My location is in the United States.
I am a senior software engineer with a Computer Science degree, and I am typically responsible for training new or junior-level staff. With recent companies I have worked for, I have not been as involved in the hiring process of technical staff. At each company, the hiring committee sent a new hire, who was a math major, to my team for software development positions, and I found both employees to be very underqualified or fully unqualified. In one case, the employee earned their math degree a very long time ago; in the second case, the new employee was a recent graduate. In both cases, I found that the employees were lacking knowledge of basic skills, such as:
- object-oriented methodology and programming
- software development life cycle
- change management
- database normalization, etc.
I was surprised to notice this phenomenon, when for software development positions, there is an emphasis on STEM-related degrees. I have worked with many engineering majors throughout my career, and a number of them have become quite successful programmers.
With the previous company, I worked with the hiring committee to change their interview questions, and the quality of new hires improved. For the current company, I am in the process of doing the same.
I checked the course requirements for a Math Major at my alma mater, and they had 4 tracks for specialization. 3 of the 4 tracks had no required or suggested computer science courses. 1 specialization listed 2 introductory computer science courses as optional.
From this, I think the criteria for software development candidates should shift to “STE” (not Math) degrees or “computer science related fields.”
Question: Do others find a similar phenomena occurring for Math majors in Software Developer positions? Historically, like in the 1980s, a Math major seemed sufficient for a development job, but perhaps times have changed. Frankly, I have a preference for hiring computer science/engineering majors. If a candidate is a non-COSC/Eng major, then they need to prove themselves by passing rigorous interview questions. Granted, the COSC/Eng majors should pass the same set of questions. I had tended to assume that Math majors came with a certain level of computer science-related knowledge, but apparently this seems to not be the case.
Please note that I am finding similar dynamics with candidates that have pure “Data Science” degrees (not Computer Science degrees with Data Science tracks).