Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees 655
McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal's Michael Totty shares some stereotype-shattering statistics about IT workers: Most of them don't have college degrees in computer science, technology, engineering or math. About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all! The analysis is based upon two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist."
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention that science, math, and engineering degrees are all-but-worthless in IT, as being able to design a circuit board, or optimize a search algorithm, or sequence some DNA has little-to-nothing to do with your average IT department's concerns about practical matters. I'm not entirely sure what a "tech" degree even is (I've never seen a university offer a "bachelor of technology", for instance), so I can't say anything about that.
IT, especially as defined by the linked article, is not programming, after all.
Re:Personally (Score:0, Interesting)
Even that's not good enough. I work in the electronics industry and the educated and schooled engineers fuck up far more than the merely "educated but unschooled" I.T. staff. And this is saying a lot, because we are a Windows shop.
I have yet to see even a domestically-born Caucasian engineer write a legible procedure, even with modern miracles like spelling and grammar checks. For example, one likes to write "speck" instead of "spec." And in one of our more recent procedures, there's no logical progression from one section to the next -- Though the sections are numbered sequentially, the actual order in which the steps are carried out makes the procedure look like TurboTax written in BASIC, with GOTOs everywhere. And I'll never forget the engineer who swapped the "+" and the "-" on a drawing our customers used to wire the system themselves. Whoaboy, blown fuses and warranty repair nightmares everywhere. Give me a proven I.T. guy any day of the week, and I'll train him to be a fucking engineer.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:2, Interesting)
Have to agree. Self direction, initiative, mixed with curiosity and some intelligence is what makes for a good IT worker. Most IT degrees are junk anyways. (STEM) degrees are a good indicator that the person can solve problems but since IT isn't rocket science the STEM degree isn't needed.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Interesting)
In principle college ought to benefit IT workers; in practice, at least when I went, it was less useful than I would have liked, and I dropped out after a year and a half because I felt that I was wasting my money. But I haven't been forced to put my resume through an HR department in a long time; I wonder if it would be as easy now as it was a dozen years ago.
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, so? (Score:5, Interesting)
This a perfect example of an article that makes a statement but does not make a conclusion. I guess the conclusion -- perhaps that we should be concerned that our IT professionals don't have scientific or technical degrees -- is implied?
> About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!
Panic!
I have an engineering degree, got a job making war toys for a military contractor, needed the computer to do my work, and found that nobody was administrating the computer. In self-defense, I learned how to administer Unix, how to do backups and housecleaning and diagnose problems, all so I could get my primary job done. After several years, when I got burned out on my primary job, (designing stuff for the military is less fun than it sounds) I found that I had learned enough to carry on with systems administration full time.
I strongly suspect that this happened to a lot of people, especially during the rise of the dot coms, and I also suspect that many of them were not originally in engineering. It happens -- people rise to the occasion, and find new career opportunities.
Why is this a problem? Is the admin going to see a countdown someday that says "answer this question that was on the 3rd trimester final in year two of an EE curriculum in 30 seconds or the computer melts into slag"? What you learn in college, other than techniques like ways to attack and solve a problem, are going to be horribly out of date anyway. What you accomplish in the workforce is more up to your commitment and talents, (and training you've sought post-college) than the letters after your name.
Conversely, having letters after your name does not mean you get a free ride (in most companies). You still have to show competency.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Interesting)
At my company, our best IT people... (Score:4, Interesting)
... were former physicists. Granted, we're mainly a NASA/NOAA contractor so the domain knowledge is very useful.
Re:This says more about the categories... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the real "back in the day," "engines" were siege engines (e.g. ballistas and trebuchets). Civil engineers (who built everything except engines) are named such in order to distinguish them from military engineers.
Re:Personally (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, one person's "busywork" is sometimes another person's critical need.
I think that many references to "busywork" in software dev are really "doing something that I'm too narrow to understand why it is needed". Sometimes this "something" is testing. Sometimes it's writing down a functional and architecture design on a critical piece of software so other devs can review it, so tester's can figure out how to test it, or so customers can figure out how to use it. Sometimes it's putting in sufficient diagnostics so "one in 1,000,000 hours of execution data corruption problems" can be tracked down and fixed.
In my experience, the odds of someone referring to "busywork" is inversely proportional to their breadth of experience in a variety of roles.
Of course, most of my experience is in fairly small growing companies where true busywork gets extinguished fairly quickly.
Re:STEM education is great but it's not everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't dismiss the value of "the lingo". It's painfully clear to me that one of the biggest problems is the lack of a shared meaning in words between two people or areas. When I'm in meetings where there are problems between people or groups, the key to solving them lies in discovering where they differ. And that takes careful listening.
For example, I might be in a meeting listening someone from dept A going on about unit testing their code, and someone else from dept B saying that they're not able to unit test dept A's code. So I get them both to ask each other "what do you mean by 'unit test'?" Turns out that nobody in the room knew jack about what an actual unit test was, and dept A was referring to the developer running the code in a debugger, and dept B was referring to passing the code to their testing team to run a bunch of functional tests. The start of the solution was to get them to use the right names for what each of them was doing. Once they both agreed on the terminology, we could address the real problem, which was that nobody knew shit about unit testing at all - they just thought they were doing it.