Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees

McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal's Michael Totty shares some stereotype-shattering statistics about IT workers: Most of them don't have college degrees in computer science, technology, engineering or math. About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all! The analysis is based upon two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist."

Comments

Personally

[Reliable Windmill]

I prefer education over schooling.

Re:Personally

[mwvdlee]

The HR drone hiring you prefers schooling over education.

Re:Personally

[ttucker]

I'm surprised by this. I was required to take an english course in college when getting my tech diploma. It's focus was on technical writing.

Also, have you mentioned to the engineer in question that it's "specification" and not "speckification"?

The problem is that you can take and pass a college level English class without actually giving half a shit about writing at an educated level. Having a university degree only proves that you are willing to do whatever busywork it takes to graduate, not that you actually know anything at all, that you paid attention in class, or even that you were smart in the first place.

Re:Personally

[FreakyGeeky]

Getting a degree can also demonstrate that one might be able to do whatever busywork a job requires to be successful. The few non-degree people I've hired had problems seeing their projects through to completion.

Re:Personally

[mrchaotica]

[I]t amazes me how many programmers can't do things like... touch type.

Although I completely agree with your point, I feel to need to point out that if your programming speed is constrained by your typing speed, you're not doing nearly enough thinking.

Re:Personally

[s.petry]

Having a university degree only proves that you are willing to do whatever busywork it takes to graduate, not that you actually know anything at all, that you paid attention in class, or even that you were smart in the first place

Thirty years ago I probably thought very similar, but today I don't hold those same beliefs.

Wisdom is being able to draw on, and use, an accumulation of knowledge. Schools like College add much to that pool. Language, Math, Science, it all ties together. If you don't get the language you can't communicate effectively. A huge percentage of people today can't communicate effectively. More, they don't write down what was done so you end up with lots of one off shit that you can't repeat in either problem or solution. "Bob said it didn't work" is not very scientific, where "When Bob had X application open and launched Y the system panicked" at least gives you a point to begin debugging.

Having the larger knowledge pool means that you can perform a job anywhere, not just do LAMP and Puppet as I see many administrators today claim.

The classical education system really does have value. The problem today is that we are in a hurry to make huge bucks, not be intelligent and productive members of a society. Much of that is societies fault mind you. We put huge price tags on education and emphasizing garbage collection over real knowledge. I.E. Miley and Fantasy Football are the "hot topics" at work, where intellectual conversation would be "nerd/geek talk". Of course another huge issue is that we don't use the classical education system, we use the industrial education system.

Re:Personally

[jc42]

Note that the criticism was about a misused ' and the current topic is about building correct software. In most programming languages, a misplaced quote (of either type) is almost always an instantly-fatal error (unless you do it twice, in which case the compiler or interpreter just goes quietly insane ;-). If you can't be bothered to get the quotes/apostrophes right, you have no future at all in the software industry. In a software arena, misusing such characters is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

(Not that there is any shortage of big mistakes to be made. Let's just say that, if attention to "insignificant" details is something that you can't take seriously, you shouldn't be mucking around in software. Or even writing about it in a public forum frequented by software geeks.)

Re:Personally

[AK Marc]

The problem is that you have to get past the drones. I was hired once by a hiring manager that advertised directly. My first day, I went to HR for paperwork, and the HR guy got into an argument that I wasn't in the system because he went around HR. I've also been turned down for jobs by HR drones who called to reject me indicated that 10+ years of IT experience, including time in a call center and CCNA/CCNP/MCSE level certifications was under-qualified for an entry-level phone support position (Computer Science degree + 5 years experience minimum, yes, for an entry level help-desk position in a call center).

So I understand people who lie. It's the only way to get a chance. When everyone lies, the few of us honest people left are screwed.

Re:Personally

[Platinumrat]

I couldn't disagree with you more. That isn't problem solving. That's management.

What you describe is a manager's view of problem solving. They basically don't want problems in the first place. It is a manger's role to ensure succession planning, training, resourcing and appropriation documentation and standards are maintained. A manager doesn't have to do them all. Just create the environment through appropriate "stick & carrot" measures.

Problem solving is a rare gift. I know many competent Design Engineers that cannot solve problems. Most good ones can follow patterns and apply them to new situations. They're the ones you want to do most day to day designs. They'll need attention to detail. But again, they'll get stuck at something that doesn't fit within the those patterns.

The true problem solver is one that can make those intuitive leaps. They can see patterns, where others don't. Or even work with a thousand disconnected clues to get to the root cause. The very best do have a formal background (and they'll draw on those bits of lectures and notes when needed, going back to 1st Principals). Unfortunately, this is difficult and mostly can't be put down in Manuals and Procedures. This doesn't necessarily make them appropriate for Design and quite often they are terrible at mundane tasks. So bad managers don't know how to value or deal with this skill.

As someone who runs an IT company

[Anonymous Coward]

Our best techs don't have degrees. Most of the people who can become skilled techs without having it force-fed down their throat at college can teach themselves, and easily grasp new technology as it becomes available. Most of the people we've hired from college were the "I-can't-do-it-unless-you-show-it-to-me-first" type, which suck to have work for you.

Re:As someone who runs an IT company

[broken_chaos]

There's a big difference between telling someone the end goal and having them get to that goal largely on their own, and having to hold their hand through every single step along the way. The latter seem to be the type that the grandparent is complaining about.

Re:As someone who runs an IT company

[Anonymous Coward]

No, He's saying he values employees who understand how the technology, that their job is based on interacting with, actually works, and can derive answers to their own questions instead of him doing their job for them. He's saying that having employees that can resolve problems because they have a passion for the field, instead of only a simple ability to follow carefully laid out instructions, is valuable to him.

I'm pretty sure you can say that about most jobs. Unfortunately a lot of HR departments can't grasp that and they have their own ideas about who would make a good employee.

Happy to clear that up for you, and I'm sorry about you mounds of student loan debt.

Re:As someone who runs an IT company

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never worked with or taught those people. I have done both. There is a somewhat common subset of people that DO NOT ask "why", they ask "how" but in the worst way possible -- without EXACT directions (exact down to the step by step listing of commands to type or buttons to click to the get the result), they will basically throw their hands up and say "I don't know what to do next" and sit on their thumbs until given more directions. Socratic method doesn't work, because they will never understand the question you are asking. Showing them how its done accomplishes nothing, because they do not watch and learn but simply let you do the work, then they go on break or go home content that the work is over. They do not know how to research or even Google things; if you tell them exactly what website to go to, and to look up certain directions, they will later tell you "I didn't know what was important so I waited" and did nothing. They don't like to read. They have no real interest in learning the topic apart from doing the absolute bare minimum as defined by their manager to take a paycheck home at the end of the day. I've been trying better ways to teach and train these people and nothing seems to work. They're somehow fundamentally "broken" (my thought is that they lack some kind of basic logical and reasoning skills, based on their responses, but it is hard to teach that too unless they have interest...)

Re:As someone who runs an IT company

[ShanghaiBill]

Oh, you mean you prefer employees able to read your mind over those that ask you to clearly verbalize your expectations?

Yes, of course. Once someone has worked for me for six months or so, they should know what my expectations are, and they should be able to extrapolate those expectations when new situations arise. A good employee should have the judgement to know what needs to be done, and the initiative to do it.

I'm a non-degree slacker

[grub]

I graduated Grade 12 in the early 80's. Was going to go for a CS degree but put it off for a year while I worked. Then another year went by, and so on.

Back then, the vast bulk of "nerds" loved this stuff as a hobby and could slide into a work role easy enough. Then people started going to school to 'learn teh computerz' as it seemed like an easy way to make cash. Those are the folks who were dumped during the dot-bomb.

Fact is many of the best IT folks I know who also have excellent technical skill were self-taught.

STEM education is great but it's not everything

[QilessQi]

I hold two CompSci degrees (BA, MA) from two reputable universities, and I can tell you this: some of best developers I've ever met have come from non-CompSci fields: geology, physics, and (building) architecture.

The keys to being a good developer are much the same as in any other field: being able to learn, and being able to apply what you've learned, and giving a crap about what you do.

This says more about the categories...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It isn't...exactly... news, is it, that neither 'computer support specialists' nor 'network and computer systems administrators' are jobs that are particularly close to what a 'STEM' curriculum might teach you. You can't be afraid of computers, and the ability to bodge out some scripts when the occasion demands it is always handy; but it isn't as though you are expected (or even permitted) to break out the CS-fu and build some custom management system, or put your EE skills to work by diagnosing that malfunctioning motherboard properly rather than just shipping it back to the vendor for a replacement...

Because IT is a superset of stem

[CastrTroy]

This doesn't surprise me at all. Especially when they mention "computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators". These aren't fields that even require a STEM degree in the first place. I'm sure if you just looked at programmers, you'd probably see a much higher percentage with a STEM degree. If I had a stem degree, and was working as a computer support specialist, I'd probably wonder what the purpose of my degree really was. Also, if you have a degree in chemistry, you technically have a STEM degree, but you're probably no more prepared for a career in IT than somebody with a business or fine arts degree

Personally, I've always hated the fact that they even refer to certain jobs as being in the IT sector. It's so large and all encompassing, that it basically fits anybody from a minimum wage support person to a hardware engineer designing cutting edge processors, or people writing financial systems on wall street.

Most Journalists Don't Understand Statistics

[14erCleaner]

For this profile, we mainly focused on two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist.

So they looked at the two lowest-paying job categories out of the 8 defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and drew conclusions about the education levels of other six. Hmmm, maybe that's not the best approach...

Re:After five years...

[ImprovOmega]

I got a BSCS degree back in 2003 and I can tell you that it is very much still relevant. You're right, the specific languages, API's, and even architectures have changed dramatically in 10 years, but the fundamentals are all still there. Learning the 2003 vintage of C++ was not so useful (except as an exercise in how to approach programming problems generally), but learning algorithm complexity analysis is timeless. And I'm sure there are more advanced process schedulers in operating systems these days, but they are still being scheduled out there in the background. And so on, and so on.

My great "aha!" moment in my CS degree was when I realized that the specific tool they were teaching in any given class was basically irrelevant - it was just a means to teaching an important concept. Trade schools teach you tools, universities teach you how those tools work. The real value in my BSCS degree was in teaching me how to think about and solve CS problems. That has been invaluable.

Re:After five years...

[axl917]

...whatever you learned in school is already out of date...

Quite true, but as one of my professors said, "In this course, you will not learn how to code in Turbo Pascal*; you will learn how to learn to code, and then apply that to Turbo Pascal."

A good teacher can make all the difference to impressionable 18-yr-olds.

(*Yes, I am old)

Re:Breaking news

[Dcnjoe60]

Because, you don't really need one to do the job.. Duhhh!

There is more truth in that statement than many would want to believe. While I was employed at a large government agency that was involved with collecting government taxes from individuals and corporations, instead of hiring programmers, we would take individuals who were familiar with the various tax systems and train them to program. It was our experience that it was easier to train those who were experienced in their field and had an aptitude for development to be programmers than it was to train programmers in all of the intricacies tax laws. I imagine there are a lot of other business and corporate areas where that would be applicable, too.