learning from job applications

Another New Year’s esque reflection. Last New Year’s I was thinking instead about the potential coursework and things I could be or wanted to be learning.

This year I have started leaning towards filling gaps in knowledge. And surprisingly the main way of doing that was looking through job applications in the tech industry. CS curriculums are designed from both a bottom-up and top-down approach, but funnily enough, there are some concepts at the bottom and some software at the top that aren’t taught in the university context. That is where job applications come in.

stuff i’ve found

“ITSM”: “Telephony”: “Rack Operations” “Cisco” “Networking”1 “Service Desk Tiers” “ERP” “TS/SCI”

The takeaway here is to show how as a CS student you don’t study the “basic” installation of machines and computers as a physical system nor do you study the most common deployed software systems. Basically a CS degree doesn’t prep you for an “IT” or a “sysadmin” role which makes sense as most come out as software developers.


  1. Networking is interesting here because it does the mean the set-up of internet physically, but also in the cloud provider sense. The cloud provider sense is interesting because you are supposed to use it like a “black box”, but to use most cloud providers “effectively” you usually have to understand the underlying technology they use to provide service like “openstack”. ↩