Oyster (www.oysterbooks.com) is hiring in NYC. Our goal is to put an amazing library of books at your fingertips for just a few dollars a month. We're looking for a strong backend engineer with Python and Django experience to help us fulfill that mission.
At Oyster you'll be part of our early team (we're <10 people) and will work with the some of the smartest, most driven people you'll find anywhere. The problems we're working on range from e-commerce, to recommender systems, to location tracking across arbitrary html documents.
We're backed by awesome investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Chris Dixon, and Sam Altman.
Was at the NYC startup weekend and saw their pitch and it was by far the best one. Really great example of using straightforward technology to solve a huge pain point and customer problem.
It's also important to understand how the internship dynamics change as you progress through the four years of college. Getting a paid internship after your freshmen or sophomore year is extremely difficult. Very few large, "name brand" companies include freshman and sophomores in their internship programs. Those that do typically have ratios along the lines of 90% juniors, 10% freshman and sophomores.
The catch is that landing the junior year internship in large part depends on having at least one previous relevant internship. That leaves most freshman and sophomores struggling to find internships at local businesses in their field of interest. Most of the businesses don't have an actual internship program, have no idea what to do with an intern, and don't have the money to pay one even if they wanted to.
This describes the experience of me and 95% of my friends at Duke over the last 4 years. Many of us have awesome, extremely high paying jobs lined up after graduation, but we got those jobs as a more or less direct result of working for free after freshman or sophomore year.
My personal experience:
Freshman summer: part-time job to support myself, took a summer class, did a lot of (free) work for Duke Student Government
Sophomore summer: 3/4 time job as a waiter in a restaurant to support myself. Spent all my free time programming.
Junior summer: awesome internship at Microsoft.
Post-grad: offers from Google and Microsoft, trying to start my own company.
Basically over the past 20 months or so my pay has gone from ~$6/hr part-time, to ~$75 full time. Trust me, I am not 12-13x smarter, more valuable, or more skilled now than 2 years ago. The system is broken.
Although I never had an unpaid internship my ability to land a paying one after junior year was dependent on the projects I worked on in my free time the previous summer. And that is in the tech industry, which is in by far the best shape. The internship situation in other field (as SandBOx mentioned) is much, much worse.
I'm an NCSU student, so I'm in the same area, looking at mostly the same jobs. What I found is that most students just aren't willing to go through the work to find a job. They want the jobs to be posted somewhere online, so they can fire off a resume they spent a couple hours making (if that). I actually managed to nab a development / systems administration internship straight out of high school for a company out of Durham, mainly because I met one of the management at the company and just asked about a position. I spent two years working for that company (paid, part-time during the year, full-time over the summer) and then a summer and a semester doing [paid] research at NCSU. This summer I've got an internship lined up with Google.
You're absolutely right that a lot of it is dependent on finding internships early on, but I don't think its necessarily that companies aren't hiring underclassmen (though MS, Google, etc. likely aren't), but rather that a lot of students aren't willing to go the lengths to _find_ the job. Not all of them are posted online. Go to your local PUG/LUG/*UG/2600 meeting, and ask around. Most people there will be willing to talk about one with you if you seem relatively competent and willing to learn what you don't know. Plus, as you said, doing projects in your spare time is a HUGE plus. A lot of the things I end up talking about in interviews are side projects that I've done.
Though I'll put the disclaimer that this is all only applicable to the tech field. Unfortunately, other fields don't have it as nicely as we do.
A wordpress cache plugin will probably help. I got 25k visits in one day last week on puremango.co.uk which is hosted on a cheap-as-chips dreamhost shared server and AFAIK it didn't blink. Cache FTW.
I appreciate the feedback. There are definitely many people more qualified than me to actually design a curriculum. My argument is more about the approach than the actual content.
Certainly agree about not making you a better dev from day 1. I do think in the long run it will actually make you a better programmer though, particularly for more difficult and complex projects.
I completely agree. When I first learned CSS it was largely through tips and tricks like these, but without any sort of mental model or big picture understanding of what was going on my progress was unimaginably slow. I had to actually read part of the spec and start looking at and modifying stylesheets used on real sites before I became at all comfortable.
When I was learning, I got really quite confused by the intersection of floats, overflow and positioning. Reading the spec and actually understanding all of the rules at the same time, rather than just what I could glean from random hacking and tutorials, was really valuable.
This topic hit home for me because I am graduating this year with a CS degree. As many of you have pointed out, a CS degree doesn't teach you how to program. I think it does give you a base of knowledge that you can then build upon to become a great coder.
I would say that 30% of my programming skill and knowledge comes from what I learned in class, while 70% comes from reading, watching lectures online, having friends critique my code, looking at open source projects, etc. But without that initial, introductory training from my CS department I would never have been in a position to understand those other topics.
Personally I would love to see a community effort to put together a free, open source "bridge the gap" curriculum for new college grads. It would focus mostly on coding best practices, code reviews, the importance of tests, engineering work flows, version control, staging servers, etc. In particular I think it should focus on real-world codebases as opposed to the one-off programs you constantly write in academia. Sure you can learn most of this stuff at your first job, but I think there are a ton of people out there who would love to learn this stuff, but they don't really know what they need to learn or where to start.
While it's in very early development stage, Oregon State University is creating an Open Source certificate program that will address some of these issues. The certification as planned will grant Masters degree level course credits and will be offered online. Course content will include LAMP stack development knowledge, basics of the development tool chain (issue tracking, mailing lists, etc.), release practices, and will require a three month hands on 'internship' working with a FOSS project to gain certification. Oregon State University would work to match make between students and FOSS projects looking to on board new contributors as part of this internship requirement.
At Oyster you'll be part of our early team (we're <10 people) and will work with the some of the smartest, most driven people you'll find anywhere. The problems we're working on range from e-commerce, to recommender systems, to location tracking across arbitrary html documents.
We're backed by awesome investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Chris Dixon, and Sam Altman.
You can email me directly: andrew@oysterbooks.com