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."
Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
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: Personally (Score:3)
Re:Personally (Score:4, Insightful)
An architecture degree should give you vocational skills you'll actually need to work as an architect. A mechanical engineering degree should give you vocational skills you'll actually need to work as a mechanical engineer. A software engineering degree should give you vocational skills you'll actually need to work as a software engineer.
For what modern degrees cost, if they don't actually help you do the job, why bother?
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I completely agree with your point, I feel to need to point out that if your programming speed is constrained by your typing speed, you're not doing nearly enough thinking.
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Why do you say that? Given how terse C is, what I said should be even more true. Now maybe Cobol or Basic, on the other hand...
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
The HR drone hiring you prefers schooling over education.
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Of course they do. Schooling is easy to just "check off the boxes", and even verify with a simple phone call. Education, not so much.
Evaluating whether or not an applicant actually has the requisite knowledge and skills for the position would require them to actually do their jobs, including understanding (at least at a meta-level) exactly what the position entails and what skills are actually relevant.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
So I understand people who lie. It's the only way to get a chance. When everyone lies, the few of us honest people left are screwed.
Re:Personally (Score:4, Informative)
Our company's HR department posts the jobs, filters out the resumes, and passes only the ones forward that meet the job requirements we list as well as their fairly generic criteria. They also do some kind of pre-screening work, although I don't know what that is. That stops us from wasting our time weeding through a hundred applications from people who apply for any job, people who can't spell our company's name correctly, or those who claim "25 years Java experience." (Unless the resume was from James Gosling himself, that would be a hell of a thing to claim.) It's the managers and senior technical people in the departments who do the final interviews and make hiring recommendations. Over the last few years, I've only gotten a few "duds" from HR through this process - most were great candidates that I recommended we hire. This system works really well.
You might argue that we'll never hire the guy who is really smart but doesn't have a degree. And you'd be right - we won't even see his resume. It turns out that doesn't matter, because we still get a lot of very good people anyway, and I'm happy to work with any of them.
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Experience > Education > Schooling > Degrees
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I'm surprised by this. I was required to take an english course in college when getting my tech diploma. It's focus was on technical writing.
Also, have you mentioned to the engineer in question that it's "specification" and not "speckification"?
Re:Personally (Score:5, Funny)
It's focus was on technical writing.
You don't say? :)
Re:Personally (Score:4, Informative)
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Contextually, you are correct (generally "its" is primarily classified as a possessive pronoun, though in the case above you're right). Still, some would prefer the term "possessive determiner". http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/possdeterterm.htm [about.com]
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Re:Personally (Score:5, Funny)
Its one of those ridiculous English quirks, that I have to say in my head occasionally to ensure I've got it correct. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
You should do that more often :)
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Its one of those ridiculous English quirks, that I have to say in my head occasionally to ensure I've got it correct. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
You should do that more often :)
I should also, really, think about my extraneous/incorrect comma usage.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised by this. I was required to take an english course in college when getting my tech diploma. It's focus was on technical writing.
Also, have you mentioned to the engineer in question that it's "specification" and not "speckification"?
The problem is that you can take and pass a college level English class without actually giving half a shit about writing at an educated level. Having a university degree only proves that you are willing to do whatever busywork it takes to graduate, not that you actually know anything at all, that you paid attention in class, or even that you were smart in the first place.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe is a manager's view of problem solving. They basically don't want problems in the first place. It is a manger's role to ensure succession planning, training, resourcing and appropriation documentation and standards are maintained. A manager doesn't have to do them all. Just create the environment through appropriate "stick & carrot" measures.
Problem solving is a rare gift. I know many competent Design Engineers that cannot solve problems. Most good ones can follow patterns and apply them to new situations. They're the ones you want to do most day to day designs. They'll need attention to detail. But again, they'll get stuck at something that doesn't fit within the those patterns.
The true problem solver is one that can make those intuitive leaps. They can see patterns, where others don't. Or even work with a thousand disconnected clues to get to the root cause. The very best do have a formal background (and they'll draw on those bits of lectures and notes when needed, going back to 1st Principals). Unfortunately, this is difficult and mostly can't be put down in Manuals and Procedures. This doesn't necessarily make them appropriate for Design and quite often they are terrible at mundane tasks. So bad managers don't know how to value or deal with this skill.
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a university degree only proves that you are willing to do whatever busywork it takes to graduate, not that you actually know anything at all, that you paid attention in class, or even that you were smart in the first place
Thirty years ago I probably thought very similar, but today I don't hold those same beliefs.
Wisdom is being able to draw on, and use, an accumulation of knowledge. Schools like College add much to that pool. Language, Math, Science, it all ties together. If you don't get the language you can't communicate effectively. A huge percentage of people today can't communicate effectively. More, they don't write down what was done so you end up with lots of one off shit that you can't repeat in either problem or solution. "Bob said it didn't work" is not very scientific, where "When Bob had X application open and launched Y the system panicked" at least gives you a point to begin debugging.
Having the larger knowledge pool means that you can perform a job anywhere, not just do LAMP and Puppet as I see many administrators today claim.
The classical education system really does have value. The problem today is that we are in a hurry to make huge bucks, not be intelligent and productive members of a society. Much of that is societies fault mind you. We put huge price tags on education and emphasizing garbage collection over real knowledge. I.E. Miley and Fantasy Football are the "hot topics" at work, where intellectual conversation would be "nerd/geek talk". Of course another huge issue is that we don't use the classical education system, we use the industrial education system.
Re:Personally (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Personally (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that the criticism was about a misused ' and the current topic is about building correct software. In most programming languages, a misplaced quote (of either type) is almost always an instantly-fatal error (unless you do it twice, in which case the compiler or interpreter just goes quietly insane ;-). If you can't be bothered to get the quotes/apostrophes right, you have no future at all in the software industry. In a software arena, misusing such characters is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
(Not that there is any shortage of big mistakes to be made. Let's just say that, if attention to "insignificant" details is something that you can't take seriously, you shouldn't be mucking around in software. Or even writing about it in a public forum frequented by software geeks.)
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What kind of windows shop does their own electrical wiring? Secondly, no reverse polarity protection?
Reverse polarity protection always involves a component which is destroyed to protect the rest of the device. It is still a warranty nightmare when a SMT diode or fuse is burnt on every shipped device.
As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Insightful)
Our best techs don't have degrees. Most of the people who can become skilled techs without having it force-fed down their throat at college can teach themselves, and easily grasp new technology as it becomes available. Most of the people we've hired from college were the "I-can't-do-it-unless-you-show-it-to-me-first" type, which suck to have work for you.
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:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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.
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Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:4, Insightful)
The question that the OP was complaining about was not "why"; the question was "how", combined with the lack of willingness to take the initiative to find out on their own. Asking how to solve a problem, because you aren't self-directed enough to figure it out on your own, is very different from asking why a problem needs to be solved, to give you a better understanding of the problem, so you can make a better solution.
You're projecting your unrelated problems onto this post.
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Insightful)
You've never worked with or taught those people. I have done both. There is a somewhat common subset of people that DO NOT ask "why", they ask "how" but in the worst way possible -- without EXACT directions (exact down to the step by step listing of commands to type or buttons to click to the get the result), they will basically throw their hands up and say "I don't know what to do next" and sit on their thumbs until given more directions. Socratic method doesn't work, because they will never understand the question you are asking. Showing them how its done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over. They do not know how to research or even Google things; if you tell them exactly what website to go to, and to look up certain directions, they will later tell you "I didn't know what was important so I waited" and did nothing. They don't like to read. They have no real interest in learning the topic apart from doing the absolute bare minimum as defined by their manager to take a paycheck home at the end of the day. I've been trying better ways to teach and train these people and nothing seems to work. They're somehow fundamentally "broken" (my thought is that they lack some kind of basic logical and reasoning skills, based on their responses, but it is hard to teach that too unless they have interest...)
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There are plenty of ways to deal with such people... The best is that you (IT) demand that computer related tasks are treated as any other job function. So IT trains managers how to do a task, the managers train supervisors, and the supervisors train employees. This critically gets IT out of the loop in employee training for dep
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, you mean you prefer employees able to read your mind over those that ask you to clearly verbalize your expectations?
Spoken like a true college grad. :)
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:4, Insightful)
No, He's saying he values employees who understand how the technology, that their job is based on interacting with, actually works, and can derive answers to their own questions instead of him doing their job for them. He's saying that having employees that can resolve problems because they have a passion for the field, instead of only a simple ability to follow carefully laid out instructions, is valuable to him.
I'm pretty sure you can say that about most jobs. Unfortunately a lot of HR departments can't grasp that and they have their own ideas about who would make a good employee.
Happy to clear that up for you, and I'm sorry about you mounds of student loan debt.
Re: As someone who runs an IT company (Score:3)
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Erh... yes? Who wouldn't?
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Not at all. My expectations are usually along these lines:
"Hey, Person J says her computer keeps locking up. Can you go figure out what's going on?"
Good IT:
"Sure." "Turns out she had installed a toolbar that kept popping up a hidden prompt for her to click on. It's all cleaned up now, and she is good to go."
Bad IT:
"Sure." "The screen seems frozen. What do I do?" "Ok, I hit alt+tab, and there seems to be a prompt. What do I do?" etc.
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:4, Funny)
Not at all. My expectations are usually along these lines:
"Hey, Person J says her computer keeps locking up. Can you go figure out what's going on?"
Good IT:
"Sure." "Turns out she had installed a toolbar that kept popping up a hidden prompt for her to click on. It's all cleaned up now, and she is good to go."
Bad IT:
"Sure." "The screen seems frozen. What do I do?" "Ok, I hit alt+tab, and there seems to be a prompt. What do I do?" etc.
Real IT Person: "That's against company policy to unfreeze this computer"
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Funny)
Not at all. My expectations are usually along these lines:
"Hey, Person J says her computer keeps locking up. Can you go figure out what's going on?"
Good IT:
"Sure." "Turns out she had installed a toolbar that kept popping up a hidden prompt for her to click on. It's all cleaned up now, and she is good to go."
Bad IT:
"Sure." "The screen seems frozen. What do I do?" "Ok, I hit alt+tab, and there seems to be a prompt. What do I do?" etc.
Real IT Person: "That's against company policy to unfreeze this computer"
Real IT Person: "Did you try turning it off and back on again?"
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No, first you start with: Is it plugged in?
Then you move on to: Did you hit the power button?
Has nobody here ever done tech support for family?
Re:As someone who runs an IT company (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean you prefer employees able to read your mind over those that ask you to clearly verbalize your expectations?
Yes, of course. Once someone has worked for me for six months or so, they should know what my expectations are, and they should be able to extrapolate those expectations when new situations arise. A good employee should have the judgement to know what needs to be done, and the initiative to do it.
I'm a non-degree slacker (Score:5, Insightful)
Back then, the vast bulk of "nerds" loved this stuff as a hobby and could slide into a work role easy enough. Then people started going to school to 'learn teh computerz' as it seemed like an easy way to make cash. Those are the folks who were dumped during the dot-bomb.
Fact is many of the best IT folks I know who also have excellent technical skill were self-taught.
Re:I'm a non-degree slacker (Score:5, Informative)
I've got a degree. It didn't teach me a damned thing about IT, but I've got the degree. The degree helps get your resume through the HR drones, though, but not much else.
STEM education is great but it's not everything (Score:5, Insightful)
I hold two CompSci degrees (BA, MA) from two reputable universities, and I can tell you this: some of best developers I've ever met have come from non-CompSci fields: geology, physics, and (building) architecture.
The keys to being a good developer are much the same as in any other field: being able to learn, and being able to apply what you've learned, and giving a crap about what you do.
Re: (Score:2)
And, of course, part of "giving a crap about what you do" involves reading the Preview carefully before you post. That should say:
Sigh... Tell me again why /. doesn't have an "Edit" button?
Re:STEM education is great but it's not everything (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if there was an "Edit" button we couldn't pick on you for a typo.
Re:STEM education is great but it's not everything (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh... Tell me again why /. doesn't have an "Edit" button?
Because computers are hard and most developers don't have a degree.
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I just thought it was a new acronym for a new type of developer like Bio Engineering System Technical developer!
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Re:STEM education is great but it's not everything (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a developer and I hold no degrees. In anything. Every other developer or admin I know and work with has a degree. Some are good, some are bad.
We've had some conversations about it and my general thoughts are that I was hurt a bit in communication (not knowing what "X Pattern" or "Y method" means, despite doing it for years because I thought it was good design), and they were hurt a bit when it comes to thinking outside the box. Over time, I learned the name of "X pattern" and they learned when to go outside of the "X pattern" box. Minimal difference in the end.
It's pretty clear to anyone in the field that a CS degree really only guarantees that someone will be able to speak (perhaps outdated) office lingo. When trying to gauge someone's ability, simple enthusiasm is easy and effective to measure, and far more valuable than a degree.
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.
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But they had a degree which I think is key. This is different from the "school is stupid" types who want to take the shortcut, who end up in an entry-level or junior job for decades.
Note that the degrees you listed are all "STEM" degrees, which I don't think is necessarily a requirement as long as the school giving the degree requires a breadth of lower division classes (I see some engineering degrees that aren't good either if they don't have non-engineering related requirements). A good programmer could
This says more about the categories... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This says more about the categories... (Score:5, Informative)
The truth is, most "computer support specialists" & "network administrators", & "system administrators", and I am one, are technicians, not engineers. Even some of the IT guys with "engineer" in their titles are really technicians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technician [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer [wikipedia.org]
And that's okay. Well, except for inflating the importance of the the job by adding "engineer" to the technician's title.
Technicians are important. Technicians keep technology running. Being a technician is a noble pursuit.
Engineers take what the researchers have discovered and create the technology, technicians deploy the technology and maintain it.
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.
Self Taught (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Self Taught (Score:4, Insightful)
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And? (Score:2)
How many CEOs don't even have a degree?
You could apply the apprentice/journeymen/expert to the IT guild as much with most any other learned trade.
I wonder how many of them (Score:5, Funny)
know what "IT" stands for?
"Computer Support Specialist" (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need a college degree to read a phone script.
Just because there's a lot of 'em doesn't mean they're all good.
Re:"Computer Support Specialist" (Score:4, Funny)
"Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Re:"Computer Support Specialist" (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes: you shouldn't assume that a degree is irrelevant to competence because this survey makes no effort separate the competent from the incompetent.
Because IT is a superset of stem (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I've always hated the fact that they even refer to certain jobs as being in the IT sector. It's so large and all encompassing, that it basically fits anybody from a minimum wage support person to a hardware engineer designing cutting edge processors, or people writing financial systems on wall street.
Finally, it is now clear why Microsoft (Score:2)
is the dominant player in corporate IT systems!
OMG! NO DEGREE! WE WILL ALL DIE! (Score:2)
Of course, I have been programming since 1980 when as an 8 year old, I taught myself how to code. I also have self-educated myself in graduate level math, game theory, algorithms, statistics, relativistic physics, AI, and probably a half dozen other STEM type topics. I have worked in a half dozen lang
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College wasn't an option for some (Score:3)
For many of the older people in this field college was not an option. Some of them "fell into" the job because they "knew computers".
I have a AAS degree from a two year school because IT related studies were not offered at the 4 year schools. In fact, I was bluntly told by a department head of a four year school: if you want to learn networking then go to a two year school. So I did. Best decision ever. No college debt and got a job right out of school.
And then there's me... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not particularly fond of statistics like these -- because the people who put them together usually insist on qualifying "college degree" as only meaning four year degrees or greater. I have an Associates degree, (and yes: it's in the IT field) but nobody seems to really care about that so-called "minimal" level of effort.
Not that it matters to me anymore at this po
After five years... (Score:4, Insightful)
...whatever you learned in school is already out of date, when you consider what they teach in University is 5 years old when they teach it.
Ask BSCS grads who graduated in 2008 or earlier how much of what they learned in school is still relevant.
Getting into management without a degree is much tougher. Common knowledge is that you are a "better person" if you spent 6 years of your life getting an MBA, rather than actually doing the job.
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A lot of university degrees in Project Management teach that a Work Breakdown Structure is a set of tasks; in 1978, the Project Management Body of Knowledge was replaced with the PMBOK Guide (first edition), which is also called the PMBOK (oddly enough). The new PMBOK1e specified that a WBS is a deliverable-oriented breakdown of work. Since the PMBOK1e in 1978, work breakdown structures have been all about the output of work: every Work Package or Roll-up Element is a deliverable--a tangible or intangibl
Re:After five years... (Score:5, Insightful)
I got a BSCS degree back in 2003 and I can tell you that it is very much still relevant. You're right, the specific languages, API's, and even architectures have changed dramatically in 10 years, but the fundamentals are all still there. Learning the 2003 vintage of C++ was not so useful (except as an exercise in how to approach programming problems generally), but learning algorithm complexity analysis is timeless. And I'm sure there are more advanced process schedulers in operating systems these days, but they are still being scheduled out there in the background. And so on, and so on.
My great "aha!" moment in my CS degree was when I realized that the specific tool they were teaching in any given class was basically irrelevant - it was just a means to teaching an important concept. Trade schools teach you tools, universities teach you how those tools work. The real value in my BSCS degree was in teaching me how to think about and solve CS problems. That has been invaluable.
Re:After five years... (Score:5, Insightful)
...whatever you learned in school is already out of date...
Quite true, but as one of my professors said, "In this course, you will not learn how to code in Turbo Pascal*; you will learn how to learn to code, and then apply that to Turbo Pascal."
A good teacher can make all the difference to impressionable 18-yr-olds.
(*Yes, I am old)
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"Ask BSCS grads who graduated in 2008 or earlier how much of what they learned in school is still relevant."
And if the answer is not most/all they got ripped off.
College is not supposed to teach you to use the current gadgets. It's supposed to teach you to read, write, and think. Those skills do not go out of date.
Most Journalists Don't Understand Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
For this profile, we mainly focused on two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist.
So they looked at the two lowest-paying job categories out of the 8 defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics [bls.gov], and drew conclusions about the education levels of other six. Hmmm, maybe that's not the best approach...
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Tell it to HR that some wants CS for IT / desktop (Score:2)
Tell it to HR that some wants CS for IT / desktop / helpdesk jobs.
I have even seen what / nice to have masters for IT jobs as well.
Passion over profession (Score:2)
I'm degreed in the medical field, but found the tech world infinitely more exciting.
Also the fact that I could almost always resurrect my patients played a part in my decision to go with IT.
its a pretty decent gig.. (Score:3)
i have a four-year degree (CPEE) and decided long ago to focus on software instead of hardware, and thru my 30 year professional journey I have seen *drastic* changes in the personal make-up of the shops I've worked at.
Back in "the day" (hate that euphemism but used it anyway), programming in C, there was little room for error, as bad code could easily crash systems and cause very expensive issues. I took probably a year of working with them to *really* understand pointers. Companies simply couldn't allow just anyone to code...the potential and real costs were way too high.
Interpreted languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python make it so that pretty much anyone can start hacking away on some code and see results that make them think "damn, I can do this a make a decent living". If they can find someone looking for inexpensive development they can get a job, for awhile at least until either they reach a level where there incompetence shows (the tech "Peter Principle" of course)
Those with the determination and/or genetic blessing to understand coding can do even better and make a very very good living. Overall, I think this is a good thing.
Due to very poor life choices I currently work in a low-end web shop, and the people I code with don't even *like* programming, and are almost totally clueless about OO principles, design patterns and the like...they just want to collect a decent paycheck and don't want to work at McDonalds.
I can't say I blame them.
at least on is an entry level jobs though (Score:3, Insightful)
And it shows :( (Score:4, Insightful)
The best IT professionals I know have studied computer science inside or out of a school. Algorithms and operating system design are core components of their knowledge. They understand how to research and study technology before choosing tools because of pretty boxes and articles on their favorite blog.
I am glad these people exist. If it weren't for them, I'd have to install antivirus software and reinstall Windows for everyone I know.
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.
As a manager (Score:4, Insightful)
I hire/fire I.T. workers. I can tell you...the education vs lack of education is the wrong argument. The best I.T. guys I get are those who love technology and care about what they do. This holds true whether they are a C.S. grad, or someone who spent the last few years hacking away on the side. When I interview, the only weight I give to their degrees/certifications is whether they learned non-technical skills. I've worked with great I.T. guys who had degrees in completely unrelated areas, but turned out fantastic because they love the profession. I've had guys with no degrees who still were worth holding in to. And I've had guys with C.S. degrees who were successful. It all comes down to liking what you do.
A degree demontrates you can finish something. (Score:3)
While many people learn a lot in college (I hope), the first thing that an employer learns when they find that you have a college degree is that you are likely to be able to finish something complex. There are lots of people without college degrees who can see complex and difficult things through to completion, but that is much harder to glean from glancing at a resume for two seconds. And that's all the time you get, because they go through massive numbers of resumes. And the fact is, most companies are less interested in employees who are smart than those who can follow instructions and work (however inefficiently) until they finish something.
Back in the late 90's a friend of mine worked for a "data services" arm of a well-known communications company. They had a very successful process for developing large applications on time, on-spec, and on-budget, and it was designed around having morons do the work. A handful of people at the top did the design work, which trickled down through layers of less and less skilled worker until you go to the bottom. At the bottom, the code monkey (not necessarily their terminology) would have a stack of sheets of paper, each describing one function or procedure to write. It would describe the function name, the inputs, the outputs, and the algorithm to be coded. The algorithm was described in such detail that even the least skilled coders could do the job. And then it would be reviewed by someone else to make sure it did the job, integrated with the growing application, etc. Now, while a handful of scrappy coders could often complete projects in less time, what this big company had was predictability, so they could enter into a contract where they could be precise about the time and cost from the outset.
Unless you understood their business model, you could find their hiring criteria to be to be counter-intuitive. But what they wanted was cheap college graduates willing to do drudge work. If you could play dumb and do the job, then you could gradually work your way up the chain. But in general, a smart 'rebel' type would never get hired there, nor would they generally want to. Linux geeks are used to thinking about computer programmers as being smart, but that's not how the business world sees them. Coders are a commodity to be bought and sold like corn (and just as lacking in useful content).
true, but... (Score:3)
...missing several points.
Ask not for degrees, but whether or not they studied. The dot-com era was worst, but companies looking for IT talent have never stopped hiring people straight from university, and when you're a starving student and you're offered a really cool job for what at that time appears to be outrageously generous money, dropping out and taking the job is a serious alternative.
I know a lot of people who dropped out, some less than a year away from their degree.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, that's from BA degrees.
Re:They pretend (Score:5, Informative)
Because in all those professions you can kill people (directly or indirectly) if you screw up because you don't know jack about your profession.
Re: (Score:3)
IT does not involve [...] Technology [...]
Really?
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, you don't really need one to do the job.. Duhhh!
There is more truth in that statement than many would want to believe. While I was employed at a large government agency that was involved with collecting government taxes from individuals and corporations, instead of hiring programmers, we would take individuals who were familiar with the various tax systems and train them to program. It was our experience that it was easier to train those who were experienced in their field and had an aptitude for development to be programmers than it was to train programmers in all of the intricacies tax laws. I imagine there are a lot of other business and corporate areas where that would be applicable, too.
Re:Breaking news (Score:4, Insightful)
The best development groups I have worked in had some people that were focused on the technology, others that knew the business, and everyone having an understanding that it is all important with a willingness to share. I have seen a lot of projects fail because someone highly technical does not respect the less technical team members who bring the business knowledge to the table.
Exactly! While not to diminish the importance of technical skills, it is also just as important not to diminish soft skills. I've lost track of the number of times that a non-technical person asked a question that led to a line of discussion that ultimately led to a much better solution.
It is common to hear "think outside the box" but often, team members from different backgrounds have an advantage because they were never "in the box" to begin with! When we hire, our primary focus is for team players. We can always provide training to improve technical skills, but the greatest technical skills are worthless (to us, anyway), if that person can't work with the team.