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IT Graduates Not "Well-Trained, Ready-To-Go"
coondoggie writes "There is a disconnect between students getting high-tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates. Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,' according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers."
Most IT hiring requires experience! Noobs are OK for some stuff but there's no way for any school to train them for what everyone in the real world is looking for ('cuz we all want something different).
A degree is not a job training course.
End of.
Since when did employers expect college grads to be "ready to go?" The skills they say they want are taught in college, but are pure speculation until applied in a meaningful way. Maybe that is a cry for more/better internship programs.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I attended a talk by an aerospace engineer and one of the first thing he realized about his first job is he didn't really know anything. His courses were merely a foundation for the rest of his career. It is this way in any technical field.
I suspect bean counting HR types are driving the data. They are seldom technically proficient enough
to have a clue.
Getting IT people with decent job history and programmers with the same is not going to
happen for $20.00 per hour or 40 K per year.
It used to be a degree was paper that proved you were trainable. Now it seems the expectation is the paper proves you're trained. Its about as ridiculous to expect higher education to pump out fully trained systems people as it is to expect higher education to pump out fully trained executives. Higher education is to provide a well rounded education, and training to learn how to learn. The other thing I couldn't help but notice is many of the jobs on this list are the very items companies had outsourced to death. Nobody in their right mind would spend time training in these areas knowing their careers would be short lived. I think outsourcing is no longer the cheap form of labor it once was and wouldn't you know it....there is a shortage of skilled people her to fall back on. Is that a failure of education? Or a failure of management? I view it very much as the latter.
It's called "computer science" for a reason. If you want IT (information technology) people, you're looking in the wrong place. Of course that's a symptom of a society in which vocational training alone is a dead end career decision. All reasonably smart kids therefore aim for a college degree and that means they're going to become scientists first and have to be retrained for practical careers. Unless businesses start considering candidates without college degrees (and pay them based on the job they do, not on the formal education), the situation isn't going to change.
No one ever graduated with the wide range of expert-level skills and the absurd amount of experience required. IT employers want candidates to know everything under the sun, and to have known those skills at least since they were created. For example, I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
IT managers need to get real. The chances that they'll actually find a candidate with real expertise in PHP, RoR, Python, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Cisco, JavaScript, jQuery, UI/UX, Photoshop, and Flash is pretty slim (yes, I saw that just the other day).
Translation: "Why can't I pay fresh college graduate rates for someone who does the job of an experienced sysadmin?"
Reason: because fresh college graduates are not experienced, since douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
And to be honest, it kind of makes sense from their perspective - they could hire a guy fresh out of college, invest a couple of years in training him, and then watch him fly away to a better position somewhere else. For some reason, people just don't stick around when their skills grow, but their position and compensation doesn't! How weird!
Employee retention? Internal promotions? What's this madness you speak of?
I went into the article expecting the usual bone-headed incompetent management drivel, but the last item on the list of jobs that are hard to fill still blew me away:
10. Active Federal Government Security Clearance
Seriously, any hiring manager that thinks it's the universities' responsibility to get security clearances for students as part of a degree, wow, that's a hiring manager that somebody should drag out back and shoot.
... and it's in the heads of the employers. How on earth can anyone train to be 'ready to go' when IT in particular, and engineering in general, is such a vast shifting quicksand. Are universities supposed to re-write their course material every 3 months? Where will they get information about new hardware/software being developed (secretly) now and due to be released before the students graduate? Do students have to decide before they actually start study which specific manufacturer of which specific industry they will be 'ready to go' to?
try to get the flow of that, as we'll never be able to be trained properly to match the 'experience' of inadvertently aiding unprecedented evile in it's life0cidal cause.
we'll be able to see the new chores opening up coinciding with remarkable spontaneous outbreaks of caring for one another, & the aforementioned little ones, whilst rejecting all forms of weaponization/destruction. see you there? there's nowhere left to hide.
I someone with 20 years of expertise with 0-1 calendar years of experience/paygrade.
If they would stop requiring CS degrees the problem would get better. They require the degree when it is not really required for the particular job they are hiring for. Of course some folks graduating from privately run IT training programs have relevant education, but the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental math and theory. They don't train people to be IT workers, they train them to be programmers and theoreticians. Good IT workers have experience. Experience is not something school gives, especially in this field.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Universities are not trade schools. Employers who are expecting any new employee to be instantly productive are deluded.
Last week I interviewed a candidate with a Masters degree and 20 years of experience in the industry. We'll probably hire her, but we figure that she could be productive in three months and won't be worried if she takes six [1].
[1] That's net. In other words, she'll be doing useful work fairly soon, but by the time she's 100% up to speed we'll have invested three to six months of her terminal productivity getting her oriented, etc.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
IBM expects programmers coming out of college to act like experienced managers? That sounds pretty silly to me. As for having the skills "ready to go", you come out of university with a degree. You still need experience and seasoning. This whole thing is nonsense.
In other words, "Only 8% of hiring managers rate recent graduates as having 5+ years experience in the three common technologies, five esoteric products, and specific industry they're hiring for." Not exactly news.
I am a development director for a business. It is astonishing to me how ill prepared new grads are. Most do not know SQL, most have never used a webservice, CSS, or any number if common relevant skills. I give a coding test to candidates. It involves a solution that requires a dictionary class and about 15 lines of code to loop through a flat file. It is open help files. 80% of new grads fail it. It is easier than most classroom assignments I had coming up.
Some of the skills they are asking for are reasonable:
OK, fair enough. A CS program from which you can graduate without knowing programming in some language is pretty useless.
Some are less reasonable:
Sorry guys, while a graduate should have some basics in this area, you really need real world experience to develop these skills to a useful extent. Or possibly an advanced degree in which the student studied real systems.
And some are just too vague to figure out what they want:
Database skills? You want them to know how to design a database using nth normal form? The basics of SQL syntax? How ISAM works? How to use Oracle Forms? It's not enough to say "database skills". The other one is even more vague.
The list of "hard to fill" positions is pretty useless, too. Love the one about the security clearance... of course it's hard to fill, the only people with active clearances are those who are working or very recently were working on a job which required one. You want an employee with a security clearance, stop being cheap bastards and hire someone you can get cleared. New grads are probably easier here; less time for them to accumulate skeletons in their closet.
I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
Once upon a time (1981) my then employer advertised for a programmer with five years of experience in 8088 (not 8086) assembly code. I pointed out that they were effectively screening out honest applicants, but they ran the ad that way anyhow.
Events proved me right.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'.
92% of hiring manages prefer out sourcing of IT departments because they can get it cheaper so they are willing to overlook well-trained.
Seriously, IT graduates are not capable? No shit, maybe we should be asking why capitalist don't know shit either?
we need more tech / trade IT schools they can have better IT class work with less of the big university filler.
IT should have apprenticeship like other trades you don't see plumbers needing 4 years just in a class room to get a job.
The old university systems is not a good fit for the IT field.
has college graduation been the equivalent of "training" ? I don't know a single doctor who, even after acquiring their MD would suggest that they are "trained" in a given specialty.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
Not university graduates.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Face it, american capitalism died 3 years ago due to the fact that it was enforced with guns and run by crooks. The financial markets have never been free because intermediaries learned how to game the system without understand what money is for (psychopaths). The most valuable product of western civilization is knowledge and its free! IT IS FREE! so should you!
yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'
I would rate only 8% of managers as having the skill to deduce what they are hiring.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Whatever, how often does anything change in plumbing? Almost never. Don't even try to tell me it does. What you are saying is an employer should be able to legally treat new hires like shit. The fact is they already do, but you want a legal way to get work for basically free from new hires. That's what an apprentice plumber is, "almost free" labor. Think architects. Maybe after 10 years they get to design something different than bathrooms.
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7429337/
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell? There's a ton of good jobs for people that can write C# web apps pushing data in and out of a business data base. All it would take is a 2 year program that teaches web development, c#, sql, and business processes. That business process part is really important too. Your program specs are going to look like gibberish to you if you don't have a basic understanding of accounting, purchasing, and billing.
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
(ok, rant over)
Strangely, many European countries have just that. For example, Deutsche Telekom and Siemens even have their own training divisions in place to raise new for their needs and many countries run their own vocational school system alongside to teach the common groundwork while the actual specialisation happens on the job in the students' company.
if (IT== ComputerScience) {
print('you are lying');
}
Colleges teach computer science. Computer scientists work on academia, not in the "market". The market needs to push for a new major: Software engineer that teaches what they need the most (ie less math).
Owning a company with many IT employees I do see this a lot, people are not prepared for real world situations coming from Universities. BUT the classes in Colleges and Universities aren't there to teach how to deal with specific situations, they're almost always theory and very little hands on.
The requirements that I now employ in my hiring process, after going through a lot of IT grads, is for people to demonstrate their capability to trace problems and be systematic about troubleshooting issues. That's more of a thought process than it is something that can be taught. The employers that believe people are going to have the perfect training just out of school are just ignorant to the diversity of the term IT.
The February 2011 "Communications of the ACM" describes recent research showing that Computing and Computer Science education is not succeeding at teaching the basics. The good news is that the problem is now beginning to get useful attention in the form of actually figuring out how to teach programming (etc). Essentially they are beginning to use the scientific method to determine what works for teaching CS. Instead of guessing.
Unfortunately the market does expect more experience than any college graduate can get in four years. I started programming at fourteen as a freshman in HS and at 45 can honestly say I have thirty years of coding experience. I also jumped in on the beta of the up and coming MS .Net technology circa 2000 so actually have ten years experience with .Net.
I can only speak to programming but we should be exposing kids in middle school to all of the different languages and let them go to town if it is something that they like. Summer interning in High School would probably lead to a direct hire on graduation and they can get their degree on the company's dime. At the very least they will be three or four years ahead of any other graduate when they are out looking for work.
On a final note I can say definitely that no cares about a college degree if you have the required experience.
In my experience, the quickest folks to get "up and running", are those with team experience. One of my profs, Arthur Lo, once said of his course, "Most students say that they get the most out of the lab exercises . . . I think that they get the most out of their lab partner." It sounds trivial, but it is rather insightful . . . the best newbies that I have worked with, had experience in working in teams.
"Hey, let's all of us work on a project together. We'll use a system like CVS so we can all see what's up. If some folks are better at programming, and others better at management stuff, we will divide the responsibilities, accordingly."
The worst case that I had, was a work student intern, who couldn't program himself out of a paper bag. I asked him why he chose to study CS. His answer: "Because I heard that you can earn a lot of money there."
Wrong answer.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I agree to a certain extent. The 'old university' approach isn't necessarily bad, it's just how business has latched onto it and expects the moon. They're still operating in a pre-2000 mentality, to a large degree: "someone with an IT/CS degree must be a computer genius".
Honestly, I'd like to see IT take the following approaches (in abstract):
* A two year degree gets you a technician job
* A four year degree gets you an junior engineer/administrator apprentice
* A two year degree with 2-3 years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree (in terms of experience)
* Six years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree
And so on. The problem arises where companies expect to hire someone with a 4-year degree and 4+ years of experience for trade school graduate rates (eg. 2 years school + 2 years of experience).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
but it sounds like I started off better. You can get experience on campus, that is what I did. Find a student job in IT or another department that runs its IT. But companies still weren't hiring me with my experience. I guess the degree in photography threw them off. I could have developed 1 job into a systems management job and another into a business analyst job after working as a contractor temporarily.
Why even report this as a problem with IT college training.
The HR guys are just working off a form from pointy haired bosses in the internal IT department.
So the better question is how would you rate your companies IT management ?
mod up a 2 year tech degree + on the job work is better then a 4 year degree that has a lot of bloat that is not needed to a basic level that is needed on the job. Most of the time you should not even need the 2 year part.
When I employee someone as a software developer, _I expect them to be able to code_. That is an entry-level requirement: I will not pay you to learn fricking C or Java on my time, especially when that is one of the job requirements. Furthermore, I am at a complete loss to explain how someone can get through a computer science degree _without_ knowing how to program (at all: I'm talking about writing "strstr()" here, nothing complicated).
well the college degrees system is a bad fit as well and that is why you see lots of tech schools there degrees have a better fit then the old university systems and lots CS programs are to broad (next to the tech schools that have more a hands on) and have lots of non tech filler.
Readers of Slashdot, you need to ask yourselves what is more important: servitude to corporations who have zero loyalty to anything but their own bottom lines, or being members of an educated civilization which values critical thinking and creativity. If corporations start dictating educational policy and turning universities into glorified vocational training schools, we will have taken a giant step backward toward a feudal society. Repeat this again and again until you understand it: EDUCATION IS NOT JOB TRAINING! CITIZENSHIP IS NOT CORPORATE SLAVERY! Until you really appreciate this fact and act upon it, you will be nothing but a glorified cubicle serf. Without free, critical thinkers there can be no real progress, and we’re all living in a shiny, high tech Dark Age.
doctors have residency that is job the training
I think everyone should be required to take a year of shop class in high school and learn to use basic power tools. It really pisses me off when I hire someone and they can't even use a simple tool like a drill. Latest example: we hired a kid who's still in school doing some kind IT background. About a week and half ago I asked him to hang up some coat hooks in the office. It didn't get done, it didn't get done, and then this morning I get an email that says something like, "I tried to do it, but I don't know how and I think you'll be better." Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science.
----- obSig
Good for you to bad most HR wants that degree and then you have lots of people who can do the IT job but can't get it as they don't have that degree.
I not saying that degrees are bad but what you have is tech schools that put degrees that are not the same as other non tech school degrees and they you have people with no degree that can do a IT job.
But sadly what you see the people with tech and no degrees held back while people with degrees get jobs that have little to idea about the real work part of it. (over the no degree or tech degree people)
A study just found that at least 8% of hiring managers are totally and completely incompetent!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I have worked with 3 students/grads of 2 local schools and I've never been disappointed. The schools really dig into the core of good programming, but also encourage research and understanding into other fields. One kid (an intern) had never seen or even heard of Python. He was able to pick it up in a mater of hours and write a bang out awesome app in about 6 days. Another one had a great idea and programmed an app that we pitched to the local and state EMAs and they loved it. Both of these could be worth thousands of dollars with some polish. Good programmers and IT start in middle school or sooner learning what they need. College / Tech School is just the polish they need to be ready for the "real" world. The problem is that we expect higher education to turn un-talented people into rock starts, and that higher education buys into it. Raise the bar for entrances and simply don't give out degrees to people who are good at taking tests only. Personally I've failed 2 classes before just because I didn't have a Windows computer, and I was a Linux student at a Tech school. The two classes were SQL and Web programming. I was required to have MS SQL server and Adobe Dreamweaver, nether of which was in the course description. When I found this out (after it was too late to drop the courses ) I complained and the teachers told me "that is what professionals use, so you must learn it". Funny, at this point I had been the webmaster/IT guy for 2 TV stations, 2 software companies, and then had started my own web development firm. Not once had I ever used any of those products nor had I ever paid for software. I just wanted a Cert to put on my resume to show to potential clients. Waste.
Kerry Hatcher | Owner | Hatch Media Productions
When interviewing for positions I don't even give the school a second glance, I could care less. What I look for is thought patterns and behavior that tells me this person is genetically predisposed for this type of work. Colleges work under the assumption that anyone can be trained to do a certain job, that is not however reality.
Got Code?
These guys know more by wrote than by theory, of course they'll hit walls. IT students need to learn a lot more than the surface fat that they're taught.
Funny..when I hire, we look at grades, and then course selection. That's basically used as an indicator of how self motivated a person is. Getting straight A's when the median grade is an A- isn't as impressive as a B in a very difficult course. And I always assume that the new hires know nothing when they start and typically spend 4-6 weeks on training - hand held at first but i expect them to be self motivated to learn, read and ask the right questions so that they aren't wasting time. Those are the ones I keep - the ones that muddle along don't stay very long. Fortunately, in the last 9 years, there's only been one that hasn't met expectations and flourished. I find that learning the theory helps when you expect the person to learn new concepts quickly and without having to explain things in detail. I'm working with an internal transfer right now and while he works very, very hard, I know he doesn't really understand abstract concepts very well. This is mostly on the basis that I have to explain things differently multiple times. He's definitely someone that fits well when you have to do relatively well defined tasks, but I don't think he would be the type that I'd want developing and debugging new ideas, which is really too bad. I forgot to mention that he is an older gentleman and has many years of experience with hardware and software.
"Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science."
Other than taking a week to get back to you instead of a day, this 'kid' is actually smart.
I would go for it in my own house, but not in somebody else's office, particularly when (as in 99.9% of the time) the building isn't owned by the manager.
In virtually any corporate environment the downside risk to not doing it right when it isn't your job (even if you think you know how) outweights the inefficiency of letting somebody whose job it is to do this do it (there is usually a facilities person from the company or building management) or letting somebody experienced take the blame for doing something nonstandard.
Your 'kid' has read Dilbert and has visions of HR marching him out sqawking "vandalism of premises".
You can always advertise for jobs such as "require IT skills X,Y and Z, and must have 1 year apprentice carpenter experience". Good luck with that.
If you didn't, it should not "really piss you off" any more than finding that your new hire does not actually know french.
This is news???
If colleges train on software, what are graduates to do when the software in the industry changes, and they have no formal background on the how/why the software exists? Best they understand the principles of network, QoS, graph theory ( what are networks if not graphs ), etc. Things that are useful outside of Cisco/Windows/whatever.
Its the same argument for CS courses. "Colleges need to teach C#/JAVA/flavor of the day". No they don't. Languages come and go. They need to teach algorithms, optimization, architecture, etc. Because these let you write efficient programs across a variety of languages.
Employers are getting a college trained employee at no up front cost to them. If they want something different, they can pay for it. For example they could write a contract with an entering freshman to pay for four year's college in exchange for four year's of employment at a reduced salary -- like the Navy does.
Funny..when I hire, we look at grades, and then course selection. That's basically used as an indicator of how self motivated a person is.
Not necessarily. The classes could have been easy and uninformative or they could have cheated, etc. I'd test their knowledge before I hired anyone.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That's because what schools teach isn't what IT employers want. They want experienced people, true; but more than that they want people who are skilled in the tools that the employer uses. Colleges and unis will teach a person the theory and processes behind the tools -- OSI model, networking, packet structure, etc. But it won't teach them how to use the specific network management tools or diagnostics that each employer uses.
Ultimately, employers -- or at least, those IT hiring managers who are distant from the actual workers and clueful IT managers -- want the colleges and unis to teach these tools. They don't want employees with college degrees (and college student loans which will keep them looking for better-paying jobs) whom they have to take the time to teach what tools they use and what the nuances of their network are. They want IT monkeys who somehow instinctively know every facet of their networks and can push the right buttons on whatever tool you put in front of them.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I was once hired with the title "Telecommunications Mechanic" and had a decent amount of skill wiring systems up and what not.
It became apparent very quickly this was mostly a blue collared job - mostly involving metal work (which I also had experience with - custom building brackets and installing gear in steel). I came in on day #1 clean-shaven from the interview which makes me look 16. They assumed I had never used so much as a hammer before.
Towards the end I simply cut a straight line into a piece of sheet metal with a jigsaw, I shit you not - I got praised by the boss on the good job.
On the last day I wired up an alarm panel that needed to get done without being told to. "Where'd you learn how to do that? That's amazing." I simply read the schematics.
more internships less class room
why have 2 years class room and then 1-2 years internships maybe with some requiring education on new stuff in the field?
Shit flows downhill and payday's on friday, that never changes. But actually a lot of stuff changes in plumbing, though at a slower rate. You've now got PVC waste lines rather than cast iron, copper, or galvanized, also a new version of cast iron with a different fitting system. You've got cPVC and PEX supply (and polybutylene has been in and out) in addition to copper. Hot water recirculation systems have become more common, tankless water heaters also. All sorts of little changes too, in how the pipes have to be hung (particularly in earthquake-prone areas), expansion tanks, water hammer preventers, sizing, etc.
With over 30 years in tech... I've worked with very few IT managers that have domain expertise. Sure they can take a helpdesk ticket and resolve the issue. But rare is the IT manager that have in depth knowledge of the users they support. University is not mean to be a trade school.
We just went through a little hiring process looking for a new bench monkey. We had a couple applicants that were about to/had just graduated from a local 2 year IT school, but we also had people who just did IT as a hobby. The applicants that did IT type work as a hobby could answer more of our questions than the IT school grads. To seal the deal, the IT grads were expecting 50k right out of school, but were less apt. I'll take someone with a passion over a person with a sense of entitlement any day.
Same song as always: America's colleges aren't turning out enough skilled people [ willing to work for developing-nation wages ].
It pissed him off because he hired a boy and was hoping for a man.
Once upon a time the _company_ did the training; they hired someone that they believed had potential, knowing the new hire would --now get this, it's a radical concept-- _grow_ into the position.
To be honest, that was also in an era where there was little job hopping. Where the corporation knew there was a high probability the person would stay with the company for many years. In other words those new skills would benefit the corp doing the training rather than some other corp, possibly a competitor. Everything has a price, including job hopping. Which came first, reduced training or job hopping? I don't know but I expect they evolved together over time and both contributed to a cycle of negative feedback.
On the job training and apprenticeships? Hear of those anymore?
Colleges provide the basics and foundation, enough so somebody understands something from the starting point. If you want a specialist or an expert for a given task, you're not going to get it out of the classroom. That never was the point of college in the first place.
The problem is, we got waaaaaaaay too many herpy-derpy motherfuckas running management and working in H.R. that expect some kind of miracles. And these are the ass-clowns that destroyed the training programs and outsourced a lot of the lower level jobs starting in the late 1990s and through the 2000's, just so they could make the expense sheets look better. Well guess what? Reap what you sow, bitches!
Am I a bit bitter? Maybe.
Now, the corporation the demands that universities be corporate training mills, rather than an institution of higher learning as universities were intended to be, so that the company doesn't have to spend time and resources on training. The most glaring example of this is the business school: corporations have pushed off their training on b-schools, with students not learning a whole hell of a lot in terms of critical thinking skills. Now they want the same b-school type of training to occur in other disciplines/majors.
Really, have you been to business school recently? I had the typical arrogant engineer's attitude towards business school that you seem to display. I thoroughly enjoyed business school in part because I was so wrong and my former ignorance made me laugh. For example a marketing class was not about using psychology to trick people. It was about using sound statistical theory to design a survey to rank needs/wants and to build a mathematical model to describe product market share. As a model it of course has its limitations but the approach in general was equivalent to what I saw i various science and engineering classes of the past. Not what I expected at all. In an economics class the externalization of costs was discussed and their impact on society and the ethics of doing so was discussed. Not what I had expected. In a strategy class sustainable resources was discussed. Not what I had expected ...
But people who have jobs in IT just spend all there days reinstalling windows? And at the same time take all day doing so.
The key factor (imo) is whether are self-motivated enough to learn the college level material on your own.
I'd still recommend a degree. But only because it makes some of the future steps easier. But get the cheapest, fastest degree you can find. Any degree. You can improve it later.
20 years down the road, you have 19 years of experience in "IT" (13 years writing code professionally) and the people who went to college have 16 years experience in "IT" (16 years writing code professionally).
The difference will not be with the groups. It will be with the individuals who push themselves to learn more and to do more.
Back when I was really a kid (7th and 8th grade, in the 70's), we had shop for the guys, and home economics for the chicks. Then the winds of change swept in and all pupils had to take both classes. In home economics, the teacher tried to put a mix of boys and girls at the kitchen. My group had four boys. What we cooked, you couldn't feed to starving buzzards. After one of the sessions, we had a school assembly. The guy sitting next to me, who was in my group, kept burping and saying, "It's coming up!" The gag was, that the home economics class never taught me how to sew a button on a shirt.
In shop, we had an old Italian guy. He loved his job, and when you came into his shop . . . he made it clear that it was his shop. When showing us how to use power drills, one of the chicks squealed, "I never want to use a power tool ever again! That's why I'm getting married for!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't know about you guys, but my experience has been (working in IT in various industries for almost 15 years) that not only is much of what's already in these comments true (about the sheer ridiculousness of many of the requirements, the desire for colleges to be trade schools, etc.) is that if you want to honestly survive these days in IT without running your company or the benefits of nepotism/cronyism, that you have to be a lifelong learner and serious self-starter, even with mounds of experience. The IT person (doesn't matter if they're an infrastructure architect (hope you're reading High Scalability), database admin (not a noSQL/hybrid noSQL/SQL expert yet?) or front end developer (you should be a web dev blog addict)) who is not learning new technologies every year is in a boat nearly as bad as the fresh grad with no experience at all.
I don't personally have a problem with it since I love this stuff, but I've seen many people burn out over this (not just the long hours, insane demands, or managerial stupidity.) You can argue that "smart companies don't do this! They never change technologies every two years!" but stupid companies provide jobs, and that's what people need. There aren't any good solutions to this, since companies will do what they'll do, but it helps to be aware of it nonetheless.
I've been an IT Manager (one without a degree I have to add) forgive me for posting anonymously, but I dont want to give clues to my identity.
I've recently following the company I worked for colapsing into administration decided to go and complete my IT degree, and I find myself at University (in the UK) amongst a group of people some are adults who are learning IT for the first time, the bulk are young adults trying their best to muddle their way through learning in their academic degree, however, there is a dramatic difference between the real world and the world of academia, which I now find myself in.
I am constantly having to answer for the lecturers lack of understanding of the business world, as most of the lecturers have never worked in a real world IT enviroment. Those which have seem to be teaching the more obsure subjects, and they are really good, but the students seem to have no appreciation for the lessons which they can learn from these people, mostly because the subject is quite obscure.
Can I honestly say that they will be ready for the real world? Sadly no.
Can they learn? Yes they can.
Would I employ them as an IT Manager? I would employ 2 of them tomorrow if I could, out of a year of 60 students.
What about the rest would you employ them? Not on your nelly would I. (hence the anonymous status)
The real problem is the overwealming experience of the degree is not so much the learning but their insistance to go out and get drunk 3 out of 7 nights of the week, and to just mess about in lectures, and tutorials, the times I see facebook on the workstations, makes me want to cry. Here I am trying my best to tick all the boxes of an IT degree I missed out on, and they just want to mess about. ARGH!!!!! its so frustrating.
Can a degree teach you what you need for work, YES (shouting intended) but the students have to be willing and want to learn, not just to mess about. For all you students reading this rant, I mean you, Buckle up and get your nose to the grind stone and work through your degree, not stagger through it in a haze.
What are 'high tech degrees'? I mean, I'm a computer science major - I would call that a high tech degree. But no, we are not being taught much about management - we have room that we can if we so choose, but I don't think too many do. Why? Because that's what the IST (Information Sciences and Technology) major is for. That's what they tell incoming freshmen - IST is management, Computer Science is actually creating things.
Now, I can't say if the IST people are good at management or not - but I would hope so, since that's pretty much what their degree is all about. I would say the issue is more corporations (and some universities - my own included in some ways) not understanding that 'Computer Science' is not a catch-all term for all IT-related needs. I can't tell you how many recruiters I've seen looking for computer science majors when that is probably not the degree they actually want for the kinds of work they're doing.
8% is pretty decent, considering most people working in the industry wouldn't even qualify as 'well-trained, ready-to-go'. At least with graduates, there's still the possibility of them getting there, as opposed to all the grossly incompetent veterans with too much ego to ever learn anything new.
http://astutehosting.com/
I do the same thing all the time. I was hired for my systems engineering knowledge. If you think i'm going to take out the trash, it probably isn't getting done.
Reading all the apologies and excuses posted here, I have to say most of you will have a very hard time finding a job.
It is pretty clear to me that a good part of the posters are still in college, and still have that damn college education.
Lemme clue you in. And please, if you are still in college, getting your IT-related degree, read this. I am a business owner in the IT field. My father is a college professor. I have a very, very hard time finding people who are ``hireable'' (to use a "word" I have been hearing alot). All my statements below are valid only to the IT field and colleges. So please take it in context.
First, understand that 99% of what you learn in college is useless. College is giving you some very broad knowledge, in hope that some of it will be useful, which is a valid (if hardly enough) position. They don't know what job you will get, so they are giving you as much knowledge they can cram inside your head. You will use 1% of it.
Now, for the college mentality. In college you are shown time and time again that your knowledge if measured by how well you do in a test. How much you know. College teaches you that learning is being spool fed knowledge by someone else. College teaches you that you should be measured by how much you know.
All that is wrong, plain an simple. If you don't know HOW to apply your knowledge, what you know is useless. If you can't go, find the information, process it, understand, separate what is important than what is not, filter it through common sense, and retain what is of value and can be used, you don't know how to learn. How much you know is nowhere near as important was your ability to make use of knowledge.
Companies will ask for "previous work experience". Notice those are exactly the words that are used most of the time. ANY WORK EXPERIENCE is important. That is at least 80% of the issue. Even if you were handling bags to a customer at a supermarket, taking out the garbage at McDonalds. You have previous work experience. You've been inside a company. You've seen and lived company dynamics. If you can get that work experience in the IT field, even better, but that is really secondary.
Lets say you are going to spend 5 years in college. Right around your second or third year, go talk to company recruiters. See what they are looking for. Not technical skills, but what kind of employee they want. Do they want people with read and write in spanish ? Who can speak mandarin ? Who are healthy ? Who practice sports ? There is probably some "placement" person in your college. Go talk to that person, and ask him what the companies want. Take it with a grain of salt, because you can't be sure about how much that person really knows, but it is more information for you.
Practice decision making. Practice leadership skills. Remember that companies will only give responsibilities for people who take responsibility (yeah, I know what that sounds like, but it is still true). USE YOUR TIME IN COLLEGE for more than reading books, passing tests and parties. Think of it as a big opportunity to open doors, make contacts and learn outside the box. Your first objective should be: to make yourself more attractive to the companies than the other people you will graduate with. Try and answer the question: why would a company hire YOU, instead of all the other people, sometimes cheaper, sometimes with more experience, that are trying for that position.
Try and meet recruiters and business owners. Try and understand how they think, and what they are looking for. Learn practicality. If they own a successful business (and you don't), they know better than you what is best for their company. They might not know better than other business owners, but they also know better than you what is best for OTHER companies.
Think of it this way: the fact you have a college degree isn't work shit by itself. So what can YOU do to make that degree worth something ? Remember no one will be hiring your degree. They will be hiring you. That you have a degree
morcego
It's just as well though. If they managed to filter out all the half-man half-cabbage hybrids, 90% of IT people would be adding to our nations' homeless rolls instead of working, and the salary for IT type work would be several times higher than it is right now due to the principles of supply and demand. Most of those half-man half-cabbage hybrids do an "OK" job and are content to just chill out on the weekend with a cool Coors 64 ouncer and a week's worth of Jersey Shore backed up on the ol' Tivo.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The article is not all that clear on the hiring of college graduates versus the hiring of experienced professionals. This is evident from the author not being consistent with regards to specifying details. The gap between the college graduate and others is experience. If I were hiring someone, I would want someone with a PhD from MIT, a MBA from Harvard, a top secret clearance, CCIE, RHCE, CEH, ITIL, and a bunch of other acronyms and only pay them $40k. There not only is a disconnect between the college graduate and the experienced professional, there is a gap between the expectations of the hiring managers and what is reality.
Schools have 120-128 credits to which they can train students. Once you subtract the core requirements, you don't have much time with which to work on "customizing" a program to make students "adequate" for the job market. Is it possible that schools are as out of touch with industry needs as industries are with the expectations of college graduates?
Maybe programs need to be tailored more towards industry needs. For instance, you want a new college graduate to be your next DBA? Have the schools issue BSDBA... or BSISS or whatever. I think that most hiring managers are going to want a lot of the basics - 2 programming languages (1 scripting and 1 OOO), UML, SQL, project management background, technical writing, networking fundamentals, programming fundamentals, etc. Personally, I think that the industry is going to move towards wanting to hire graduates with BS in IT/IS and a masters in a specific area, say information security.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Comparative advantage, dude. Asking IT to do home improvement is misallocation of resources.
I am a person who has to hire and deal with new IT graduates all the time and they don't really know anything useful. They do not become useful until they have had a couple of years experience. I know this is true for many degrees. What universities teach is not reality, not even close. It is more than just IT skills. Most can't write good documents or presentations either, the language they use is childish mostly. It is crazy. I have been in this industry for 20 years and my recommendation is to find an IT job and get the experience. Experience will carry you further than the degree, save yourself the student loans. If you dont have what it takes to do it without the degree the simplest one you can in IT and get into a job as soon as you can. Believe me, nothing a student is learning has any application in the real world. If I were to hire you, not only would you not be ready to go and need training for the gaps in your knowledge, I am likely to have to retrain the nonsense your professors taught you because most of what they teach is simply not how things work. The few things the professors get right were right about a decade ago and no longer apply. I am guessing there is a reason Bill Gates skipped college and became the most successful IT guy ever.
It migh be a basic skill to you, but if it's that important to you then put it in the hiring requirements.
It's terrible for your business reputation to be known to be good with tools. The kid was right from a career standpoint.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking. There are probably cables, pipes, and ducts in there. Did you use an energized wire detector? A stud finder? Check the building blueprints? It's probably not drywall over wooden 2x4s, either. Commercial construction is different, because the fireproofing requirements are higher. It could be a metal wall, drywall over concrete, drywall on metal studs, plaster over lath, plaster over brick, or other less-common options, including asbestos insulation. For most of those, a drywall anchor is the wrong fastener.
For something like a coat hook, adhesive hooks are more appropriate. 3M has some good ones.
If you want your employees to have shop class, buy them a TechShop membership.
Knowing how to speak French is something extraordinary in a large nation like the US where everyone on the continent speaks English except for Mexico and Quebec.
Basic carpentry and tool use are skills that everybody should know without having to be taught formally. I'd say he has every right to be upset that an employee lacks an important and fundamental life skill. It'd be like getting married and finding out that your wife doesn't know how to cook or clean or do laundry.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell?
That must mean game programming has now crashed. After the "multimedia cdrom" crash in the 90s, they set up a program for that. Then after the dot com crash they set up the "web designer" program. I suspect in a couple years we'll be seeing a "myspace social media technician" program.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, maybe that's because everybody is studying computer science while employers are looking for software engineers, not scientists.
0x or or snor perron?!
Except for the nebulous "programming" just about everything mentioned in TFA is a trade, as opposed to something that a CS degree prepares you for (OT - just what DOES a BS CS degree prepare you for - more school?). I agree with an earlier poster that this is most likely a disengenuous complaint by upper management types who want universities to be glorified trade schools to provide them with low-cost fodder on someone else's nickel (OK, bags of nickels). Anyone who is not asleep these days knows that the Big Boys don't like universities, state universities anyway unless they are cranking out cheap labor.
And just what is meant by "programming" in this particular context? I suspect that the great majority of these positions are not what most of us would consider programming, but is more likely web design or SQL query design. Most IT shops don't use programmers, software shops do, but an IT shop is a bunch of mechanics (not meaning to be derrogetory here - have you seen the pay scale for a good mechanic these days/) and not a bunch of coders. It's a different kind of job.
How many computer science graduates are "well-trained, ready to go" to be software developers? How many future lawyers show up at their first clerkship "well-trained, ready to go"? Architects? Engineers? I'm not sure "IT" is unique in this regard.
Ahh the old your're in IT and since we hired you to maintain the network you should be doing manual labor jobs like move furniture and fix the coffee pot and drill holes in walls to hang white baords.
yeah I love that assumption on employers part.
When you have colleges where the teacher gives you 3hrs of class to just activate the remote desktop on a Windows machine and test the connection. You know that the students have no respect to this teacher and don't give a rats bum about the class. This is the problem in Schools, Colleges and universities.
Can we trade you your better private music laws for our better hiring of self taught IT workers?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I was in charge of a bunch of Indian graduate students in various engineering fields, and they didn't even know how to use a push broom or a mop. It's funny because one time my boss came in and was like, "Guys, learn how to use a broom! This stuff isn't rocket science and half of you are Rocket Scientists!"
I'll second the Accounting line position buttressed by tech route.
Accounting often has some of the trickiest software in an otherwise low-tech business, so you see a lot of these hybrid 80-20 positions. We have a back end IT guy, and I do level 1 helpdesk in between my "line" duties.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have been on both sides; hiring and looking for work.Employers seldom understand the skills needed to perform the tasks and rarely can express these in a job posting. Then HR with even less technical knowledge will cull the resumes received into a small group of "qualified" people for management to consider. For example: many years ago I saw a resume rejected because one of the required skill was an in depth knowledge of 'TSO' this is an acronym for Time Sharing Option. The candidate actually spelled out the words on his resume and got rejected by HR. This in no way to hire qualified people.
When I was looking for good graduates to fill systems programming positions for a major company we got many resumes form a local Ivy League university close by. One candidate had just finished writing a compiler as a graduating exercise. This is the kind of thing she wanted to do for us. Major disconnect.
When this industry started; before there were any IT degrees; employers looked for Math and Philosophy degrees. They wanted people with logical thought processes. They did not really care if you knew much about data processing. Can you think? The rest is easy...
hmm, looking at the broader picture, I'd say it's the socialists who don't know anything. they only know how to copy shit from others (eg the soviet space shuttle program that flopped, and the british designed-and-abandoned RBMK reactors used in chernobyl). ...or maybe linking knowledge level to ideology is fallacious because it's extreme ideology of any kind that leads to ignorance.
Disclaimer: I teach at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
Some time ago the government gave us permission to grant a four year bachelor's degree in Integrated Telecommunications and Computer Technologies (Bachelor of Applied Technology). Part of the planning process involved talking to the local employers. During one of those meetings I got an excellent insight into the difference between our three year technology graduates and those of four year university engineering programs, roughly paraphrased as follows:
So, there is your choice, go to a community college and become immediately useful to potential employers, or go to university and hope that an employer will be willing to be patient for a couple of years.
The down side for the three year grads is that they need more education if they wish to progress along the engineering track. Their alternative is to go into management or sales. The alternative isn't bad as far as wages and status go. The trouble is that most of the three year grads came into their profession because they enjoy working with hardware and code much more than they enjoy management and sales. If they wanted to do management or sales, they would have gone into something different; like business. So they are stuck with the fact that they need more education to avoid becoming stuck.
Thats just a technical skills list. No big deal? How about non-technical issues:
1) The environmental laws relating to septic tanks change occasionally and are different for every municipality you work in.
2) The plumbing code rules / laws change constantly for each municipality for appliances. So... your dishwasher now needs a vacuum breaker on the waste side. No, it needs a new, different type of vacuum breaker. Now you must hardwire the AC. No, it must connect to a GFCI plug fed by a lightswitch under the sink within 3 feet of the outlet. And now it needs to be fed off a dedicated 15 amp circuit from the electrical panel. And its all different at the city down the road. Ditto the icemaker in the fridge, which must, or must not, or can possibly have a needle shutoff valve or a ball valve or it depends. You need a building permit to add an outdoor faucet fixture, err wait thats just in the city to the east, here you need dedicated copper bond grounding conductors to hook up a hot tub, but not a pool, unless its grandfathered in.
Tradesmen actually make pretty good lawyers in their specific area of expertise.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why would the it guy have to hang up coat hooks?
Sounds like they need to do what UOP does with their civil engineering program: 2.5 years of study, then you get apprenticed out for .5 year, then 1 year of study, then .5 year of apprentice, then .5 year of study and graduation. I may have the math just a bit off as to when the 6 months of apprenticing are, but that's the basics of it, you end up with two 6 month breaks where you are working and gaining real-world experience for real civil engineering firms.
The downside is that it takes 5 years instead of 4, the upside is that you have 1 year of experience in addition to the BS degree and at least one and possibly two contact/references (if they don't just hire you for their own firm).
true.... I wouldn't be asking someone in I.T. to hang a coat hook (although I imagine many of us have done it) but using a drill as an electric screw driver to mount a server in a rack is a valuable skill, as it understanding other facilities-related things that impact computers and networking.. like interference generated by electric ballasts in florescent lighting or the definition of a plenum space versus non-plenum. Professionals need to have a wide range of skills and they typically cross functional boundaries, at least on the periphery of one's trade. Sitting in a dark office coding or working via a terminal all day and doing nothing else is a myth, one that only Hollywood subscribes to.
So– Managers of businesses are complaining that these college graduates aren't well prepared for the workplace, yet why do they seem to hold onto the notion that any high school kid can do the work they are asking of these professionals? Or at least, they seem to insist on paying their professional IT staff like they were only high school graduates.
I did some work with one company where the CEO brought in his fourteen-year-old son to build the company's web site. Later, he dragged in the IT staff on the carpet and gave them a forty-minute long tongue lashing because the web site wasn't working. There was no javascript menus, the purchasing system was non-existent. He complained that it looked amateurish! They all walked out on him after his tirade was complete. I guess it is needless to say that the company no longer exists.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Of course, it's common knowledge that the only reason to get a "high-tech" degree is to earn more money at your job. You still have to either find a mentor or learn all the shit yourself, there's no way around experience, especially with technology.
Where has reason in the world gone? Have we abandoned it in favor of power and politics?
I'm -far- more concerned about managers without practical experience than I am about IT people without practical experience. .NET 3.5, the idiot manager had no respect for him. .NET code together but who didn't know what boolean algebra was - let alone clue one of how to optimize an algorithm or design enterprise architecture (I call these people 'code monkeys' because, other than to string a couple of lines of code together, there's no way in hell I'd trust them to do software engineering any more than I'd trust a circus monkey).
I've seen managers without practical experience nearly bankrupt a company. I've never seen that happen with IT people.
I knew a guy who had more years of experience in programming that I've been alive. Bring any problem to him and he usually not only had an answer, but he had actually worked through that same exact kind of problem in the past. But, because he didn't know
On the other hand, I've known "software engineers" who could slap a couple of pieces of
Yes, practical experience is important - just like education is important. There's a reason a person isn't a senior engineer until they've had substantial amounts of both. And I've got little patience for people who whine that they are being discriminated against because they lack both.
But, to repeat myself, I'm far more concerned about managers who lack practical experience or education than I am about IT people in the same boat.
I cannot fully agree cuz I'm about to graduate but if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that I haven't learned as near as much as I expected to learn @ uni. We tried to go to much into the breadth than depth, which in my opinion was the biggest mistake.
What degree does produce a graduate that is "Ready to go"?
University is not about job training. If employers are honestly expecting a recent graduate to be able to step in and run a department they are delusional.
If you look at recent job postings, you'll discover that the problem is because companies are looking for so-called "Drupalist" or "Wordpress/Joomla Engineer". If schools would include this in the curriculum, then the IT industry would be in a big trouble. Teaching specific languages to prepare students for the industry is bad enough. Schools should not teach CMS to Computer Science students. Time is better spent teaching the fundamentals of programming and architecture design.
Some way to teach experienced IT workers the difference between what they know and what the school teaches regular undergrads, resulting in the same degree, would be awesome.
2 year degree, work a bit, one to two semesters picking up the difference, and you've got a "four year degree". That'd be awesome. Certainly would have saved me a hell of a lot of time in my second shot at higher education (but replace "2 year degree" with "4/5 of a non-IT degree, abandoned when it became clear it would be worthless and I had a good job offer")
Probably not feasible, I guess, but man would that be great. It'd help with the debt problem, too, since people wouldn't need two years worth of classes (and debt) for maybe a semester's worth of actual learning.
Nope. 376 non-IBM organisations who are members of an user group of IBM kit.
I'd ask if you RTFA (or even TFSummary) but that'd be forgetting this is /.
Fixate on the unfairness of it all and you will perish. Learn to market yourself and you will never starve. If you don't learn how to market yourself, then no combination of degrees and experience can save you.
I am in a community with a significant IBM presence. IBM has significant input into the community STEM programs. Community involvement is good, but one should look carefully to see what strings might be attached.
The biggest thing I didn't get in college was how to plan a project and ask for what I need to make it happen. In high school and college, your time is pretty worthless to the school you're atttending, and they don't care much about new ideas or process improvements you might think of. When you get a job making 10s of 1000s of dollars, you're time is pretty valuable I didn't realize it in that way. My disk drive was slow? Who was I too ask for a faster one? Disk drives are expensive, right? Not when you're company is paying you to sit around waiting for the drive to act.
The switch from a mode of thinking you're on your own making the best of extremely limited resources to a mode of thinking about how to allocate large amounts of money is huge.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I recently hired a brand new CS grad for a low level position on my team. I interviewed several CS or CE grads for the spot, and while I wasn't expecting experts, I was pretty shocked at the superficiality of the knowledge. Here were some of the most glaring holes:
1. none of the kids had any exposure to version control, or even knew what it was for
2. all were very light in the SQL department -- I'm not talking stored procs and tuning, just the basics of a select and a join
3. none of them could explain what a class was in Java
I intentionally kept the interview questions at a high level, and I was expecting to have to mentor someone with the specifics. I ultimately hired on passion. I picked the kid with that spark in their eyes that said "I want to learn stuff and get better" and who could think logically. I think the secret for a new grad is not so much their degree but what they do on the side. I'd have hired someone on the spot who came in talking passionately about their RoR side project and gave me the URL to the site and the source on GitHub. In a crap economy, passion = employment.
Have you ever helped rack servers? Guess what, there's a lot of trash that needs to be taken out.
Unless you're in a huge company where everything you do is so routine, and happens with such a high volume that there are "server room trash removal" specialists, the job falls to whoever is nearby.
Some companies make every job extremely specialized. Others make them very generalized. One thing remains true with either... You are there to do whatever they need you to do. Sure, anything major should have been in the job description, but if your inability or unwillingness to do all the minor stuff is impacting your performance, or others, they SHOULD replace you with someone who better suits the job duties.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I for one am sick of industry claiming reality and claiming the academic world is out of touch! Different perspectives of the same elephant but they think they can see the whole beast.... managers often seem to have this misconception on a wide range of ... actually I'd say this false reasoning and possible arrogance is a defining characteristic for management (I've yet to meet somebody who proves otherwise; other people seem to repeat similar complaints...)
There is so much specialization which changes FASTER than most every other field - it probably is the fastest moving industry. Picky details are all over the place as well as inconsistencies as new areas are made up by whomever defines the stuff through 1st to big market share - it can involve a new language, new techniques, new software, and its own terminology. If you WASTED the last few years of your 4 year college degree learning specifics for the current market some of that information will be of use for some students but depending on the jobs found you may find that gaining experience with .NET does you ZERO good when you go work on standards based web apps running on linux servers.
I think part of this bitching is their lack of understanding of just what the employer needs to be doing; they externalize everything so much its like they don't have an idea of what business is supposed to do and how the guys at the top are supposed to EARN those higher incomes. We are moving towards the extremes and more people are waking up to the trend as it gets closer to their self-absorbed lives.
Colleges are NOT business they don't produce "products" and this form of thinking is harming college and secondary level education long term. They are expecting colleges to compete for their specific needs like they are buying from a Chinese supplier -- they bitch because there are accreditation standards. I'm also sure too many of them DO NOT VALUE a "liberal" degree program and want to remove the approx 2 years of general college from the 4 degree and replace it with their specific demands-- because they have no interest in better well rounded citizens they want a PART, a COG, a specific brand of human resource to plug into their corporate machine. I've seen and read about how high school students have lower critical thinking skills entering college than in the past (10+% worse) and I think it reflects this school = business mentality altering the process. (standardized testing is like MSCE certifications - it means little in the "real world" and doesn't reflect actual understanding or skill.)
I've probably lost half of you so I'll stop; someday you'll get it I hope; or you'll be happy as a serf.
I can go on about how computer people are engineers and we should reclaim computer engineering from those electronics people and make that the college IT degree. Or how an apprenticeship program is best suited for most computer jobs and how it needs unionization like plumbers and carpenters (who use that to help maintain the well suited and traditional learning style; its not perfect but what is... its better than a 4yr college degree plumber.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
1. Java/J2EE
Too specialized ("where is my job in 10 years?", "shouldn't I learn COBOL instead?"). Not sexy ("Where are the shooting mutants? I was promised shooting mutants!"). Not fun to learn (needs enough background skills that you can apply them somewhere else more interesting). Easy to pick up if you already know C. Skills non-transferrable in the other direction ("what's a pointer?", "what do you mean I have to free the return value from strsave()?"). Requires large university infrastructure to benefit few students ("Does it run on Linux? My department uses Linux to keep costs down and because we can install it at home."). Can't do homework at home (cost, infrastructure prohibitive).
No soup for you! Next!
2. Security
"Son, we see you've been learning about security. Wwe're going to confiscate all your computer equipment and throw you in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison and ban you from using computers or the internet for life."
Enough said there...
3. Software Developer
"Oh no, they don't teach computer languages at my college, that stopped in 1988 when the accreditation rules changed. They teach me theory! A linked list would be a gereat data structure for that problem!" OK, write me a linked list. "What, now I'm expected to know my tools?!? What is this, bait and switch?!?"
A carpenter who only knows theory will cut his fingers off the first time he uses a table saw.
4. SAP
"Don't you have information technology classes in the business department to teach those? Oh, the cancelled those back in 1988 too, when they changed accreditation standards for them to no count towards a CS degree?"
People are going to college for their degree. It is the modern day union card. If you don't reward them for learning useful things, they won't learn useful things. Most graduates go into something for the money they expect to make with the union card in hand, and expect to work 9-5, and will take the minimum requirements to get the union card.
Want a different result? Change the requirement/reward matrix.
5. Database Administrator
Many of the same drawbacks of J2EE. How many people are going to be able to do their homework on their Core 2 Duo running Linux at home? How many companies want one of these for a MySQL database as opposed to an Oracle or DB2 database?
6. .NET
Just plain unsexy and un-fun. .Net is code for "We wanted people to pay us again for their software, but VisualBASIC was finally good enough, and we couldn't up-sell anyone anymore. So now VisualBASIC can't run on new hardware that comes preloaded with our new OS. Send the checks payable to Microsoft, KTHXBAI!"
Seriously, takes absolutely no brains, a zombie could do it. If you want someone who will be interested in this job, hire a zombie. You will be able to tell them by their MSCE certificate which they will think translates into an ability to code as well as the caffeine laden nerds who spent 24 hour marathon coding sessions in the basement of the CS building.
7. Oracle
"Have your university give us all their money for a license. Then you give us all your money for a license to do your homework, unless you want the whole retro experience of using your Terminal window to log in as a glass tty. No, we no longer run on Linux, unless you pay us lots of money."
Seriously, it's like requiring every student buy an H1 HumVee in order to be allowed to take classes.
8. SharePoint
Google cloud services. No hardware costs. No longer relevent.
9. C#
"That's like C, only it can't compile any of the source code I can download from the net right? I guess I'm bored enough to try something new, in case I need a fall
Hi, Mr. Dinosaur!
The Mesozoic Era just called, and they want their technology back.
As long as you are not too busy, tell COBOL the Palaeozoic Era is still waiting at the restaurant, and is pretty drunk on wine from being stood up for their date, and needs someone to come help her into a cab.
--
This so sounds like a bunch of companies complaining that they can't get people to maintain old code...
-- Terry
I never completed my Bsc degree, I jumped straight to Msc after 2 years. I studied in eastern Europe, there's no fucking around there. .NET programmer, picked it up in a week (we learned Java at uni), I was leading a team of developers and designing architecture of the program in the 2nd year and we successfully completed a software project for the government. I worked with students from my faculty, true we took creme de la creme but they all knew how to code to professional standards in .NET with some mentoring after 1st year of studying.
After 1st year of studying I was able to work on commercial projects during summer break as
These days I run my own company in Australia and the shit I have encountered is beyond belief. It seems noone studies IT/CS out of passion these days any more. I get people with Msc in Computer Science who can't write technical documentation, especially freaking Indians with degrees from Bangalore which aren't worth the paper they're printed on. You have to wonder how these people got their degrees, how they wrote their dissertation if they can't write simple business documents. Aussie graduates, not much better either... you find a bright star here and there.
You seem to asume I'm a socialist, very intelligent, whats that saying now, assumption is the mother of all...? I take it your american so you have no idea what socialism is anyway (whats that central bank for, why wont my government tell me? haha)? I on the other hand live in Europe, you know, the place where all these 'ideologies' stem from! Your assumptions about ideologies would seem rather adept if where not the fact that your probably unable to understand that all knowledge stems from indoctrination, what is your indoctrination exactly? Kill sand nigers is it? For oil now? 1948 and some kind ethic what now?
American Employer: American Graudates are no Good! They do not have 2.3567 years in XYF technology!
American Grad. Sorry, I did not go to university to learn XYF Technology. Plus who the heck will have 2.3567 years?
American Grad 2: I have 3 years in XYF. Should do, right?
American Employer: No way! I said 2.3567! American grads cannot even read! Congress!! do something!!
Indian IT guy (either with American IT co in India or INdian IT co): Here's my resume. 2.3567 in XYF. All from New Delhi Trading IT Co. Here's my reference phone numbers. Good?
American Employer: Great! Please confirm that you are NOT a resident or citizen, and that you will work for $20/hr, and you are on!
I can think of very few degrees that allow you to be effective from day one.
Teaching degrees come the closest I know of, but even there most first year teachers tell of the horrors of unpreparedness they endure.
Degrees are mostly supposed to give you the tools and framework. The specifics of a job give you the experience needed to be good at some subsection of what your got in school.
typo: 1948 and some kind of ethnic what now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing search Israel!
Half the problem is that the 'higher education' 4-year-degree has two years of uselessness at the front-end: generals, followed by entry-level IT/CS courses that anyone getting into the field should probably at least have a basic grasp on, already.
The best way, IMO, to get 'schooled' in IT would probably be a year and off, alternating, for 5 years. You decide to do IT, so you go to a year of intensive generals - tutalage on the OSI model, 1-2 different kinds of programming languages (eg. C/C++ for the 'fundamentals' with a higher-level, "we like to use objects" language), and the hardware basics that everyone can use (hex/binary, how machines interpret code, different hw subsystems, and so on). Hopefully you pick up some of the basics of things like OS design and the like, as well (shouldn't be too hard, if you've got the proclivity). (Then again, maybe I'm just biased due to it being somewhat 'natural' and being quite entrenched).
Year 2: Good: now you've got your teeth wet, and have a pretty good idea how damn hard your life will be in IT. Hopefully, it was intensive enough to make about half the students drop out. Time to try to apply it. You work a year doing basic lowly "technician" duty. Hardware/software breakfix shit: you make a little money, but are overseen by an instructor who critiques your work, makes recommendations, and so on.
Year 3: Back to the grind. Now you get to learn some fun things, like systems design, resource contention, network/systems administration, proper documentation, project management, change control, and all the best practices that make IT work difficult and misunderstood. (I'm approaching this from a sysadmin perspective, because that's what I know; I'm sure there'd be another side for programmers.) CPU design, storage architectures, and so on would all get covered, obviously.
Year 4: more of the same, but half way through, (after a lengthy and exceptional 1-month break) you've got to actually apply the disciplines from year 3. Your schedule gets drawn out, and you're doing 'more of the same' while having to implement and maintain systems. (VT makes this awesomely simple and inexpensive, whereas in previous years it'd have been obscenely pricey.)
Year 5: time to apply it, all together now. You're supervising/managing projects staffed by year-2s under the overwatch of your 'professors'.
Everything changes so damn quickly in IT, a year is about as much time as you can pragmatically do anything in the field without growing 'soft'.
In my mind's eye, a 'year two' graduate would be the rough equivalent of current "2 year IT degree" type things. i'd much rather hire one such student than th crop of "this is how we administer windows; click.../write a vb.net app" schooling.
Such a regimen would at least increase the likelihood that the graduates would be competent and skillful. Having gone to a high school that was obscenely aggressive in its academia, I think this approach can turn a mediocre person into an overly competent one.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A university is supposed to provide an education - which last a lifetime, not job training –which only lasts until The Next Big Thing comes along. People and employers looking for the later rather than the former should consider places like ITT, Devry, Charter, etc.
I suggest replacing IT with Construction and replace 'hang some coat hooks' with 'replace a hard drive' ?
Will the result be any better?
Maybe something more like:
while( capitalist.knowledge == none && capitalist.isPerfect( graduate ) != true ) pass
19990704
The Financial Times by Rebecca Christie
Reprinted in the Kansas City Star
Business wary of high-tech training
WASHINGTON - Companies often are uninterested in training workers for high-technology jobs, preferring instead to compete for a limited pool of existing talent, according to a Commerce Department report.
Short development cycles and product lives contribute to some companies' reluctance to train workers, said the report prepared by the departments' Office of Technology Policy. This is compounded by fears that a worker might take a new job before employers are able to reap the benefits of training investment.
The report quoted one technology executive from Arizona who said: "I am afraid, as an employer, of getting people who would require an awful lot of training. We have eight hours to learn a new system. We don't have three months or six months."
Labor Department statistics show that between 1983 and 1998, demand for employment in core technology occupations grew six times faster than the overall job growth rate. Central recommendations from the new report included tax breaks and government-funded training initiatives designed to expand the labor pool.
The report also said the U.S. education system needed more emphasis on science and technology, particularly for middle school children. Some schoolchildren rule out a career in science as early as middle school and stop taking the classes they would need to study mathematics or engineering in college, the report said.
If you're hiring programmers you need to provide a good Development Abstraction Layer. I certainly would not want to be pulled off my desk to help with any handyman projects you have around the office.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I started in a lowly tech support job, now I'm a 6 figure IT professional at 35 designing and installing petabyte level DoD storage systems. Thank you employers who valued drive, certifications, and experience over a useless CompSci degree. My wife has a masters in an art field, 100k in student loans, and can't get a job that pays more than 35k a year. At least she keeps me fat and happy!
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
You think a typical 4-year CS program is too theoretical? What exactly do you consider to be theoretical CS? My experience, both as a CS undergrad and as a CS grad teaching undergrads (at a different institution) is that most CS majors get one and a half semesters of theory: one course about Turing machines (which covers the absolute basics) and one course about algorithms (which barely touches on the theoretical foundations). Occasionally, a CS major will wind up taking a course on programming languages, which will expose them (in a minimal sort of way) to other theoretical topics (lambda calculus).
People with bachelor's degrees in CS may not receive much training in how to use specific applications that are common in the business world, but that does not mean that they are receiving too much "theory."
Palm trees and 8
A word to students and hiring managers: colleges are among the best places to learn a lot of skills that people need in the workplace, but the vocational training they are designed for is the academic world.
why else would you bring politics into the discussion unless you had an axe to grind? reread my post.. it implies nothing about you personally. as far as assumptions go, you're leading the pack here:
1. that americans don't and can't know about socialist ideology
2. that americans are ignorant of europe and other cultures
3. that america is the only country that needs fossil fuels
4. that americans are the only people who dislike the middle east.. of course, if we're going to stereotype, it's western europe that bends over backwards to whatever comes across the border, to the point of censoring the existing culture in some countries.
5. that all americans are hopelessly indoctrinated. even if that were true, it's called stockholm syndrome for a reason.. pack mentality isn't limited to america, and it's overreaching ideologies like socialism that promote such a thing; the most extreme at gunpoint.
I worked one place where the main thing to know about plenums is that if you did something which required knowledge of them, the union guys would break your kneecaps -- or worse, file some sort of labor complaint. (and it cost hundreds of dollars to get a single cable run put in, as a result). That's valuable knowledge you won't get in most universities.
What most people fail to realize is that this is where professional schools come in.
When academics stop and the real job market begins.
In most other jobs of comparable skill, you have some kind of professional 'residency' period. Lawyers have articling. Nurses have their own programs... Chartered accounts and other have their own programs. Doctors have residency. Trades people have journeyman programs. And no, I'm not talking about coop placements... although that does help. The real difference is that real professional programs take training the next generation as part of the profession.
IT people will never be trained and ready-to-go as employers don't want to pay for the appropriate training and mentorship to go along with it.
So they take ill-prepared people and shove them into operations and things kinda work.
Let's not even get into outsourcing...
You hired someone with an IT background and you're surprised that they aren't qualified to hang up coat hooks.... Are you fucking retarded? If you wanted a maintenance person then maybe you should have hired one.
In just the technical realm, a lot of what we learn is theoretical, but there is not a lot in the way of practically applying it. For example, I've learned a lot of Java, and have had to use it for various classes, but not once has a professor told us what "ant" is or how to use it. A lot of these kids are just doing a javac and running the program, or using Eclipse. So people who can write a proof for the Halting Problem would not know how to compile a java package. I don't think it's bad to know how to write a proof for the Halting Problem, but some basic practical stuff has not been taught to us. We haven't learned anything about revision control. Maybe you should be able to get a CS degree without knowing anything about revision control, but the assertion that such a person is not "ready to go" would be correct.
On the other side, there are practical things one learns with experience. Most of it is common sense, but experience drums the lessons into your head if you forget. Such as - if you notice there is a major problem, after checking for a few seconds if its real or not, instead of spending a few minutes trying to remedy it, you should alert your boss - "There may be some kind of big problem, I'm looking into it". That way your boss can call his boss and relay the message "There may be a problem, so-and-so is looking into it". What you don't want is for things to go down, you spend twenty minutes trying to bring it up in isolation, then your boss calls you and tells you his boss called him and asked why everything was down and he told him he didn't know. There are lots of little things that are common sense, but get drilled into your head by experience and I guess it's difficult to teach that in school.
What I love about this is that the "people/worker" socialist/communist type character steals money from the capitalist (who when honest is selling products that others desire and pay for) to fund their lifestyle of protesting against the capitalist!
Now if you want to take about "robber barons" or people entangled in the banking mortgage scam, then you are talking about criminals not capitalists.
Jesus Christ. If you can't use a drill, how can you expect to run a line to where you need it?
It's like saying most young criminals play video games.
Doesn't mean video games have any connection to crime, because the fact is most young people--criminals and not--play video games.
So most recent graduates are not well-trained and ready to go. Most people are not well-trained and ready to go.
I'm not the head of HR for a large multinational company, but I have been through the hiring cycle a few times. My experience has been the only significance of the length of a person's resume and the title of a position is to the salary that person will accept.
From college interns to senior personnel with decades of experiences, folks with a decent head on their shoulders will figure out what they don't know and the clueless fark-ups remain clueless fark ups.
The 10th hardest position to fill was Active Federal Security Clearance. I'd like to know which college degree prepares one for a career as an Active Federal Security Clearance. That list was full on HR drivel.
Universities provide a general set of tools that could be used in any way one wants. An automechanic also has a set of tools. Skills are developed over a period of time under a mentor. No matter how much programming works/dbms assignments you do, each industry is unique with it's set of data and requirements. No University can provide all the skill sets within a four year time frame. But if graduate do not acquire these skills on their own, no one can help him or her. Communication skills are developed as part of social interaction. If some one is introvert and refuses to interact with others, he or she is doomed. Universities teach theories and 1st principles and thinking. Working in an industry provides opportunities to develop specific skill sets. One needs both through self effort.
I'm not clear- did you hire a handyman or a programmer? Perhaps something that seems obvious to you may not be to someone else. I feel sorry for the kid, you seem like a real asshole.
In a world where companies seem to want short term solutions - training is important. They will throw you away when your training no longer matches their perceived needs."Our client is having issues - they need to expand to 1000 plus machine server farm and the latency in our product is killing them" "Sorry, that is not covered in my training"
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
No one will read this because is on the ass end of this conversation, but I just have to say this...
'well-trained, ready-to-go,' is a fucking welder, not a developer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm pretty sure I've never seen "hanging coat hooks" or "rebuilding carburetors" as a requirement on any IT-related job listing. You do know what IT is, right? I seriously hope you're not in management.
He has every right to be upset that the kid didn't know how to do something that wasn't part of what he was hired to do? Do you expect your plumber to rotate your tires?
It's impossible for an IT program to teach students all the possible scenarios that they would encounter at any given company.
It's up to the company to provide the specific training on how to work in their environment. And this is never going to change.
I'm on the opposite end. I've got zero experience, have been out of school three years, and have had 1 job offer (wouldn't even pay my loan payment) for nearly 1000 applications. I have a BS in Engineering, a law degree, passed two bars and the patent exam. I've tried getting work as an engineer, an attorney, an IT guy, a writer, many many more -- zilch. I can't even volunteer, since I don't make ends meet now working 60-70 hours a week at minimum wage. You want non-job skills? I can do electrical work, plumbing, (skilled) carpentry, drywalling, roofing, hell, even metalworking. I've shoed horses for godssake.
It's the whole damn experience thing. Every time it goes like this, "Do you have xx years experience doing yy Mr. Jones?" "No sir, but if I..." "Well, I'm sorry Mr. Jones, but we are looking for a candidate who does. Please do apply again in the future."
It doesn't help that half of the entry-level positions to which I apply are swamped with people having years of experience, but who are laid-off and willing to take the cut.
Man. Sorry, I didn't mean to rant so much. Just really really tired and frustrated.
IT hires aren't supposed to be doing that kind of work. That's for your building maintenance people. Duh.
That's a big fat social science fail for the IT "journalists."
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Could you link to some of that "experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology?" I'd like to read up on exactly how/why corporate collectives are not rational actors.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Don't expect MIT CS graduates to change car tires on their own :)
This article should be read with some caution: SAP, Oracle and SharePoint all require vocational training as these are vendor products! To be a "Database Administrator" also is requires vendor specific product training. An Oracle DBA does not automatically become a DBA for all other database servers. At least 4 of the to 10 positions require vocational training which Universities/Colleges cannot be expected to provide training for : they don't provide flavour of the month product training. This article simply points out that companies are too stingy to pay for their employees to get training! Someone else must do it for them.
Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,' according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers."
Computers were pretty much the domain of scientists and mathematicians until about the 1980s. Seems like BS graduates (business school, not bachelor of science) just expect "computer guys" to work magic because the hiring managers and others from the accountancy/finance/hr side of the companies, which is probably who was surveyed in these studies, just have no idea how a computer works and what is really required to make it work.
To look at it more neutrally, without my biases for math & physical science, and against business school, when expectations are that consistently not met, that's a clear signal that the expectations themselves are out of order. Even a business school graduate should be able to see that in those numbers.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
This is just industry laying the groundwork for outsourcing and getting a tax break for doing it.
First they complain for a few years that they can't find qualified people. Then spend a few more years screaming that many, many more students need to start enrolling in CS and EE RIGHT NOW!! or we will have an apocalyptic shortage of these people. Then....time to reap what they have sown. Tell the govt they need some subsidy to set up shop in India or China or else America will not be a player in game, that it's better to have a US based company with foreign workers than to be completely dependent on wholly foreign company for important technology.
So they wanted surgeons so instead they hired a nurse? Anyone can pass the A+ exam, get CISCO certified, and 20 other certificates, it's not too difficult. But taking what you learn from that and putting into practice is an entirely different story. Even then, someone fresh out of college won't know very much about how the business world really works unless they've been actively part of it for quite some time. They also may not know the tricks of the trade or even have much exposure to real life scenarios. This is true for any major, which is why they get hired for less than those who have experience. However, there is a catch to hiring old farts... They tend to stick with traditional methods or know older things, but not necessarily what's new. True, they should be re-certified, or trained with the new stuff but sometimes the younger generation has a better understanding of it. There really isn't a perfect employee and it would seem that the one who knows everything is the biggest arrogant douchebag of the bunch. So you can't fire him because he does his job so darn well, but at the same time he's bringing down morale at the office (Grandma's Boy anyone?). Ah well, ces't la vie.
I can do that!
No, seriously, I can. That's the majority of what my (useless) college degree taught me, and then when I got out everyone wanted web programmers and I was SOL so I got into IT... which has done just about as well. Maybe you just had bad luck with your particular colleges?
So maybe I'm a bit late to the party, but most people don't seem to want to pay for a decent wage for graduates or experienced people.
I don't know how many people post ads for junior IT people with AS/400 experience when the last of those systems was produced ten years ago; or that they want junior people with reams of specialized technical certifications costing thousands of dollars -as well as- a diploma from a college or university and then only pay what a phone monkey makes.
IT departments have been cheapened and hollowed out and as someone who's actively looking for another position I can tell you that the people replacing those that have left need constant hand-holding. Our place alone hired an indian kid who couldn't follow a dialogue to update Flash to display a website and a former university lecturer from the carribean that didn't know how to reset a tripped circuit breaker.
But what do you expect when you pay peanuts and only offer part-time work, eh?
I'm college educated and my experience in hiring people for a small company is people who are college educated are less competent. Maybe this is just my experience. I do hold a degree and the concepts taught are completely inadequate. You basically get a very basic education. Non-experienced people will be just as qualified if not more so most of the time because they didn't waste time doing non-sense projects in college. They actually took it upon themselves to LEARN something. And learning something is better than getting "educated". Concepts don't just come from the class room and self-starters generally aren't those who are college educated. That is to say people who need college aren't self starters. I am college educated in topics I had learned before college and consider the schooling I had to be a detriment to my own knowledge and start in the real world. I didn't go work for a company out of school. I started my own and have done very well. I did intern for a start-up that went bust. Why? Not because they didn't have a good business model. No they had a successful model my company is partly based on. The company failed because of the people running it. The truth is if I had to do it again I would NEVER have gone to college and if I could have dropped out of high school I would have. People just waste time, money, and energy to meet artificial demands that help them in a corporate world without considering that they could just as easily start a a business and be more successful.
Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science.
Well then maybe you should have hired someone who learned how to work with drywall at a Votech school instead of hiring someone with a degree in Rocket Science.
No, but I expect my plumber to be able to change a tire.
What are you wittering on about? I find mundane manual work incredibly irritating. Coat hook? Are you my mum? Chuck it on a sofa, ffs. I have an IT background, I work in IT. If I want to get sweaty I'll go to a gym. Drywall anchor? Omg, I'm falling asleep...
Or a more serious note, this really smacks of an insecure person try to bolster their self-confidence.
"These kids and their giga, terra-ma-thingies. In my day 640k was good enough for anyone. I know, I'll make him do some demeaning practical task and then accuse him of being a wuss. Also, I'll refer to him as 'kid' all the time, thus underlining my inherent superiority."
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking.
We may hope the kid learned an important lesson about the working world: bosses will ask you to perform tasks for which you do not have training, for which you do not have the proper equipment, which may be dangerous, which are not part of your job description, which your contract prohibits you from performing, or which are otherwise unethical or illegal. You should refuse to perform such tasks; there are worse fates than unemployment.
Get off my lawn!
I had come out of a good UK university with a BSc Physics and MSc in Comp Science, i had a nice starting IT job in Zurich which fell through in 08 due to the finance mess. I admit i knew nothing about computers, only how to build them and the OSI model and fundamentals to networking etc.
I now work for a stockbrokers as helpdesk/sysadmin (jack of all trades) I have been here a year and LEARNT a great deal about corp IT, systems, networks, things which you cant be taught in the classroom.
I am now ready to move on (learnt everything I can in this environment), and have got some good possible jobs lined up. but even though i think experience accounts for alot more, having a degree is beneficial.
and most jobs I see for similar posistions require a degree + experience which is a catch22. I was fortunate for my company to take me on with little to no experience but the degree meaning I could learn and adapt etc.
Have you ever seen Michael Abrash's high performance SearchForString() implementation?
You're asking someone with an IT background to do the job of your maintenance staff. What the heck did you think was going to happen?
Also, since you don't quite seem to grasp this, the women in your HR department probably won't be thrilled when you ask them to clean the lunch room.
This kid is responding in exactly the right way. He can't do a horrible job since that will look bad on him, and he can't do a good job because if he does then you'll have no reason not to continue to dump this kind of assinine crap on him.
When I came out with my B.S. in IT, in 2007, I was not prepared. In all fairness, everything that I learned my 4 years of schooling was never even used. I used more from my second disciplinary classes then anything else. The topic taught were more business centric, and the processes of IS, more so than IT related coursework. I felt very ill-prepared to go out and tackle technical issues. Lucky me, I was working in IT while going to school...so I was able to get experience. Though, while going to school and working I can say that I learned more from my job than school. I've pretty much don't use anything I was taught in my 4 years. Now, I did attend some 2 year technical college classes to get more training and get some certifications after my 4 year college; and that material has been applicable on the job.
I'm not a seasoned IT professional, at 26, I've only begun. So, I honestly believe that I was not prepared for IT professional job straight out of college. I had to work during college and still get more education after my 4 years.
Wow, just wow. Imagine if your coat hook hanging fool had managed to clip an electrical line while drilling those holes. You think it's bad now wait until OSHA runs a train through your office looking for violations.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
As I like to say:
Human Resources: "We took the 'Personal' out of 'Personnel'."
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Uh... have you been watching the news lately? Nowadays, being in a union and working for the government means you have a big, fat target on your back.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Woosh.
Rethinking email
When I was a supervisor for a team of software testers, I would often hire new college grads. However, I preferred those who majored in a science other than computer science. I wanted someone who looked at computers as tools, not someone who looked at computers as the primary object of interest.
The single largest skill that many IT students are lacking is communication. Of course the important skills include programming and database work, but sending students out into business not knowing how to compose a letter or give a presentation to even a small group of people is terrible. At the very least having the communication skills will make it easier for a IT person in almost all aspects of their job and for moving into management, where communication skills are arguably more important.
Colleges and Universities are not technician training schools. The former teaches students how to think, interact with others and solve problems. The latter usually caters to specific tools, stream-lined training and while the latter may produce people that appear "ready to go" in the long run, the former will be more productive. Again, these are in general based on assumptions of the students in both not having any prior experience. On a final note, you do not necessarily need a college degree or certificate to be smart or know how to do something; but having a 3rd party "acknowledge" it seems to put the employer at less risk.
When I graduated high school, I attended a private, liberal arts college with the hopes of graduating with a degree in MIS (Management of Information Systems). I had obtained an IT job when I was 14, so I had a bit of experience in the IT Service Industry and knew what the real world expected of IT Tech's and IT Departments. By my Sophomore year, the only IT classes that my major required were how to use Microsoft Office. I was quite upset so I spoke with the Prof about studying GNU/Linux, Windows Servers, help desk skills, customer support, Mac OS X, e-mail, DNS, Internet, routers, and so forth (that list was kinda long, I know) ... as we had YET to touch on ANYTHING related to TCP/IP Networking or any of the items I listed. He refused stating that the approve course work would take us through VB.NET programming, Java programming and business management. I tried to debate the fact that we hadn't learned anything about what the real world expected of IT Tech's and the IT Department, but he shot me down. I gave one last ill-fated attempt at debating him and tried to bring to the table that before even becoming an IT Manager, you had to know what was expected of the department and the skills of a technician. He asked me to leave his office because I knew nothing. Wrong. By that point I had worked in IT for six years. By the middle of my Junior year I decided to leave because I wasn't learning anything that applied to IT. I have worked my way up here at the business I currently work for and just obtained a job at an ISP as a Linux Server Administrator. They were mostly impressed that I had 11 years of IT experience rather than having had a college degree. I recently exchanged e-mail's with a friend that returned to our college (who was in the MIS program with me) and he hasn't found a decent job yet. The MIS program hasn't changed.
My advice is that if you are going to go to college for IT, take a deep look into the program before choosing that school. While in school, get an internship because that's the only way you will have experience under your belt before entering the real world. I've been rather lucky, so take my experience and please learn from it.
Cheers.
The villains are the "think tank" that's asking the questions with a view to getting the desired answers to "prove" an extreme position. Those of you who studied classics under the Jesuits will recognize the survey's setup:
1 - Do you think college does a good job of preparing students for a sustainable CAREER in IT? (Let's say 75% Yes)
2 - Does college train graduates for the nitty-gritty specific requirements of your company? (8% Yes)
3 - Referring to question 2: fantasies aside, should college train graduates for those specific requrements (10% Yes)
#1 is the "honest" question, designed to make sure people answer #2 in contrast to it. #2 is the answer the questioner desires to "prove" and publish. #3 is used to target think tank fund-raising to the 10% who think college should be a trade school.
Honestly, folks, 8% is the tipoff. There are some clueless managers out there, but not 92% of them! Those folks were just answering the questions exactly as posed.
RECOGNIZE & RESIST these tactics. When you see non-peer reviewed (or anonymous) "research," THINK BEFORE YOU EMOTE and remember that most of the outfits who ask these questions have an agenda. When you are asked to answer loaded surveys like this, don't just toss them. See them for what they are and advisedly answer them incorrectly.
Sure, I don't disagree. Problem solving skills really are something a job candidate needs. But how do you, as the interviewer, know whether he/she has them? There's no university coursework in "problem solving". No one thinks they're bad at problem solving, so they won't own up to it in an interview. There's no "problem-solving meter" you can hook up to the candidate to measure his/her ability. Maybe "vague" isn't the right word to use, but problem-solving ability is at least very difficult to measure/quantify.
Unions were the 'things' that worked to give 'human beings' more bargaining power than an 'cog' or 'electronic chip'. They were one of the forces that raised raised wage-slave factory workers above the the levels
of the machines they worked along side.
Now we see the Corporate Right pushing against unions as being
'anti-competitive' on the world market. That's because they keep working conditions and wages of US employee's above that of a 'machine' -- with US workers being 'valued' more than overseas workers in terms of protections and wages. When it comes to pure dollars figures, unions are bad for competition, BUT do we want to reduce the US standard of safety and standard of living to that of the third worlds we are supposed to be competing against?
The problem is we (the US) doesn't require makers of our goods to give the same standards of safety and equivalent standards living in their countries as we require here -- so there is no way our worker can be competitive as the barriers between international markets continue to drop.
US workers ARE NOT that much brighter or better educated than their counterparts overseas. In some areas, yes, in some areas no. Increasingly, as US education standards and enrichment programs drop, it's moving to more areas where we are not competitive.
Yet the Wealthy Right (closely aligned w/corporate right), also believe education is a right reserved for the wealthy. This spells disaster for the US society of the mid-late 1900's of prosperity, and puts the society of robber-barons and land-mogels of the late 1800's and first few decades of the 1900's back on the map for being the future of the US. The middle class recedes back into the working class, and further separates from the leisure class and government becomes more and more the government of the 'haves', supporting them in keeping and maintaining what they have over the 'have-nots'...
It's a move toward lower financial equality in the US -- which is BAD and is the result of adulation of capitalism being allowed to run amok (starting from the Ronnie-Reagan-Greed is Go[o]d') generation. It won't be until greed is seen as bad, again, and the equality is seen as a virtue over greed, that this country will have a chance of returning to greatness.
As it stands now, we are on the road to being another third-world mean-nothing country in the world, except that we have very, dangerous politicians with an unstable (flip-flop) political system that seems to be engendering more violence-causing fundamentalist crazies reacting to anything that doesn't go their way.
At the top of all this is an increasingly corrupt government where top government officials (elected and appointed) use offices in the government as stepping boards to 'reward positions' in the private sector for favors done while in office.
This was mitigated, before, by long term government employees -- something that has it's own problems, but not as severe as the current ones. Regardless, one solution that needs to be considered is the prohibition of employment in any private sector job, **at first**, in any sector related to any government position you held. And if that is abused, then any private sector position at all.
Government service needs to stop being an easily abused stepping stone / revolving door to lucrative private sector jobs designed as rewards -- and the door into government from private sector needs to be examined more closely for areas of potential conflict.
Unfortunately, in the highest court of the land we have Supreme Court Justices making rulings on corporations and cases that they have a personal interest in -- where they refuse to recuse themselves. So the first step may be impeaching those transgressors to get in judges who have enough common sense to recuse themselves under such circumstances and to get those supremes, who it is now obviously, that they liked under oath to get into their office -- OUT of office (Thomas).
Having corruption in the highest court of the land is the worst place if we want to have justice in the land.
The whole deck is being loaded against the American people.