Scary thoughts
We've been doing a lot of phone interviewing at work lately to fill a couple positions. Granted, Connecticut isn't exactly a mecca of high tech and most CS grads flee for their lives as soon as they graduate. Even knowing that, the candidate pool still appears depressingly dismal. What really strikes me is that the worst candidates seem to be the ones with a Master's degree in Computer Science. I assume most of these are course-work only Master's. I really would like to believe that someone could not possibly complete a thesis (which in CS is usually a programming project, rather than a research paper) and not be able to answer some very simple questions pertaining to their chosen field of work.
Looking through the recent resumes two things stand out:
1. More than half of the candidates have a Master's in Computer Science.
2. Less than half (out of those only one had a Master's) did well enough in a phone screen to progress to an in-person interview.
The obvious possible conclusions are:
1. A Master's in CS dumbs a person down.
--- or ---
2. The kind of person who chooses to pursue a Master's degree is not the kind of person we'd like to hire.
The second choice leads to a conclusion that people who are not exactly the greatest in their field will move on to pursue higher degrees in order to showcase better qualifications on their resumes. Pretty much every single person we interviewed with a Master's would barely qualify for a junior-level position. It's really stunning how little interest these candidates appear to have in a field they chose to pursue graduate work in.
And here I am about to become one of them. Yikes. Pray for my brain.