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Successful IT Workers Applaud Non-Traditional Paths to Tech (zdnet.com) 149

Posted by EditorDavid from the bytes-by-baristas dept.
Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk describes what happened after Microsoft's senior cloud advocate tweeted "Hire folks with non-traditional paths to tech." Thomas Zeman, whose Twitter bio declared he's "scaling pods at daytime, working on a docker based raspberry pi router at nighttime," mused in reply: "Depends a bit what tech you are talking about. When doing machine learning for cancer recognition on medical images I am sorry but dont believe baristas will crack it...."

Oddly, Zeman's comment received what might be termed a reaction....

In wandered David Brunelle... "Hi Thomas!" he said. "I'm a vp of engineering at Starbucks. I started my career as a Starbucks barista. I have no college degree. Most of my early-in-career training came from the Navy. All non-traditional. And I lead one of the biggest digital payments platforms in the world...."

Here's Twitterer Ew, Ryan: "I've worked as a delivery driver, tuxedo salesman, sandwich maker, gas station attendant, server, a few summers as a plumbing apprentice, and I could go on and on... but now I've worked at Google, Twitter and TikTok. Don't confuse past work histories with future capabilities."

Or this from someone with the adorable Twitter handle @SecuritySphynx: "Gatekeeping is a bad look. 4y ago I was stamping envelopes/answering phones for $12/hour. Now I'm engineering security solutions with some of the worlds largest orgs Almost no one started in tech and never did anything else before. Check your classism at the door, please...."
The article ultimately asks how many tech companies (and their HR departments) "persist in seeking those with a particular qualification and a particular past history? How many think there's a tech type?" But at least the Twitter thread provoked this clarifying correction from the pod-scaling, router-builder who'd started all the reactions.

"I totally believe anyone can learn and master anything (including Baristas of course) without any doubt. The point is that mastering things will take a lot of time..."
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Successful IT Workers Applaud Non-Traditional Paths to Tech More

Successful IT Workers Applaud Non-Traditional Paths to Tech

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  • Microsoft's senior cloud advocate tweeted "Hire folks with non-traditional paths to tech."

    That's not *exactly* what she tweeted. She actually tweeted "Hire [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] folks [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] with [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] non [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] traditional [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] paths [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] to [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand] tech [A weird sign that /. doesn't understand].[A weird sign that /. doesn't understand]".

    • Re: Slightly inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @07:16AM (#60853190) Homepage Journal

      A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

      -Robert A. Heinlein

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by syn3rg ( 530741 )
        Exactly. I wish I had mod points.

      • OK but then again in that same book Heinlein promoted sibling and parent/child incest

      • Proof by literary reference, is almost as bad, as this guy on Facebook said it.

        Humans have the ability to be very generalist, however over time, we seems to fall into loosely specialist roles.

        I can Change a Diaper, but a Nanny, or a Daycare worker can probably do it much faster than me, as they do it many times a day.
        I can plan an invasion, but a military general will probably be much more effective than I, as they can fall back onto what was done in the past and tactics that seemed to work better than othe

      • All modern economic theory is built on the observation that specialization makes everyone richer. And fuck "dying gallantly".

        But yeah, planning an invasion takes years of study. Programming a computer does too.

    • He was talking about machine learning cancer diagnoses. Well, yeah. I'm proficient with lots of technology (including some AI based health tech). And I wouldn't trust me to work on cancer diagnostics without an expert in the medical field assisting me.

      On the other hand, I could get a payments system going on my own (although, obviously, a team and experts would help).

  • People without the fundamentals... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @04:57AM (#60853016)
    People without the fundamentals can't do the complex stuff

    And from the responses, it's clear that people without the fundamentals don't even know what the complex stuff is.

    The complex stuff is not digital payment systems or the majority of jobs at Google or tiktok or whatever else the low self-esteem brigade are claiming as their achievements.

    There are plenty of jobs for copy-pasters, but to get the hard stuff done when no one else has done it yet, you need staff well trained in the fundamentals. Otherwise your coders won't know what they aren't doing.

    • Re:People without the fundamentals... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @05:24AM (#60853046)

      People without the fundamentals can't do the complex stuff

      I love the response [twitter.com] from the woman who said that "[she is] a former barista and [she is] currently a nuclear physicist for a NASA contractor". Yeah, she forgot to mention that she's *also* a bona fide physics graduate. Let's say that I used to deliver mail back in high school to get some money, does that make me a mailman? I'm sorry, but in what universe is getting a physics degree "a non-traditional way" to getting a physics job?

      • True! A lot of these stories are "I didn't study Computer Science or Software Engineering at all and got hired by FAANG". Maybe, but You're an Electrical Engineer or have a Master/PhD in Math or Physics. You should be able to pick up a book about Algorithm & Datastructures and Object Oriented Programming and get up to speed.
        Chances are you actually got plenty of CS courses in University to begin with.

      • People without the fundamentals can't do the complex stuff

        I love the response [twitter.com] from the woman who said that "[she is] a former barista and [she is] currently a nuclear physicist for a NASA contractor". Yeah, she forgot to mention that she's *also* a bona fide physics graduate. Let's say that I used to deliver mail back in high school to get some money, does that make me a mailman? I'm sorry, but in what universe is getting a physics degree "a non-traditional way" to getting a physics job?

        I financed my Comp. Sci. masters degree by washing dishes at restaurants and working construction jobs. I don't consider dish washing and cleaning concrete moulds to have done much to improve my skills at Comp. Sci. Experience helps to make you a better professional but so does a broad and comprehensive education. The self taught can always point at a handful of university dropouts who went on to build a tech empire but these drop outs all built their empire by standing on the shoulders of people with unive

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Its not; and these people are largely leaving out all the therebetween that are not only traditional but down right classical.

        Leaving aside folks who might have been working as barista between other skilled work due to say pandemic induced layoffs.

        There is nothing weird, unusual, wrong, undesirable, etc about a former barista becoming the head software architect some place. If said person is talented, perhaps has played with a raspberry-pi in the evenings and done some personal projects, I see no reason not

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        Also,

        Most of my early-in-career training came from the Navy. All non-traditional.

        Since when is getting training in the Navy non-traditional? I've known some great engineers that got their training in the Navy.

        • One of the best programming hires I ever made was from the Navy. They take engineering seriously, especially if that person was in reactor maintenance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Yet Google is worth over $1 trillion. So apparently there is a huge market for the output of copy-pasters who can't do the complex stuff.

      • That might have been a bit of a hyperbole. Chances of getting hired by Google are very low, like less likely than getting into Stanford or Harvard.
        So they get their pick at the brightest people.

      • Yet Google is worth over $1 trillion. So apparently there is a huge market for the output of copy-pasters who can't do the complex stuff.

        You're assuming that Google's value is built on the current quality of their software. Just like Comcast has excellent customer service and the DMV is a great place to visit.

        Or hell, like Facebook has the best newsfeed algorithms and Apple's iOS store has the best store UI imaginable.

        • Just like Comcast has excellent customer service

          I know this is off topic, but I feel like mentioning that I've had to call Comcast for tech support twice in all the years I've had them (which goes back to when they bought the company that bought the company that I originally got cable TV from back in the days of dialup) and the support both times was excellent.

          I'm not sure if it's because I got lucky or because I started off by reporting signal quality numbers from the web UI of my cable modem and summarizing the troubleshooting steps I had already perfo

      • You mean the company the business model of which relied for many years on the invention of two ultra-smart Stanford Ph.D.s?

    • People without the fundamentals can't do the complex stuff

      But you don't need a traditional path to get the fundamentals.

    • There are plenty of jobs for copy-pasters, but to get the hard stuff done when no one else has done it yet, you need staff well trained in the fundamentals. Otherwise your coders won't know what they aren't doing.

      Based on what we've seen out of SolarWinds, Google, Mozille, etc, it appears their coders don't know what they're doing so obviously aren't well trained.

    • Agree 100% that you must have mastered the fundamentals to do good work. But one can learn the fundamentals. There are several other things you'll also need which cannot be taught.

      One quality that comes immediately to mind is boldness. You absolutely must be comfortable with the thought that a mistrake on your part could potentially muck up the lives of other people -- perhaps even an enormous number of them. Very, very few people are willing to take that kind of responsibility.

      Not everything can be learned

      • I wish more people had learned about threads and concurrency and networking before trying to build micro services.

  • The real answer: it depends... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @05:17AM (#60853042) Homepage

    Of course there are people who come to tech from other backgrounds. One of my best ever IT students worked his first 10 years as a baker. Yes, it can happen. But you know what: as a baker, he was always interested in computers. He spent his free time playing around with tech, he taught himself to program for fun. He had the ability and the interest, and finally realized that he would be happier with a career change.

    He was an exception. His story does not mean that your average baker will ever learn to code.

    anyone can learn and master anything

    This is the pie-in-the-sky idiocy. No, every person cannot learn every skill. Look, I - as a very good IT person - am never going to be a musician. Sure, I can mash keys on a piano - I even took lessons - but no one wants to hear the result. People have their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and talents. It is not the case that anyone can learn and master anything.

    The quote above is idiotic. It could only be uttered by someone who believes in participation trophies.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by leomekenkamp ( 566309 )
      I fully agree with you on the lunacy of "everybody can be great at anything". I think it is a myth, brought into the world by people who are 'self made'. It is so much easier for your own ego to say that anyone can reach what you yourself have reached: if not everybody does it, you must be special.

      On top of that, I think it has also been used as a tool for those in power to keep that power. "Everyone can become the nations leader, you just need to be voted in!". Any of the plebs can become a ruler. Not a

    • Of course there are people who come to tech from other backgrounds. One of my best ever IT students worked his first 10 years as a baker. Yes, it can happen. But you know what: as a baker, he was always interested in computers. He spent his free time playing around with tech, he taught himself to program for fun. He had the ability and the interest, and finally realized that he would be happier with a career change.

      He was an exception. His story does not mean that your average baker will ever learn to code.

      They won't learn to code, or they won't be capble of it?

      Because the former requires them to have interest, see it as a potential path, and have the time and money to learn themselves and/or pay for the education, and, yeah, have some sort of mental aptitude. So there are more requirements than having the special "programmer brain" that only us cool and smart folks on /. have. But our socieity is set up as school->choose university before you know how the world works-> work in that field until you die,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      anyone can learn and master anything

      This is the pie-in-the-sky idiocy. No, every person cannot learn every skill. Look, I - as a very good IT person - am never going to be a musician. Sure, I can mash keys on a piano - I even took lessons - but no one wants to hear the result. People have their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and talents. It is not the case that anyone can learn and master anything.

      The quote above is idiotic. It could only be uttered by someone who believes in participation trophies.

      I'll point to the Disney movie Ratatouille for this, since the movie includes an almost identical quote. Don't think of it as everyone can become a coder, but that a coder can come from any background as long as they have the right amount of talent and desire to learn.

    • This is the pie-in-the-sky idiocy. No, every person cannot learn every skill. Look, I - as a very good IT person - am never going to be a musician. Sure, I can mash keys on a piano - I even took lessons - but no one wants to hear the result. People have their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and talents. It is not the case that anyone can learn and master anything.

      This is clearly true for people with learning disorders or brain damage - although some of those people have remarkable skills and talents.

      It MAY be true with respect to learning languages. There is clearly something that goes on in children that doesn't seem to go on in adults that helps children learn language in ways that seem inaccessible to adults. But that might just be a case of "we haven't found it yet". In other words, our teaching techniques might be not be accessing the human adult brain in th

    • Well, don't we need bakers for pies in the sky? Sorry, I'm out of points or I'd mod you up ;-)
    • I'm not one of the best ever IT guys, that's for sure, but I have a solid job with good benefits despite a BA in the social sciences. It took about five years of help desk and another three or four years of tier 2 support before I was able to get into a specialized position where I really started to thrive. But there's no way I could have filled that role and subsequent roles without the years of experience. The moral of the story should not be, anybody can step into IT, it should be, pick the right major.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      anyone can learn and master anything

      This is the pie-in-the-sky idiocy. No, every person cannot learn every skill. Look, I - as a very good IT person - am never going to be a musician. Sure, I can mash keys on a piano - I even took lessons - but no one wants to hear the result. People have their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and talents. It is not the case that anyone can learn and master anything.

      The quote above is idiotic. It could only be uttered by someone who believes in participation trophies.

      I belief it is uttered by a person that desperately wants to believe software can be made cheaply and programmers are essentially on the level of janitors. (With apologies to janitors, a good janitor is worth a lot. But you would not have that person write complicated code.) This is, of course, not true. Writing software starts on the level of a qualified technician for the very easy stuff and goes all the level up to where you need somebody with an engineering PhD in the respective area and a lot of experi

  • Apprenticeship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bongo ( 13261 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @05:48AM (#60853068)

    Around 1880 or something like that, Master Builders wrote a manifesto AGAINST the proposal to turn architectural design into an academic subject tested by formal exams.

    They argued that the work needed a mixture of aptitudes and abilities, including arts, business, psychology, practical understanding of materials, politics, and so on. Most of these could not be properly taught academically, but rather, needed people who already had a natural APTITUDE which they could then PRACTICE and DEVELOP in the REAL WORLD by working as apprentices.

    Sadly, they lost the argument. Paper qualifications became the norm, and later, some quite famous architects noted that getting bad grades tended to correlate with being a better architect.

    I think the original Master Builders were right, and that the academic-complex has eaten up too much territory--so this same problem keeps showing up in a variety of fields.

    Here we see that gee, isn't it odd how people from weird backgrounds could do well, even though on paper they don't qualify? Yeah, that's exactly the point--the world of IT is similar to the world of architecture, in that you are building an environment and consequently you need many different aptitudes as well as abilities learnt in practice.

    Academia, the whole notion of narrowly defined roles and abilities, especially as used by HR, is all bunk in this field. Yes there are certain very specific problems which require pure research. But as soon as you start building systems and integrating them with other systems, you are into the real world and multiple aptitudes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Around 1880 or something like that, Master Builders wrote a manifesto AGAINST the proposal to turn architectural design into an academic subject tested by formal exams.
      They argued that the work needed a mixture of aptitudes and abilities, including arts, business, psychology, practical understanding of materials, politics, and so on. Most of these could not be properly taught academically, but rather, needed people who already had a natural APTITUDE which they could then PRACTICE and DEVELOP in the REAL WO

    • I think security is the field in computing that is suffering the most from this. There is such a broad range of business and technical aspects to the field, but they expect the best candidate to have a CS degree, and every major cert, and only done security for the last fifteen years.

  • STEM people rate each other by what they produce, not fluffy shit like the art and social science worlds, and we are better - and less discriminatory - for it.

    Make something and we will rate you on it, not on where you learnt to do it, the colour of your skin, what's between your legs, or anything else.

    And that's also why we don't want your pathetic tokens forced into in our world.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • STEM people rate each other by what they produce, not fluffy shit like the art and social science worlds, and we are better

      Sounds like someone who can't draw for shit is salty about it and jealous of artists.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Sounds like someone who can't draw for shit

        But just imagine the horrible clock skew embedded systems would have if we let Salvador Dali design software.

  • Umm (Score:5, Informative)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @06:31AM (#60853124)

    This is like saying Bill Gates and Steve Job dropped out and became a billionaire, therefore it's a good strategy.

    Nevermind that 95% of homeless people don't have college degrees ( https://sites.google.com/site/... [google.com] ) .. compared to 65% of the general adult population. Basically only a dropout's understanding of statistics would make them play such odds.

    Get yourself a STEM degree, unless you objectively are a natural hard worker and hardcore auto-didact (like John Carmack) you won't regret it.

    Not everyone can be Steve Jobs and find themselves a Steve Wozniak to do their STEM heavy lifting. Or in the case of Gates, purchase 86-DOS from a naive programmer. Basically if you want to invent things you need a real STEM education with mathematics, like what Elon Musk has. Gates and especially Steve Jobs were business people that found the right people who were good at inventing. I mean, Steve Jobs didn't invent pinch to zoom, bounce scrolling, slide to unlock etc. Those were guys like Bas Ording, greg christie, Imran chaudri, and others you don't hear about.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 )
      Get yourself a STEM degree, unless you objectively are a natural hard worker and hardcore auto-didact (like John Carmack) you won't get past the HR department - their job is to exclude anyone more skilled than the founders/C-suite - ie having anything resembling skill at all.

      • You may not get past the HR department at some places, but there are plenty of others that will give someone a chance, despite lacking the requisite buzzwords. At the place I work right now (a small software development company), I can think of:
        - At least a half-dozen who dropped out of grad school at various stages and for various reasons
        - The guy who became a lead architect, despite getting his Masters degree in Philosophy
        - The guy who was a nuclear physics major and one of our most talented coders
        - The g

    • Jobs was smarter than people think, and that was part of the problem. A situation most geeks can relate to.
      https://www.biography.com/busi... [biography.com]

      Gates was a similar story of smart people not fitting into the current system.
      https://www.biography.com/busi... [biography.com]

    • Just a side note on the Bill Gates thing:

      Bill Gates got admitted to and attended Harvard. So if anyone plans to use that as an excuse, get into Harvard and attend classes first, lol...

    • Don't really agree on Bill Gates. He was gifted in math and CS, and could program at an early age. Obviously he had the business flair as well, but I'm sure he would have been successful regardless of Microsoft. Maybe not "richest man of the world" successful but good enough by any measure. Besides his family was wealthy to begin with.
    • Seems like you missed the point by strawmanning it. The point is not to go out and hire any random person for a job. The point is that some people take non-traditional career paths: do not instantly dismiss them just because they did not take that traditional approach. Several key leaders in my company worked themselves up from entry-level hourly positions.

  • Test if in doubt... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Richard Kirk ( 535523 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @06:31AM (#60853128)

    I have occasionally seen people with amazing qualifications on paper who turn out to be useless, and people with no qualifications who are great. The solution at Canon Europe was to have a simple programming test, and to write and give a presentation. The test was simple - write (say) a simple sort algorithm, what is the prescience of these operators, how would you support different image formats? Off the wall answers were encouraged. I remember answering the precedence of operators question with (1) I know the page in K&R that has the table, (2) no-one should write code like that, and (3) the answer (which may or may not have been right but it hardly mattered).

    If you know the basics, it gets the interview ball rolling. And if you have any large gaps, they will show. One person applying for a senior sysadmin post went to the toilet during the test and never returned.

    • did you check if he wasn't stuck in the bathroom stall?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      >the prescience of these operators

      I always use prescient operators when available; it saves so much time by not needing to code the arguments . . . :)

      hawk

      • >the prescience of these operators

        I always use prescient operators when available; it saves so much time by not needing to code the arguments . . . :)

        hawk

        Talk about code that practically writes itself!

  • Found 'em (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @06:36AM (#60853132)

    Or this from someone with the adorable Twitter handle @SecuritySphynx: "Gatekeeping is a bad look. 4y ago I was stamping envelopes/answering phones for $12/hour. Now I'm engineering security solutions with some of the worlds largest orgs Almost no one started in tech and never did anything else before. Check your classism at the door, please...."

    Hey, we found the Solarwinds employee who got breached.

  • Depends on how you define gatekeeping (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @06:53AM (#60853166)

    "Gatekeeping is a bad look.

    It is, but gatekeeping is like racism in that many people cynically throw it out there as a way of using defamation and ad hominem to cow people into silence on questioning them.

    Case in point, many of us traditional route guys resent the bumper crop of "data scientists" at my company because they are barely more qualified than a random barista. Junior hires are often econ degree + a 4 week boot camp in Python. Raise your hand if you think that sort of person writes code that rises to even the level of the average intern from a four year university who is in their junior year of college.

    The worst part is that their own education often doesn't even give them the sort of out of the box thinking and analytics mentality that is pitched as an alternative to the traditional path. Had a data scientist with an econ background blather on and on in a meeting and then suddenly go into a rant about Trump being a grade A moron for thinking tariffs would have any positive impact, so I calmly asked "please explain to us how Ricardian theory addresses the super cargo ship, movable factors of production and the wire transfer." Looked like a deer caught in the head lights of bubba's jacked up pickup truck.

    (Spoiler alert: Ricardo basically admitted that free trade couldn't work under the conditions of 2020 because English bankers could just move all production to Portugal and gorge themselves on all of that tasty arbitrage)

    • Junior hires are often econ degree + a 4 week boot camp in Python.

      Boss: “I’ve had it with these motherfu**ing snakes on this motherfu**ing project!”

  • MBA's working in large companies didn't actually have an MBA.

    How many doctors found a Non-Traditional path to their practice.

  • There's a reason tech companies hire people with liberal arts degrees. It's certainly non-traditional, but what they've found is people with such degrees are more flexible, adaptable and able to grasp ideas just as readily, if not more, than people who concentrated in comp sci [edsurge.com].

    “People coming from a liberal arts program who possess good human skills that translate to a variety of jobs are appealing because they are already good thinkers, and can be trained vertically on say, social media or programming,” says Sentz.

    The company's diversity [cnbc.com] (as measured by people's backgrounds) also increases which in turn can lead to better productivity. Silicon Valley is rife with people leading tech companies who have a liberal arts background [forbes.com] as opposed to

  • IT is hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @08:02AM (#60853234)

    So your new doctor doesn't really have a traditional degree per se, and got all of his/her medical training through "non-traditional" methods? I wonder how many insurance companies wouldn't mind. Or patients.

    Repeat after me. IT is hard. It's highly technical. It not only requires upfront and persistent training to remain proficient and current, but it also takes a decent amount of cognitive ability and intelligence, which not everyone has. And like any other challenging profession, that also includes those who are currently trying. IT is often a support role to both internal and external customers, so a certain personality is required of the job as well. (A shitty desk side manner, is no more welcome than a shitty bed side manner.)

    It's not "classism" to look to hire those who have proven they have the capacity. Kind of like we do with many other professions that demand a particular capability.

    As far as the "non-traditional" argument goes, we've been doing OJT and accepting certifications and experience in lieu of a "traditional" degree for decades now in IT. You can earn CEUs at DEFCON. Those trying to make a point here, haven't been paying attention.

  • It should more accurately read, "Don't dismiss the idea of hiring folks with non-traditional paths to tech."

    Or if you speak in ridiculous non-sense, "Don't (clap) dismiss (clap) the (clap) idea (clap) of (clap) hiring (clap) folks (clap) with (clap) non (clap) traditional (clap) paths (clap) to (clap) tech (clap)(coffee)(coffee)(beer)(coffee)(hundy)(pizza)(smiley)(dog)(kite)(music)(eyeroll)"

    Wait. Disregard that last one. That was me.

  • These are the people mainly responsible for the current mess. And they want to get more into the field? Are these people completely derangesd?

  • College adds to debt and is also time consuming.

    I learned a lot about tech on my own and through mentorships. I live in a small town where there aren't a lot of job opportunities but I avail myself of books at the library (curbside pickup these days) and I also use many online resources.

  • Step 1: work in an unrelated field to demonstrate work ethic

    Step 2: Sleep at a holiday inn express

    Step 3: Engineer security solutions for a Fortune 500 company

    Step 4: Profit!

    We did it slashdot!

  • Shilling for low wages and no training (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @10:21AM (#60853450)

    I wonder how much of this gets promoted as a means to find people who corporations can pay less because they have weaker existing credentials and they don't have to invest in training/continuing education because these people will do it themselves?

    I'm not knocking self-directed learning here, everyone who has been successful in IT has spent some time learning on their own time (and dime!).

    But some of this feels like a means of encouraging yet another way for corporations to obtain talent without investing in directly. Either because the people come from a background with no credentials and can be justifiably paid less (for a while, at least) and they come to the table willing to keep investing in their own training without any corporate dollars going into it?

    I know they go nuts for this where I work and it often just feels like lazy and cheap management, worse it leads to chaotic and incoherent technology direction since it often boils down to some gee-whiz thing Chad did in his basement being the standard, which of course is undocumented and often wrong.

  • Aptitude over Education (Score:3)

    by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Monday December 21, 2020 @12:35PM (#60853852)

    I think many folks on both sides are confusing aptitude. To me, it doesn't matter if you have the education or not, if you don't have the aptitude for IT, you're going to suck at it.

    I've worked with tons of "educated" developers who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. They got into it for the money, were able to pass the exams, but they never had the real aptitude for it. And this lack of aptitude results in bad code and bad implementations and ultimately bad projects and products.

    Likewise there can be folks who were never educated or trained but, because they had the aptitude for it, they could pick it up and run with it. With the aptitude, not only could they learn programming, but they could apply it appropriate ways to build meaningful systems.

    That said, you simply can't beat the combination of aptitude and education. The education gives you the fundamentals to understand how it all works, how to make sense out of multithreaded systems with synchronized blocks and semaphores controlling access, and the aptitude allows you to apply all of that education to build and maintain complex systems.

    I think currently our problem is that we don't really have a good test to identify those with the right aptitude and can't get them set up into the right education track to take advantage of that aptitude. Growing up, I remember in elementary school we were tested for "musical aptitude", or basically seeing if we had aptitude to learn an instrument and which one(s) we might be good at. I'm wondering if we couldn't have such a thing for "IT aptitude", or maybe we do and I've just been out of elementary school for too long ;-)

    And for the record the "I used to be a barista and now I'm the VP of Engineering" example blows. Why? Because a VP of Engineering is a fancy term for a business person that oversees engineering. It doesn't mean they have such awesome technical skills that they're better than all other engineers in the company. It means they understand the economics of business spending and investment, and they know how to make decisions that improve profit while minimizing risk. It requires a little technical experience to understand terminology and what not, but only at a surface level. Any in depth knowledge required will be provided by subordinates who are expected to understand the details and explain them when required. Maybe Mr Brunelle is different, but I'm sure if we had a developer intimately versed in completing an electronic payment, dealing with failures, handling rollbacks, etc. that we could easily identify gaps in his knowledge of the systems he oversees. Not that is a bad thing, someone at his level should not waste time mucking around in the details, but neither should we raise him up as an excellent IT person that didn't get a classical IT education...

    • I think many folks on both sides are confusing aptitude. To me, it doesn't matter if you have the education or not, if you don't have the aptitude for IT, you're going to suck at it.

      This right here. I saw my fellow class mates struggle and work hard and spend hours and hours of lab time and make decent grades and .... run away from the IT field as soon as they graduate.

      A few decades later I'm teaching as an adjunct at the community college level and I can pretty much tell who can/will end up actually getting a job in IT (because they LIKE it and want to do it) vs those going through the motions to get a degree 'cause they "help grandma with Facebook and like playing games online" or "t

  • I'm not sure how this would be anything new... tech companies have been hiring people with the right skills regardless of formal education at least as long as I've been working from the late 1990s. I am someone who discovered that I could make more in IT than I hoped to make designing RF circuits after taking a break from engineering school. I had every intention of going back to school prior to looking for a job, but after getting a few years of experience it no longer made financial sense to me.

    I starte

  • So, Twitter pulled the plug on it's Javascript-less version December 15th. Anyone have a way to read what's on Twitter without enabling JS?

  • HR won't hire them, because HR KNOWS NOTHING about the organization they're HR for, and all of them will be moving to somewhere else in several years, so they don't *care* to learn about their organization.

    Since they know *nothing*, they want degrees and certifications that someone else said this person was ok.

    Come the Revolution, we'll lead HR into the parking lot, toss asphalt on them, and PAVE THEM INTO THE ROADWAY, and *then* they'll have some social utility.

  • Designers, mechanics and drivers (Score:3)

    by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @03:59AM (#60856062)

    I don't believe anyone can be taught it - at least not to code, working in generalist business management positions in tech of course is no different from any other industry. Like some musical abilities, its innate, something people are born with or not.

    There was a wave of pronouncements from UK politicians some time ago that all children should be taught programming in school. Only people who had never written code would think that was sensible. The sensible thing to teach them was either to become intelligent users or for some to learn a minimum of systems management.

    What you need is some test for this ability. Its like musical composition. Most will develop taste in music. Some will take up an instrument. Very very few will master music composition. Expecting everyone to be able to, with training, is silly. Just as not everyone can master serious levels of math.

    What you need is not an account of background - this just screens for those who have the ability who have happened to have exercised it in the past. What's needed is a screen for those who have it.

    Quite a number will have it, and never know they do. Like a guy I knew who in his sixties, no previous programming experience, who for various reasons found himself with a challenge which he could only solve by writing a quite large application. He picked up a high level language and wrote the app in three months. Before that, he had no idea of having any special ability in the area.

    Its not a teaching problem, or not primarily a teaching problem. The problem is finding the ones with the unconscious ability to profit from the teaching. Or even, not really to need teaching, once they know they have to learn. My acquaintance taught himself.

    Its like Capablanca, who picked up chess as a child by watching his father play. Similar thing.

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