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Ask Slashdot: Best Degree For a Late Career Boost?
Qbertino writes "I'm in my early 40s, and after a little more than 10 years of web, scripting and software development as a freelancer and some gigs as a regular, full-time employee, I'm seriously considering giving my IT career a boost by getting a degree. I'm your regular 1980s computer kid and made a career switch to IT during the dot-bomb days. I have quite a bit of programming and project experience, but no degree. I find myself hitting somewhat of a glass ceiling (with maybe a little age discrimination thrown in there). Since I'm in Germany, degrees count for a lot (70% of IT staff have a degree) so getting one seems fitting and a nice addition to my portfolio. However, I'm pondering wether I should go for Computer Science or Business Informatics. I'd like to move into Project Management or Technical Account Management, which causes my dilemma: CS gives me the pro credibility and proves my knowledge with low-level and technical stuff, and I'd be honing my C/C++ and *nix skills. Business Informatics would teach me some bean-counting skills; I'd be doing modelling, ERP with Java or .NET all day. It would give me some BA cred, but I'd lose karma with the T-shirt wearing crew and the decision-makers in that camp. I'm leaning toward Business Informatics because I suspect that's where the money is, but I'm not quite sure wether a classic CS degree wouldn't still be better — even if I'm wearing a suit. Any suggestions?"
Go into management, or switch careers. America allows age discrimination so long as it's not against people near retirement age. In this industry, age discrimination is common knowledge, and several groups have tried to get laws passed to eliminate it, to no effect.
At the risk of being perfectly and completely crass, you're facing the same level of discrimination that black people did in the South prior to the civil rights movement: And unlike them, nobody gives a shit. Sorry. :(
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Wait.. wait.. hear me out. The MBA will give you insight into how those who are MBAs think (and therefore, most of management). Also, your experience will say "I can do IT/CS", while the degree will say "I can do business". Which means you're more likely to be able to make a jump to management if you find your career options topping out on the IT/CS end.
And you'd be following in the footsteps of Alan Cox.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Since you're doing this for the money, and hitting the "glass ceiling", honing your business skills will give you the best chance of moving into a position where you can make significantly more money. You say that you want to go into project management, and having business skills in achieving the trifecta of a successful project (scope, schedule, and budget) will go far. Since you've spent a significant part of your career in deep technical fields, it will also give you a different perspective on what your employer thinks is important. It will also give you a hand-up on your peer competition, because being able to tell when the tech folks are bullshitting the "suits" is extremely valuable.
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
I'm pretty sure that any limits are really ageism and not related to whether you have a degree or not. It's all about how many hours-per-week they can get out of you for $X per month. The older you are the fewer those hours are.
Even if the hours you do provide are really worth more in terms of productivity because your experience means that you do not go off on unproductive tangents.
But just in case the limit really is the degree .... get the fastest cheapest degree you can. It does NOT matter what the subject is. As long as it is fast and cheap. It is just the first step and at this point you really aren't concerned about making the correct relationships with the other kids in the frats.
THEN start working on an advanced degree in the subject that you really want. Such as computer science. Or whatever.
I don't know how it is in Germany, but here in the USA (especially in the Silicon Valley) if you want a late career boost, go get an MBA. Having an MBA isn't a four-letter word around here, especially if you get one from a good program. MIT has an excellent executive MBA program that can be done remotely, and everyone I've encountered with one has been top-notch. Same goes for an MBA from Stanford or even the other colleges local to the area.
Having an MBA opens a lot more doors for you. If you already have a good amount of experience in IT and Software Development, go get a degree in something outside of those fields to help expand your options.
You could also get a degree in something you enjoy personally but won't directly get you a job. Education doesn't just have to be for professional development.
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
Anything you go for will take time and put you into debt. What are the odds you will make enough money so that the degree pays for itself? It's something I've thought of myself. I'd rather plug along and slowly build or maintain what I have rather than incur a great deal of debt. Maybe a cert here and there, but that's it.
Where do you want to be 10-15 years from now? Aim towards that.
Stop working for Faceless Corps and switch to a smaller company where you rub elbows with the Owners daily. They are not stupid and do the "only youngsters here" stupidity. They realize the older worker is a pro in the field they have been in for the past 20 years and use them to compete with the morons that have MBA's
I'll never work for another Fortune 500 company again. I prefer having beers at the end of the day with the guys that own the business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
At that young it's not as much age discrimination in the US as it is $$ discrimination. They are saying that because you are older you expect more pay and therefore if we can find someone fresh out of school who can do the same job we'll hire them because we can pay them peanuts.
Honestly, in person, the only people I have run into complaining about age discrimination before showing lots of grey hair haven't put forth the effort to keep their skills fresh and are completely surprised why no one will just hand them a job. Interviewing for a high paying, higher level position when unfortunately they are only qualified for the entry level / junior positions still. This is probably true in all trades to some extent but in the computer field I think more than others if you are not constantly learning new things, adding new capabilities to your repertoire then you are moving in reverse. There are too many people resting on their laurels and I will hire a young kid a couple years out of school long before I'll hire someone who has demonstrably become stagnant.
If anything, for the OP's OQ, reverse age, or at least experience, discrimination helps him. If I'm hiring someone fresh or recently out of school then their schooling will play heavily into whether I bring them into an interview or not. Once someone has 5-10 years of experience under their belt, as he says he has, I rarely even look at that part of the resume as, frankly, it's not relevant anymore.
If you haven't had a good course in algorithms and data structures, you'll benefit from that
Having taught at the undergraduate level and currently working on a PhD in CS, I disagree with this advice. If you have 10 years experience, you've probably already figured out what a linked list, red-black tree, graph data structure, etc. are. You probably know how to implement various sorts, graph searches, spanning trees. The things you will likely run into in a CS degree that you haven't had to deal with in the past are the theoretical side. Turing Machines, paradigms (depending on how the course is taught), formal languages (as in regular languages, context free languages, context sensitive languages, not formal programming languages), operating systems, maybe some AI, networking, discrete math. Outside of the CS-based courses, you'll have all the standard gen-eds. Depending on how curious you've been since high school, you might already have covered large swaths of this, or maybe you would do well to take those.
In short, view a CS degree as a way of broadening your world, but don't for a second think you are going to "hone your C/C++ and *nix skills". As most employers complain, CS isn't really about programming so much as it is about the theory that underlies why programming works (or doesn't). It will inform your programming a great deal, but it really won't make you much of a better programmer/designer/software engineer than simple working experience can do.
I agree with much of what you said here. But the problem I've always had with the idea that a "good" I.T. worker being one who is constantly learning new things and adding items to a resume is, it's not that realistic when one works for a small to mid-sized company. (Even more unrealistic given a slow economy.)
I've been pretty much self-taught and self-motivated to try out new technologies and computer solutions since I got into this stuff in the mid 1980's, but I've never been the type to hop around from job to job. Most of my job changes actually came about only because the place I worked for closed up. (I started out working for several "mom and pop" type computer stores, for example, all of whom eventually went out of business.)
The problem is, my peers in I.T. who were basically "in it for themselves" without much regard for their employers racked up more impressive resumes than me, especially in the dot com boom days, when it was possible to accept a position, stay JUST long enough to claim you were responsible for X,Y and Z (cool new technologies of whatever type the place happened to be using), and then jump ship in the middle of a project for better pay at the next place needing someone who used those same technologies before. Lots of burnt bridges behind them? Sure -- but there are plenty of companies out there, especially for the young and single who can move from city to city if and when it's needed.
I, on the other hand, honestly hated the stress and uncertainty of job interviews ... and just wanted a stable job doing what I enjoy.
So where did that get me? Well, I was able to ride out much of the commotion from all the failed start-ups when the dot com era went bust, so that was a plus I guess. But the places I've worked for 5+ years in a row always stuck with the same "tried and true" technology. Sure, we'd do incremental upgrades on such things as Microsoft Office, or migrate Windows Server to newer versions eventually. But there's really only so much "resume building" one can do by staying at the same company, when their budget doesn't allow for buying lots of new software or hardware -- and they're (rightly, IMO!) trying to avoid high costs of re-training people on all new ways of doing things, once they've got something in place that's effective.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is -- it's not necessarily "resting on one's laurels", just because one hasn't added all sorts of new products to a resume. But I really do think recruiters and hiring managers look at it that way, most of the time. If a business paid me for 5-6 years to take care of the same set of technologies for them, that likely means those were good, solid choices that really got them their money's worth. There's no negative in having a deep familiarity with such solutions, vs. the next guy who can list of 5x as many technologies -- most of which were failures, so got removed after money was WASTED on them.
There is no ceiling that I'm aware of, but there is a major reluctance to pay wages above the initial 3-5 years. Especially when most of those 5 year folks churn out almost the same quality code as brand new grads.
Except that they don't. All the studies done have shown that experience really counts for code quality and productivity.
Of course, that's assuming the rest of the development chain is working. If the management have poorly-conceived ideas and don't listen to their techies about what's feasible in the first place, then they might as well employ actual monkeys in the coding role because the project's going to fail regardless.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
At that young it's not as much age discrimination in the US as it is $$ discrimination. They are saying that because you are older you expect more pay and therefore if we can find someone fresh out of school who can do the same job we'll hire them because we can pay them peanuts.
I doubt it's wage discrimination simply because who's paying the older workers that extra money, if they aren't employing them? I think it's simply that young workers can and will put up with more crap than older workers. They have more time (less commitments and more ability to maintain weird hours) and they're less experienced in the ways of business (that is, more gullible, less cynical). If you want someone to dump 80 hours a week into a salary job for a projects that's probably going nowhere, it's not going to be a 40 year old with a couple of kids.