[ajaxian]

To my mind this is the key quote:

"If you have a low skilled job there is a higher chance of your job being outsourced but if you are a software developer developing complex software you are very much in demand."

The fact is that most new CS graduates are "low skilled" as real-world, industrial programmers. A CS education can realistically only provide them a grounding in the core theory of the field; it can't, and shouldn't, be teaching them how to work within the context of massive, old, crufty programs that are the norm in the real world. This is the responsibility of employers, and IMO when employers complain about a lack of "good" CS graduates it just shows that they have abdicated their responsibility to train their employers in their own industry niche and somehow expect cheap programmers who are subject matter experts with years of experience in a dozen hyper-specific tools to drop from the sky.

But of course the outsourcing shops are perfectly happy to peddle the lie that their own people are programming geniuses who are also subject matter experts--and look at all the money you'll save! The IT managers get suckered into hiring boatloads of consultants or sending everything offshore, their own good employees, if they had any to begin with, get fired or jump ship, and the cycle accelerates.

Sure I'm cynical, but I've seen it happen often enough, and heard the same from friends who've experienced the same, to justify it.

[ig1]

I disagree, I've been at a company where we had ~1500-2000 applications for graduate developer roles, so we had access to a substantial percentage of CS graduates. About 20% got through CV screening (which is basically have anything on your CV to show you're competent - good uni, an internship, challenging uni projects, open source projects, etc).

Of that 20% most of them failed to be able to handle fairly basic CS questions (implement a linked list, describe how hash-maps work, reverse a string, basic algorithm questions, fizzbuzz, basic language questions on a language the candidate claimed to know). About 5% were able to pass this stage, and of that 5% we made offers to most of them.

We weren't expecting people with a deep grounding in practical programming, we were expecting a decent knowledge of CS and some basic ability to actually produce code. There just aren't enough competent CS graduates on the market.