One would hope that IT people learn some CS, because they are often overmatched (in terms of technical knowledge) against threats. When business majors in IT departments try to defend computers and networks against those trying to crack them, it is not surprising that they often lose.
Regarding an “applications strategy”, I would say that you need to apply to more schools when you are applying to top schools. Maybe 10 would be a good number, with at least 2 safeties.
Regarding programs whose grads consistently do well, you went to find a program where there is good data to support what their grads are doing, not just anecdotes. The more details they disclose, the better. Here is one list. http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/12/25-college-diplomas-with-the-highest-pay/
The above link is worthless in deciding which school to apply to.
I think that it is helpful to know which schools have good average salaries at graduation. Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Penn, and Cornell all do very well for CS grads. Why is that worthless? They may be reaches, but they could be reachable.
The referenced list does not do any comprehensive listing of CS salaries. Salaries may also be misleading in that article because they state one for NY nursing grads- those students likely go for jobs in the extremely expensive city and of course need more money for the same standard of living. Salaries’ worth depend on the local cost of living. Living in the expensive west coast tech cities versus other places for example. Money is not the only consideration. Lifestyle matters as well.
It would be much more useful to have lists of where grads at big name tech companies recruit- specifically in CS jobs. However, grads come from all over the world at the big names. Sometimes looking at where a schools grads go is dependent on where students choose to live, especially the more average students.
The online website GeekWire is an interesting source of tech news.
btw- it does matter where one attends college. Different schools teach different amounts of material in a given course. First learned this decades ago when a friend was teaching at a lesser U and stated she was supposed to cover less material in a semester than she had TA’d in a quarter course at a much better U. I suspect that San Jose State has a CS major that is in line with local employers. And- not all CS jobs are the same, even if it is software development/engineering (different companies use different titles for the same type of work). The best will get hired for the more challenging roles within a large company.
San Jose State is not a special case. The pattern of hiring many employees who attended local, not top ranked colleges, is quite common at other desired companies, particularly with nearby larger publics where there are many CS majors. For example the colleges with the most alumni on LinkedIn at Microsoft’s Dallas office that have jobs with “engineer” in their title are below. I expect Microsoft’s Dallas office recruits at these colleges, with good opportunities for internships, good networking, special connections, etc.
- University of Texas: Arlington
- University of North Texas
- University of Texas: Dallas
- Texas A&M
- University of Texas: Austin
The list for the main campus in Washington is:
- University of Washington
- Bellevue College (located in Washington)
- Washington State
- UIUC
- Western Washington University
I’m sure Microsoft recruits at many other colleges as well, including top ranked ones, but the point is they also recruit and hire many from lower ranked colleges. One can expect Google, Apple, Microsoft, and similar Silicon Valley big names to attend a San Jose State or UC Davis career fair, just as a Stanford career fair. If you contact a particular college, they may send you a list of companies that attend recent career fairs as they usually post them on the website, but not publicly.
Has this been discussed yet? Is there a relationship between the quality of a school’s UG CS program and that of the same school’s CS department (its PhD program) as a whole?
The post above seems to imply that, for UG programs in CS, the ranking of the colleges (as “decided” by US News and Report, for example) does not correlate very well with that of UG program – at least in the eyes of these large companies. Also, the location (it’s proximity to the employer) matters.
When the dinosaurs still roamed the world and the CS career was not highly sought after, it was rumored that the graduates from Arizona State University could have a higher chance to be recruited by Intel - because Intel had a site there. The importance of a college’s proximity to the employer was important even then.
Hey, these large companies would likely even recruit (mostly hire the workers who are employees of another second-tier company who got the contracted projects from such a tier-one company?) students not graduated from US colleges via the H1B programs.
It is well known that Bill Gate and several other business leaders in Silicon Vally are very vocal about having more H1B quota in order to increase US business’s competitiveness. I recently learned that many H1B holders do not have to be graduated from a US college. (They need to suffer through the lottery system in order to get ones but many of their corporate sponsors in essence “cheat” the system to various degree.) It is also true that some good programmers have never set their foot on the US soil.
I have met someone in Silicon Valley who firmly believes that many CSUs like San Jose State UG programs are better than many UCs (except the top two UCs) because their programs are more “practical” (know what the employers in SV want) and not too academic/out-of-touch. Not sure if his point of view is biased.
Since when the word “academic” becomes a dirty word to designate an education institute! I am too old to know this, I guess.
Which UC that has CS program not practical? It’s not really a question because by the very nature of CS, CS has to be practical because you have to turn program assignment in every week or longer for larger project.
I don’t know of non-practical UCs. My son has mentioned that a friend at Caltech says the CS classes there are less practical than expected, with more math and fewer full programs than expected based on dual-enrollment CS classes taken during high school. (Still really difficult, though.)
I know that CS isn’t about learning more languages, but until our local CC recently remodeled their courses to better transfer to UCs, their course list was more focused on classes on Java, C, C++, assembly, Matlab, and iPhone apps. The last couple were only CSU transferable, not UC.
This does appear to be true if you compare the number of courses or credits of frosh/soph CS courses that a student would take at each school to be prepared for junior/senior CS courses. However, a student at a school that uses more credits to teach the same material (i.e. “easier”) could just take more credits per semester than s/he would at a school that packs more material in the given amount of credits.
Actually, there are two distinct modes of H-1B employment.
The direct hire companies (Microsoft, Google, etc. that complain about the lack of visas) pay well, and mostly go for those with MS or PhD degrees from US universities. The low end outsourcing companies, on the other hand, are the ones taking up most of the H-1B visas.
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
When my son was applying to CMU they had a presentation at the Accepted Students weekend at the School of Computer Science that listed everywhere students had gone and a range of salary. At the time the tippy top salaries went to those who went to Wall Street, and the lowest went to a kid who wanted to return to his small town in Idaho where his only job opportunity was teaching high school math. They also listed how many went to the various bigger companies. It wasn’t one student at Google - there were lots of them. My son got recommended for an internship at Google because a friend who was already at Google suggested they interview him and he made it through the interview process. There’s no question you can get to - name your favorite company here - from other colleges. It’s just harder. They don’t put all that information up on line, presumably for privacy concerns, but you can see where recent grads have gone by looking at the links here: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2014-survey/scs.html
Talk about Google. My kid recently received an interview request without even applied. She wondered if it’s a hoax. I told her to ignore it until she gets another email.
My son toured CMU because of a hacking competition award, and they told the group that they’d recently had a graduate in cybersecurity who got a starting salary of $200K at a company in San Francisco, and “he wasn’t really even that good.” This might have been a grad student. Ages blend together for cybersecurity people; my son knows two kids who were/are basically working on DARPA cybersecurity and video person identification contracts in high school.
@DrGoogle, it should be fairly easy to figure out if the email is a hoax.
DrGoogle, That can happen. My older son got contacted last year by Google out of the blue . A recruiter found him on LinkedIn. But as Ynotgo says, should be easy enough to figure out if it is legit or not. In son’s case, it was definitely a legitimate recruiter that he had contact with.
She said they mis capitalized words that should be capitalized. But I didn’t see the email. How can she tell if it’s a hoax? But it doesnt matter, she is not ready. She wants to do it later.
Must be a hoax. Engineers always Capitalize words that should Not Be. 
It was not engineer, it was human resource and that’s the problem. If she ignores them, do you think they contact her again. It could have gone to her spam.
Here is a another list of colleges with the highest paid CS grads from college factual.