Dear College Grads, Here's Why I Won't Hire You

A new batch of college graduates hits the job market in a month, and one potential boss has a particularly depressing message for them. Even though his "cool, rapidly growing company in the digital field" needs employees, Kirk McDonald of PubMatic says today's grads aren't up to snuff. "The problem is that the right skills are very hard to find," writes McDonald in the Wall Street Journal. "And I'm sorry to say it, dear graduates, but you probably don't have them." The must-have skill? Computer programming.

He doesn't blame the students, who were educated in a system that values athletics more than science. But he does have some tangible advice for them: Learn the basics of computer code this summer, and, yes, that applies even to those who aren't in the IT field. "Even if your dream job is in marketing or sales or another department seemingly unrelated to programming, I'm not going to hire you unless you can at least understand the basic way my company works," writes McDonald. "And I'm not alone." Click for his full column, which talks about APIs and Python ... and if you don't know what those are, well, you know what to do next. (More computer programming stories.)