Over in Facebook's Computer Science Educators group there was an article posted on CS grads going back for a "panic" master's degree since the job market isn't terrific. Now, going for more education, at least for those who can afford it has been a tried and true practice in weaker job markets. If you look at my former students with Masters degrees you'll certainly notice clusters around bad times in tech hiring.

What this post is about though, is one of the comments. On of my CS Ed brethren commented on how companies are looking for more mid-level experience and abilities out of college and not entry level.

Now, I've long been one who's felt that we can do a better job preparing out students for industry from undergraduate CS programs. I don't want undergrad programs to become code schools - they still need to teach real CS - enough algorithms, data structure,s theory and all but there are some easy changes.

• Use industry standard tools when appropriate - version control for example.
• Teach things like unit testing.
• Make sure students complete some large group projects, preferably prior to their senior year.
• Use techniques like code review.

These and other techniques and tools can easily be integrated into a CS sequence without removing any of the good stuff.

That said, I don't think we should be bowing to industry if they demand more mid-level ready college graduates.

Let's look at what industry had been demanding from their college grads over the past twenty years. Even if we just limit our view to the "good times" when "everyone was hiring" the typical entry level hire had a CS degree along with one or two internships. How much more can undergrad institutions actually do?

Even back then, the Googles of the world largely recruited from "elite" institutions and when they said "entry level" they really meant that you went to Carnegie Mellon or MIT, taught yourself all the stuff from the unwritten curriculum, and had a couple of killer internships.

In any event, once you got a job, you then might get some amount of ramp up - an in company bootcamp if the company was large enough or it might just be a helpful co-worker at a smaller company. Now, those company bootcamps also seem to be disappearing or at least becoming shorter and shorter.

Companies deciding they want more 'mid-level' ready new hires is just the next step in companies abandoning any responsibility to the tech ecosystem in terms of job preparation.

I'm not surprised.

About ten years ago I was speaking with a friend who was the CTO of what I guess I'll call a small large company. Multiple offices, multiple cities, but nothing like Meta or Microsoft in terms of number of employees. We were talking about internships. I asked him what his rate of return offers was and he gave me a number that I thought was low. He commented that he just couldn't hire that many but felt it was the companies responsibility to the tech ecosystem to have a robust internship program where college students could gain valuable experience and get paid a good summer salary.

Since then, I've spoken to a number of people in the industry but unfortunately, only a few understand that having an education, robust, internship program should be a companies responsibility not only for hiring their own employees but also to help bolster the tech workforce in general. A few got it, a few talked the talk as though they got it but their actions, or rather their company's actions spoke otherwise and to far too many, the idea of having an internship program as anything other than a direct recruiting tool had never crossed their minds.

Of course, in the most recent tech crunch, internships dried up. Never mind that companies like Google weren't losing money, they were only making less than before - one of the first things cut was this important piece of the tech education pipeline accompanied by a request for 'better prepared more mid-level ready' candidates.

All this made me think back to when I got out of college. We didn't have a tech scene per se, but companies expected college grads to be raw. They trained them regardless of the job. I forget how long my training program at Goldman Sachs was but it was long. It covered the business side and the tech side. They taught the languages we were expected to use - generally C or Cobol and the platforms we were going to work on. Once we were in our groups, if we needed more training, we got it. I ended up doing Windows programming so my manager made sure I had whatever I needed to get up to speed.

Other companies had even longer and more thorough programs. Many also had rotational programs - you got your training then you did rotations - multiple weeks or months even with different groups to find the best fit.

Over the years, companies have abdicated more and more responsibility for employee training and society has decided that responsibility falls on the schools - both K12 and higher ed.

This is neither sustainable nor healthy which is why I feel push back against the "mid-level ready" employee right out of college is both appropriate and needed. Unfortunately corporate America holds a lot of influence so I'm not sure how effective any push back will be. Those grads will still need jobs and who's more likely to blink first - the educators or the corporate execs?