — it isn’t waived for them) and what’s similar. I’ll bet that the fact 3.5% of the university budget pays for 65% of the teaching is just as true in the US. The Chronicle had an article recently titled Teach or Perish (see link here) with this claim (that I’m quite certain is true where I’m at, success is measured in terms of salary): “While teaching undergraduates is, normally, a large part of a professor’s job, success in our field is correlated with a professor’s ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.”
Graduate students in PhD programs continue to pay full tuition – almost $8,000 – even when they are not enrolled in courses. In return, graduate students receive the ‘privilege’ of underpaid work for the University, a library card, and meetings with supervisors. All comparable universities in North America offer post-residency fees or tuition wavers for graduate students finished with course work. The university rejected our proposals for similar provisions.
CUPE 3902 membership has been without a permanent contract for more than eight months, despite carrying out more than 65% of the teaching across the three campuses at the University of Toronto.
The university allocates a mere 3.5% of its $1.9 billion budget to CUPE 3902 workers, the vast majority of which comes from tuition and taxes.
via We Are UofT.
The dark at the end of the funnel: The pipeline in computing education leads to a sewage plant
Recommended blog post from Neil Brown, in response to comments from Mark Zuckerberg that the problem with getting more women into computing is solved by getting computing education earlier. It’s not. It used to be that we’d say, “Women aren’t going into computing because they don’t know what it is.” Now we’d say, “Women aren’t going into computing because they know exactly what it’s like. Smart women.”
However, this is not solely an issue with the education system though that would be a familiar narrative — work force not as we would like it? Must be the fault of schools and universities. The pipeline or funnel doesn’t just need filling by shoving lots of 5 year old girls in one end and waiting for the hordes of female developers to swim out of the other end into an idyllic tech industry pool. Zuckerberg mentions that the lack of women in the industry forms a vicious cycle. This is not a problem at the education end of the funnel.
As this Fortune article describes, the industry is not welcoming to women. The Anita Borg Institute found that women’s quit rates were double those of men. Not to mention issues like maternity leave. The pool at the end of the pipeline is leaking, and for good reason. So the vicious cycle is not simply an accident of history; the women that are in the industry tend to leave. There are several reasons for this, some of which are identity and culture in the industry.
Seeking study participants: What should BS in CS graduates know about software development?
Katrin was in our ICER DC this last August. She is trying to measure the expectations that software companies and universities have on BS in CS graduates. She has a survey on software development and the software development process. She asked me to share this message:
Let’s do the math: Does it make sense to fill a pipeline of CS workers from 3rd grade?
According to the article linked below, there is a large effort to fill STEM worker jobs in Northern Virginia by getting kids interested in STEM (including computing) from 3rd grade on. The evidence for this need is that there will be 50K new jobs in the region between 2013 and 2018.
The third graders are 8 years old. If they can be effective STEM workers right out of high school, there’s another 10 years to wait before they can enter the workforce — 2024. If they need undergrad, 2028. If they need advanced degrees, early 2030’s. Is it even possible to predict workforce needs out over a decade?
Now, let’s consider the cost of keeping that pipeline going, just in terms of CS. Even in Northern Virginia, only about 12% of high schools offer CS today. So, we need a fourfold increase in CS teachers — but that’s just high school. The article says that we want these kids supported in CS from 3rd grade on. Most middle schools have no CS teachers. Few elementary schools do. We’re going to have to hire and train a LOT of teachers to fulfill that promise.
Making a jobs argument for teaching 3rd graders CS doesn’t make sense.
The demand is only projected to grow greater. The Washington area is poised to add 50,000 net new STEM jobs between 2013 and 2018, according to projections by Stephen S. Fuller, the director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. And Fuller said that STEM jobs are crucial in that they typically pay about twice as much as the average job in the Washington area and they generate significantly more economic value.
It is against this backdrop that SySTEMic Solutions is working to build a pipeline of STEM workers for the state of Virginia, starting with elementary school children and working to keep them consistently interested in the subject matter until they finish school and enter the workforce.
Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding: But mostly a video game (Elliot Soloway)
Elliot gets it right in his NYtimes quote from this last weekend. Young kids who code are probably not learning much computer science that might lead to future jobs. Rather, they’re “programming” as if it’s a video game. That’s not at all bad, but it makes less believable the argument that we need coding in skills to improve the future labor force.
The spread of coding instruction, while still nascent, is “unprecedented — there’s never been a move this fast in education,” said Elliot Soloway, a professor of education and computer science at the University of Michigan. He sees it as very positive, potentially inspiring students to develop a new passion, perhaps the way that teaching frog dissection may inspire future surgeons and biologists.
But the momentum for early coding comes with caveats, too. It is not clear that teaching basic computer science in grade school will beget future jobs or foster broader creativity and logical thinking, as some champions of the movement are projecting. And particularly for younger children, Dr. Soloway said, the activity is more like a video game — better than simulated gunplay, but not likely to impart actual programming skills.
via Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding – NYTimes.com.
New ACM Report on the Need for CS in K-12
ACM has just released a report arguing for the need for computer science in K-12 schools. They are very strongly making the jobs argument. The appendix to the report details state-by-state what jobs are available in computing, the salaries being paid for those jobs, and how many computing graduates (including how many AP CS exams vs other AP exams were taken in 2013) in that state.
The report Rebooting the Pathway to Success: Preparing Students for Computing Workforce Needs in the United States calls on education and business leaders and public policy officials in every state to take immediate action aimed at filling the pipeline of qualified students pursuing computing and related degrees, and to prepare them for the 21st century workforce. The report provides recommendations to help these leaders join together to create a comprehensive plan that addresses K-12 computer science education and that aligns state policy, programs, and resources to implement these efforts.
Shortage in the IT U.S. labor market? Or just a lack of graduates?
Is the shortage of STEM graduates a myth, as IEEE has been arguing recently? Is the case for IT different than the case for STEM overall?
I found the analysis linked below interesting. Most IT workers do not have an IT-related degree. People with CS degrees are getting snapped up. The suggestion is that there’s not a shortage of IT workers, because IT workers are drawn from many disciplines. There may be a shortage of IT workers who have IT training.
IT workers, who make up 59 percent of the entire STEM workforce, are predominantly drawn from fields outside of computer science and mathematics, if they have a college degree at all. Among the IT workforce, 36 percent do not have a four-year college degree; of those who do, only 38 percent have a computer science or math degree, and more than a third (36 percent) do not have a science or technology degree of any kind. Overall, less than a quarter (24 percent) of the IT workforce has at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science or math. Of the total IT workforce, two-thirds to three-quarters do not have a technology degree of any type (only 11 percent have an associate degree in any field).4
Although computer science graduates are only one segment of the overall IT workforce, at 24 percent, they are the largest segment by degree (as shown in Figure F, they are 46 percent of college graduates entering the IT workforce, while nearly a third of graduates entering IT do not have a STEM degree). The trend in computer scientist supply is important as a source of trained graduates for IT employers, particularly for the higher-skilled positions and industries, but it is clear that the IT workforce actually draws from a pool of graduates with a broad range of degrees.
Hiring Lecturers (face-to-face and online) at Georgia Tech
The College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia invites applications for full-time, non-tenure-track faculty positions at the rank of Instructor or Lecturer (based on experience) to start in May 2014. Primary responsibilities are to provide high quality classroom teaching and service to the department. In addition, the College is specifically looking for candidates interested in performing as Instructor of Record for large online master’s degree courses with prerecorded video lecture content. Applicants must have a minimum of a Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field. This position is renewable annually based on funding and the needs of the College. This is a 9 month contract although summer teaching is typically available.
Applications should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, teaching statement, material relevant to evaluating the applicant’s teaching abilities, and the names of at least three references. These documents should be emailed to recruiting@cc.gatech.edu with “Lecturer Vacancy” in the subject line. Also, candidates are requested to ask references to send their letters directly to the search committee via electronic mail to recruiting@cc.gatech.edu and ask them to put your name in the subject line. For full consideration, interested individuals are asked to apply by April 15, 2014. However, posting will remain open until position(s) are filled.
Duties, Responsibilities and Assignments
The overall responsibility of the lecturers and instructors at the College of Computing is to teach such Computer Science classes as are assigned to them, usually the large first and second year classes. The specific duties involved in teaching such a class are:
1. Preparing and maintaining a class syllabus and schedule.
2. Preparing and delivering materials for each of the scheduled meeting times of the class. For Online courses monitor course progress and activity and respond appropriately to any problems.
3. Holding regularly scheduled office hours to assist students who are having any difficulty with course materials.
4. If Teaching Assistants (TAs) are required for the class,
- a. Making the selection of TAs to hire for the class
- b. Ensuring that each TA is trained with respect to their legal obligations to the students and to the technical content of the class.
- c. Ensuring appropriate conduct of the TAs.
5. Supervising the development of, and approving the content of, all assignments given to the students in the class.
6. Supervising the development of, and approving the content of, all evaluation materials given to the students in the class.
7. Supervising and ensuring the correctness and fairness of all grading activities in the class.
8. Computing and delivering to the Registrar’s Office mid-term and final grades for the class.
9. Assisting in reviews of their fellow lecturers on a regular basis.
10. Participating in committees and other administrative activities as required by the administration.
Computer Manpower in Higher Education — Is There a Crisis? Worse than you might think
A slightly different pattern for me: Check out the quote first, and I’ll add comments after.
Let us consider the conundrum facing the computer field in higher education first. It is experiencing an exponentially increasing demand for its product with an inelastic labor supply. How has it reacted? NSF has made a survey of the responses of engineering departments, including computer science departments in schools of engineering, to the increasing demand for undergraduate education in engineering. There is a consistent pattern in their responses and the results can be applied without exception to the computer field whether the departments are located in engineering schools or elsewhere. 80% of the universities are responding by increasing teaching loads, 50% by decreasing course offerings and concentrating their available faculty on larger but fewer courses, and 66% are using more graduate-student teaching assistants or part-time faculty. 35% report reduced research opportunities for faculty as a result. In brief, they are using a combination of rational management measures to adjust as well as they can to the severe manpower constraints under which they must operate. However, these measures make the universities’ environments less attractive for employment and are exactly counterproductive to their need to maintain and expand their labor supply. They are also counterproductive to producing more new faculty since the image graduate students get of academic careers is one of harassment, frustration, and too few rewards. The universities are truly being choked by demand for their own product and have a formidable people-flow problem, analogous to but much more difficult to address than the cash-flow problem which often afflicts rapidly growing businesses. There are no manpower banks which can provide credit.
This quote was presented by Eric Roberts in his keynote earlier this month at the NSF-sponsored Future Computing Education Research Summit (well organized by Steve Cooper). The highlight is my addition, because I was struck by the specificity of the description. I find the description believable, and it captures the problems of CS higher-education today, especially in the face of rising enrollments in CS classes (discussed by Eric Roberts here and by Ed Lazowka and Dave Patterson here).
What makes this analysis scarier is that the paper quoted was published in 1982. Back in the 1980’s, the state Universities had the mandate and the budget to grow to meet the demand. They didn’t always have the CS PhD graduates that they needed, so some Math and EE PhDs became CS faculty. Today, though, the state Universities are under severe budget constraints. How will we meet the demand in enrollment? In the 1980’s, some CS programs met the demand by raising the bar for entering the CS major, which ended up make CS more white and male (because only the more privileged students were able to stay above the bar). Will our solutions lead to less diversity in CS? Will we lose more faculty to industry, and replace them with MOOCs?
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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