I don't think you got the point of what I was saying. I was saying that a minority of students (including CS grads) have ANY marketable skills when they leave college.

System analysts get paid FAR too much for someone with no experience fresh out of school.

While Japanese and German companies tend to build up a good relationship with their workers and try to keep them at the company until retirement

Why do you hate America? Employees are the enemy. The more experience the worker has (especially domain knowledge specific to the company) the more they're going to want to get paid. More pay means less profit. So, fire them and replace them with H1-Bs or much younger workers who don't have families to feed or a mortgage to pay for, and you save a ton. Never mind that their work product is total shit, nobody cares about that. After all, corporate profits are far more important than any concern the employee might have.

which means the average worker is more skilled and productive and needs less management.

Problems with that:

1) Needing less management means fewer managers. Hey, that second summer cottage isn't going to buy itself, managers need jobs.
2) More skills mean the greedy goldbricking lazy shits want to get paid more. What a pain in the ass.

Is it in the more creative sector an advantage to be more experienced? Or is it better to have more new and young blood with new idea's?

New ideas? Ain't nobody got time for that. No, you will do what you are told, don't question management. Either that, or managers will steal ideas from the lazy fucks that do the actual work. The only time more experience is useful is when the C students in HR are checking boxes to try to find "good" candidates (when the truth is that a laundry list does nothing to assess the real potential of a candidate). But, you have to be careful. If you have too much experience, you're "overqualified" and you won't get the job, since you might leave for a better offer. Companies hate that. Most would chain you to your desks given the chance, so the fact that their employees can leave (which is the only real right American workers have, something about slavery being illegal) is an insult to our Corporate Masters.

The fact that most CS grads (under most current programs) can't program their way out of a wet paper bag is a symptom of a larger issue. Too many students spend four years (and $100,000 or more) learning all kinds of "theory" and learning how to learn, and graduate with a useless piece of paper and no marketable skills. Time was when employers recognized that the theory and learning skills meant the graduate was easily trainable and would not need a whole lot of background to become useful to them. But, nowadays, since most employers would rather cut their arm off with a butter knife than provide training for their employees ("But but but if we train them they might take those new skills to another employer!" Then make them want to stay by not treating them like walking cost centers that you despise having to pay), a graduate who can't "hit the ground running" or has no real-world experience past their internships (witness the plethora of "entry-level" jobs that require 3 years' experience) is unhireable. Companies whine about not being able to find people to hire (usually so they can get H1-Bs to do the job for 60% of the pay) but don't realize that employee development pays off in spades, and if everyone says "let someone else train them" then nobody gets any training.

A bachelor's degree used to mean something when you were trying to get that first job. Nowadays, a bachelor's is basically the new high school diploma, since the lack of a degree is used as the first criteria when culling the pile of resumes submitted for an open gig. Someone without the obscene debt that comes along with a degree will find it easier to quit when they get treated like crap by their employer, because they don't have a student loan payment that's half their take-home pay.

(Yes, paying H1-Bs less than market value is illegal. But, what do you think happens to H1-B visa holders that complain? They get fired and sent back to their home country. So, they don't complain, and employers save money on salaries.)

IME it's usually the product owner (thinking of Scrum here) that gives feedback and changes the direction of the coding process. There is a tradeoff (if you do it right); the product owner gets to see something very quickly, even if it isn't feature complete, and the coders get better instructions and the knowledge that the fact that the product owner is changing spec means that there is a cost in development time.

Of course, most of the time Scrum is implemented as "the product owner (who is generally a walking haircut MBA moron) gets to do whatever the fuck they want and the developers are never given enough time to do a decent job". Under this implementation, the product owner gets all the benefit and all the power, and is not constrained by silly things like "resource limitations" or "number of hours in the day". Also, without the cost pressure, there is no incentive to provide good initial specs, as you can just cram more and more work down the developers' throats as the process continues, and no pressure to be thoughtful and efficient with change requests. The specs can change all they want; the deadlines remain the same.

Hey, C students need jobs too!

Stupid judges, stupid juries (although I don't know if this was a jury trial), "expert" witnesses wholly owned by the plaintiff, deeper pockets than the defendant, sleazy lawyers... All can lead to a completely ass-backwards decision that has so little to do with the facts in evidence that the case might as well have been decided by flipping a coin.

I don't know what it's like in Germany, but here in the USA trying to get a judge or a jury to understand what an antivirus program even IS is a crapshoot at best.

You don't actually know any women in IT or programming, do you?

Your contract should also include termination clauses - penalties paid if terminated early.

No client in their right mind would ever sign a contract with that in it. At least not in the USA. The whole point of hiring contractors is that they are engaged to work on a specific project. When the project is finished, the contractor is fired. If the contract specifies a length beyond the project completion date (to allow for deadline slippage), then the client would have to pay the contractor for time he/she didn't do any work for them. As most USA clients would rather rip their own toes off than pay someone for time they haven't worked, it's a non-starter. Hell, they bitch about having to pay their own employees for time they haven't worked (vacation, sick leave, holidays, etc.) Even though the law allows them to not allow any paid time off at all, for some reason this is the one place where market pressures have benefited the employee; companies have to offer competitive time off to hire people. If they had their way, we'd all be working 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, with no overtime pay, of course. Sad thing is, it's legal to do that to exempt employees. No, you can't physically drag them in to the office and make them work, but you sure as hell can fire someone for "not being a team player" (which is doublespeak for "won't allow us to abuse them as much as we want to").

Sadly your "winnings" is usually that you are now a "employee" and the "employer" just fires you.

This is the most relevant sentence in your post. Sure, you can report lawbreaking clients to the IRS and DOL, but don't plan on having a job three seconds after they get notified of your complaint.

In America the federal government is composed of the crookedest corporations.

FTFY.

No, they can't force you to work overtime, but they can definitely fire you for not doing it.

You can't complete a degree sitting in your dorm room; eventually you have to interact with faculty and your peers. Most programmers also work as part of a team.

You can't just write off aspects of social interaction as unnecessary. Everyone has to work with SOMEONE, even if it's a client. Your response sounds like oversimplification and bias.

Just a guess, but I bet you don't work in the USA. I have never seen any sort of "contract" for jobs I've had. At best, we get an employee handbook that we need to sign for. If there were a contract (implying binding conditions) or a binding job description, you would have recourse if your employer suddenly changed the circumstances of your job on you beyond what they contract allows. No, here we just tell the worker that we own their asses and if they don't like it they can fuck off.

Usually that can be avoided by good interviewing and identifying those companies. I've had one job that had that mentality, and it lasted about six months (when the next job was lined up.)

Story time: A while back I was interviewing for a new gig. The second question they asked me was how I felt about mandatory overtime.

Yeah, NOPEd out of there pretty quick. At least they were up front about it.

Last I checked they still had open positions. I bet they don't understand why they can't fill them.

New ideas only get implemented in a half-assed way if the person who promoted the idea is already two jobs further in his career.

Or, the person implementing the idea is completely disengaged due to management incompetence and lousy treatment. At most places, the difference between busting your ass 90 hours a week and warming a chair for 7.5 hours a day is an "attaboy" and nothing else. There's no incentive to do a good job beyond personal integrity, and you can't pay the rent with that.

Two things motivate me: 1) Being able to write good code, and 2) Money. If anyone tells you differently, they are not being completely honest with you, probably because they're telling you that in a job interview setting and if it looks like your motivation is anything other than "I enjoy working myself to death making more money for people who are already rich", you're sunk.