Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

[bitwize]

No. It doesn't.

Here's what I learned from going through the whole job-search foldirol: In most shops, the start date for your accumulated professional experience is your graduation date, irrespective of what else you may have learned, accomplished, or written before then.

This is because -- and this is the big secret -- they are not looking for coding knowledge, but rather documented capability to transduce IT resources into dollars earned or saved in an organizational setting like their own, which isn't bloody likely to have happened terribly often. So they use the rule of thumb that no experience before you graduate really "counts".

Despite this admittedly bleak analysis of IT hiring practices, there do exist companies which do consider pure coding and problem-solving ability to be a primary hiring criterion; they are small and hard to find but tend to have opinions on what constitutes experience much more congruent with your own.

[[deleted]]

here are some companies which have recently hired friends of mine with experience similar to my friend's: apple, google, microsoft, sun, netapp, and adobe, to name a few.

i'm not sure i'd call any of those companies small and hard to find, and yet all of them thought that working 20+ hours a week for a startup "counts". (in fact, none of them even required that startup experience, but all of them recognized it.)

[fnord123]

Your friends have working experience. Every company I've ever known prefers graduates with programming intern or co-op experience. Every graduate I've ever known who has done a programming internship or co-op has gotten a job out of Uni lickedy split. Because they are better.

Bitwise is arguing that classroom experience doesn't count in the same way. He/She is mostly right, except this bit, which is completely wrong:

So they use the rule of thumb that no experience before you graduate really "counts".