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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."
I prefer education over schooling.
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So this is where 90% of the clueless management come from?
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.
Because, you don't really need one to do the job.. Duhhh!
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
Of course!
The industry folks will always pretend that a degree is not really necessary, and experience/skills matter.
That way, the number of people available to do IT increases, and the average salary decreases.
I wonder why you can only be an architect, doctor, lawyer, dentist etc. WITH a degree.
They should suppress that requirement for those professions too, shouldn't they? It is experience that counts after all...
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.
Trolling is a art,
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.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
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...
I'm self taught and far better for it, institutional learning is too rigid and doesn't foster creative individuality.
How many CEOs don't even have a degree?
You could apply the apprentice/journeymen/expert to the IT guild as much with most any other learned trade.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
know what "IT" stands for?
You don't need a college degree to read a phone script.
Just because there's a lot of 'em doesn't mean they're all good.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
per Joel Spolsky 'smart and gets stuff done'. I am a DBA and my undergrad degree is in political. I did go back and get a masters in software engineering and take several undergrad CS classes. I found that these helped quite a bit, but are not 100% critical. CS degrees are useful and have alot of value. Especially early on... for programmers. However, you don't need a technical degree to build a computer or do desktop support. They help some with IT Admin jobs. It helps me as a DBA in that it helps me learn new things since I have a better grasp of underlying concepts. I have gone out over the years and googled college coursework and then read some of the books on my own.
some of the best programmers I have worked with don't have college degrees. Its the person not the degree. The degree can help, but you should be able to see it in the quality of the work and it should be in the background.
this is not a good way to assess whether someone is qualified for a job. A quality technical interview given by peers at the company. Since these are the people who use the technology every day.
is the dominant player in corporate IT systems!
I don't have a STEM degree, and I am a senior programmer. I dropped out of college entirely. I couldn't deal with the bureaucracy. You have to take this class, you can't take this class, bleah bleah bleah...
Of course, I have been programming since 1980 when as an 8 year old, I taught myself how to code. I also have self-educated myself in graduate level math, game theory, algorithms, statistics, relativistic physics, AI, and probably a half dozen other STEM type topics. I have worked in a half dozen languages, high level scripting to ASM and from the front to the back of the stack in contemporary Enterprise web app environments.
A degree is only worth as much as the person it is imprinted upon.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm going to sit here and speculate on why. First of all, I taught myself C at 11 years old, and I'm 25 now. In the past 14 years, I've obtained a pretty good idea of what programming is, and of course spent plenty of time messing around with and administrating my own systems. I'm sure this isn't an unusual story to hear on slashdot, I'm sure many of you made a similar journey. But here's the problem, after talking with friends who had taught themselves how to program and do it well, and had gone through schooling for that subject, I realized there weren't heaps of new things to learn. Almost all of the schooling would be rehashing things I already knew.
So where am I going with that? Programming is a relatively easy subject to pick up on your own. You can just start messing around and get immediate results. You don't need a huge buildup of theory before you can start applying the stuff, either. If I can start coding in C at 11, it isn't that hard. And I'm definitely not one of those people who had a PhD by the time he was 14 either. So this doesn't really surprise me at all, the degree has very little practical value to someone who is already confident in their abilities with these kinds of things.
It was actually because of this that I chose my major to be Electronic Engineering instead(still working on it). The material is more challenging to me, and most of it isn't stuff that I've done already. It's not as easy to learn on my own (though it could be done. I even made a list of textbooks used in the 4-year school I want to attend in case I decided I wanted to go that route). I'm not sure how everyone else here feels about it, but I think programming is easy shit. Using computers is relatively easy shit. Just because you don't have to spend as much time making that foundation, I think it's a lot easier to get away without getting a degree in it. Maybe this is due entirely to the fact that it's easier to self-teach, rather than it being an easy subject in and of itself. I know many of you wouldn't agree with the latter statement. Once you know it, why have someone try to reteach you?
These are the people who do tech support by reading from scripts. They're also the people who setup computers, plug cables and have magical access simply because they have the correct passwords.
These are NOT skilled jobs. They are admin assistants with fancy tech-sounding names. This whole article seems braindead obvious and stupid to me. Talented people with STEM degrees do not call themselves IT workers - they call themselves engineers, designers, developers, researchers, etc.
For many of the older people in this field college was not an option. Some of them "fell into" the job because they "knew computers".
I have a AAS degree from a two year school because IT related studies were not offered at the 4 year schools. In fact, I was bluntly told by a department head of a four year school: if you want to learn networking then go to a two year school. So I did. Best decision ever. No college debt and got a job right out of school.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I'm not particularly fond of statistics like these -- because the people who put them together usually insist on qualifying "college degree" as only meaning four year degrees or greater. I have an Associates degree, (and yes: it's in the IT field) but nobody seems to really care about that so-called "minimal" level of effort.
Not that it matters to me anymore at this point... I've been in the workforce for long enough now that a Bachelor's degree would not by itself get me anywhere close to my current salary... nor would it even get me any meaningful bump in income alongside my current work experience. If you wait long enough, such things pretty much become moot.
...whatever you learned in school is already out of date, when you consider what they teach in University is 5 years old when they teach it.
Ask BSCS grads who graduated in 2008 or earlier how much of what they learned in school is still relevant.
Getting into management without a degree is much tougher. Common knowledge is that you are a "better person" if you spent 6 years of your life getting an MBA, rather than actually doing the job.
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...
Have you read my blog lately?
My degree is Business rather than MIS simply because for my catalog year, MIS didn't exist. Yes, I'm old, just turned 40. I had the option to change my catalog year and take some additional non-MIS courses required by the new year, or stay on course (pun intended) and graduate with a general Business degree rather than an official MIS degree. It was still a fantastic learning experience, I was fortunate to have excellent professors, and still work in the industry today.
Tell it to HR that some wants CS for IT / desktop / helpdesk jobs.
I have even seen what / nice to have masters for IT jobs as well.
I'm degreed in the medical field, but found the tech world infinitely more exciting.
Also the fact that I could almost always resurrect my patients played a part in my decision to go with IT.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Been doing IT-ish stuff, up to and including moderate intranet app development, for 15 years. It's just the kind of mind I have: methodical, technical, but I didn't have the desire to get a CS degree. (Besides, do you need STEM to tell people to reboot so they can print?)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
i have a four-year degree (CPEE) and decided long ago to focus on software instead of hardware, and thru my 30 year professional journey I have seen *drastic* changes in the personal make-up of the shops I've worked at.
Back in "the day" (hate that euphemism but used it anyway), programming in C, there was little room for error, as bad code could easily crash systems and cause very expensive issues. I took probably a year of working with them to *really* understand pointers. Companies simply couldn't allow just anyone to code...the potential and real costs were way too high.
Interpreted languages like PHP, Ruby, and Python make it so that pretty much anyone can start hacking away on some code and see results that make them think "damn, I can do this a make a decent living". If they can find someone looking for inexpensive development they can get a job, for awhile at least until either they reach a level where there incompetence shows (the tech "Peter Principle" of course)
Those with the determination and/or genetic blessing to understand coding can do even better and make a very very good living. Overall, I think this is a good thing.
Due to very poor life choices I currently work in a low-end web shop, and the people I code with don't even *like* programming, and are almost totally clueless about OO principles, design patterns and the like...they just want to collect a decent paycheck and don't want to work at McDonalds.
I can't say I blame them.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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."
In other news, I did a study on the finance sector and determined that since the guy who works at the local Chase branch is in highschool that everyone in finance doesn't have a finance degree. I also found that I am also an expert statistician.
Computer support specialist thats a first line helldesk role which normally doesn't require a degree
IT should really be run as a trade school program. A few years as an apprentice, gaining certifications and experience, and working towards becoming a master. All of the various specialties, such as programming, network administration, etc, would act as analogues to plumbing, electric, etc.
When I worked for Lockheed Martin, emphasis was placed upon degrees and formal education, and though I have a BS in Business Administration, I have an ME in Systems Engineering, with a concentration in Space Systems.
Now that I work for another defense subcontractor, more emphasis is placed upon technical certifications, so I've run through the CompTIA gamut, got my Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) cert, and have about another half dozen technical and security management certs planned out.
Bell Labs used to like to hire teachers and re-train them for programmer and system test jobs. Re-treads was what some HR recruiters called them.
Honestly, even most IT majors can barely handle most technology since they spend years basically learning to hack around until something works. I meet hundreds of IT people every year and many function entirely based on hacking, misconception and rumor. Want an example? Ask IT pros which OS is best. Instead of choosing based on educated reasoning, research or better yet explaining that each has a purpose and you'd have to choose based on the task at hand, many will choose based on religion and mostly hearsay.
The best IT professionals I know have studied computer science inside or out of a school. Algorithms and operating system design are core components of their knowledge. They understand how to research and study technology before choosing tools because of pretty boxes and articles on their favorite blog.
I am glad these people exist. If it weren't for them, I'd have to install antivirus software and reinstall Windows for everyone I know.
I have a CS degree. Does it help in IT? It helps the same way that knowing the specifics of the Otto engine cycle help with cleaning the carb of gunk from bad gasoline.
One lesson I learned is that no, degrees and certificates don't mean a person is clueless. However, the people with the purse strings that hire and promote don't see a person's work unless they epically fail. However, they do see the MCSE, BS, BA, CISSP, TS/SCI clearance, and other certs. So, in my experience, one can be totally clueless, but if they have the pieces of paper, there will be jobs for them. In fact, I've worked at places which fired people on the spot if their certs expire, saying they "lacked the authority to operate the equipment."
So, the cert treadmill is important, in my experience.
Been in the industry a while, worked with a lot of IT admins. It is a rare admin that understands the scientific process. That can think about problems rationally. That can put aside their own bias and do the job in front of them.
Wish it were different, I truly do. I spend my days cleaning up these admins' mess more often than not. But it is what it is.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In my not so humble opinion as an engineer surrounded by non-engineers in an IT division...
These people you speak of are customer support/power users/project managers/etc. Most of them do very little "IT" work.
This a perfect example of an article that makes a statement but does not make a conclusion. I guess the conclusion -- perhaps that we should be concerned that our IT professionals don't have scientific or technical degrees -- is implied?
> About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!
Panic!
I have an engineering degree, got a job making war toys for a military contractor, needed the computer to do my work, and found that nobody was administrating the computer. In self-defense, I learned how to administer Unix, how to do backups and housecleaning and diagnose problems, all so I could get my primary job done. After several years, when I got burned out on my primary job, (designing stuff for the military is less fun than it sounds) I found that I had learned enough to carry on with systems administration full time.
I strongly suspect that this happened to a lot of people, especially during the rise of the dot coms, and I also suspect that many of them were not originally in engineering. It happens -- people rise to the occasion, and find new career opportunities.
Why is this a problem? Is the admin going to see a countdown someday that says "answer this question that was on the 3rd trimester final in year two of an EE curriculum in 30 seconds or the computer melts into slag"? What you learn in college, other than techniques like ways to attack and solve a problem, are going to be horribly out of date anyway. What you accomplish in the workforce is more up to your commitment and talents, (and training you've sought post-college) than the letters after your name.
Conversely, having letters after your name does not mean you get a free ride (in most companies). You still have to show competency.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Let's say you want to create an IT track at a college. Maybe it takes a few years to create an appropriate track of classes and plan out various concepts to be taught. By that time, whatever software you were using is outdated and/or replaced. Processors have sped up quickly. Old previously valid security techniques are easily cracked with more cpu power so you have to learn new techniques. Your professor doesn't have time to learn new techniques or new software or whatever. Then on top of that, your students take 4 years of learning old outdated information in college. At that point its 8 years outdated. OF COURSE a large portion of the IT workers don't have STEM degrees. Don't get me wrong. There are certain programming logic and security concepts which are important to learn and CAN be taught at a university. It's just that at the end of the day you'd be paying many thousands of dollars to learn outdated information other than those core concepts.
there are a lot of people in the "medical" profession without a degree as well. Doesn't mean they can perform a surgery.
Not sure about everyone else, but when the recession hit the fact that I didn't have a degree saved me from the chopping block. Because I perform just as well as my counterparts with degree's I was not axed in the workforce reduction, same could not be said for everyone however. Sure I get paid less, but the difference between owning a 3 bedroom home and a 5 bedroom home means nothing to me.
"I never let schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
Furthermore, I am a rather skeptical person. If you sit me down in a room, and wax poetic nonsense about how there are rules about Big O notation, execution time frames and information patterns which are bound to concrete mathematics, I will promptly shatter your world view.
You certainly can and many people locked into a classroom, who write papers and do not produce anything of value for society certainly do.
But this how I feel: No damn way are you going to put me in a chair, and make me listen to you, about how you feel computer science should be, or how it is and for the pleasure of it all, write a check to a bunch of bankers for all that nonsense for $150K plus.
Kiss my ass.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I hire/fire I.T. workers. I can tell you...the education vs lack of education is the wrong argument. The best I.T. guys I get are those who love technology and care about what they do. This holds true whether they are a C.S. grad, or someone who spent the last few years hacking away on the side. When I interview, the only weight I give to their degrees/certifications is whether they learned non-technical skills. I've worked with great I.T. guys who had degrees in completely unrelated areas, but turned out fantastic because they love the profession. I've had guys with no degrees who still were worth holding in to. And I've had guys with C.S. degrees who were successful. It all comes down to liking what you do.
IT does not involve [...] Technology [...]
Really?
"40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!"
You couldn't pay for a 4 year degree as a support specialist. Maybe as a high end administrator, but what an employer would look for is specialized commercial training and certification. I personally think a 2 year community or technical college program is more than enough for these types of positions.
On the other hand, I don't have a degree and it hasn't stopped me from becoming a senior programmer and architect.
... were former physicists. Granted, we're mainly a NASA/NOAA contractor so the domain knowledge is very useful.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Worked in IT for ten years. Was a project manager specializing in Citrix cloud migrations and ran her managed IT firm's help desk.
Her degree? BA in English, with enough credits in Classics for a minor.
I don't have a degree. It may be a little harder to get your foot in the door, but I've been career programmer for over 10 years now, and in those ten years I went from measly IT support droid to leading an R&D team in a major multinational.
At this point in my career, there is no point in putting education or certificates on my resume. The work experience speaks for itself. The only limitation I have now are countries that insist on a degree in order to immigrate there under some kind of "valued worker" type of program. I can't qualify for H1-B for example. But hey, why would I give up Canada to goto the US anyways?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
History and Poli-Sci here.
I worked my way through college as a Foreign Affairs & Defense staffer for a US Senator, graphic designer, campus Sun workstation sysadmin and bartender (all at once sometimes). The Vax, Sun's and Mac's in the various jobs gave me the computer bug, and was completely self taught from there, barring some non-degree math/programming classes I've taken over the years. I've worked for 20+ years in IT for Fortune 100 companies. I've not had any interest in doing what I originally planned to do for my career. Go figure.
Michael Bloomberg thinks more kids should grow up dreaming of being plumbers. As heavily as he was criticized/ridiculed, he does have a point.
Median salary of a Computer Technical Support Specialist: $42,646
Median salary of a Plumber: $45,347
And, unlike in IT, plumbers usually get THANKED when they fix a problem and do it well.
As for Scandinavia - over here "IT" usually means "install some Microsoft product". So HR is usually looking for people with the right certifications. Over time this generates a pattern where the guys in the IT department don't read or write any code. The guys that know how to write code ends up in software development, since the pay is better. There is even some "computer science" courses in univeristy that hardly teach people to code. Sad thing.
In the tech field, a degree means nothing. It's certification you need. Most companies looking for an IT tech want a specific set of skills. A degree offers a general set of skills. Certification means you have worked with, or at least studied up enough to pass a test, about specific equipment. Tack on experience to that certification, and someone not hiring a tech because they lack a degree is a fool. Certification and experience trump degrees every day. (maybe not in corporate HR's eyes, but in the practical world they do)
"About a third", "40%", and "a third" are all less than half. -- A guy with a Math degree
While many people learn a lot in college (I hope), the first thing that an employer learns when they find that you have a college degree is that you are likely to be able to finish something complex. There are lots of people without college degrees who can see complex and difficult things through to completion, but that is much harder to glean from glancing at a resume for two seconds. And that's all the time you get, because they go through massive numbers of resumes. And the fact is, most companies are less interested in employees who are smart than those who can follow instructions and work (however inefficiently) until they finish something.
Back in the late 90's a friend of mine worked for a "data services" arm of a well-known communications company. They had a very successful process for developing large applications on time, on-spec, and on-budget, and it was designed around having morons do the work. A handful of people at the top did the design work, which trickled down through layers of less and less skilled worker until you go to the bottom. At the bottom, the code monkey (not necessarily their terminology) would have a stack of sheets of paper, each describing one function or procedure to write. It would describe the function name, the inputs, the outputs, and the algorithm to be coded. The algorithm was described in such detail that even the least skilled coders could do the job. And then it would be reviewed by someone else to make sure it did the job, integrated with the growing application, etc. Now, while a handful of scrappy coders could often complete projects in less time, what this big company had was predictability, so they could enter into a contract where they could be precise about the time and cost from the outset.
Unless you understood their business model, you could find their hiring criteria to be to be counter-intuitive. But what they wanted was cheap college graduates willing to do drudge work. If you could play dumb and do the job, then you could gradually work your way up the chain. But in general, a smart 'rebel' type would never get hired there, nor would they generally want to. Linux geeks are used to thinking about computer programmers as being smart, but that's not how the business world sees them. Coders are a commodity to be bought and sold like corn (and just as lacking in useful content).
I have a CS degree. I know people who don't have degrees who are great and make more than I do. I know people with degrees who can't do shit. There is a misunderstanding about what a degree means. An undergrad CS degree means that you know a little about several broad areas of computers. A little about programming, a little about data structures, a little about algorithms, a little about digital logic, a little about system software, a little about operating systems, and a little about how computers work. Someone who goes through the program doing the minimum necessary to get by will not know enough about any one area to be immediately useful to employers even if they did learn what they were supposed to. It is what they do above and beyond their degree requirements that define what direction they will go professionally. The degree says that even if candidate is a specialist in one area that (s)he knows the basics about the rest of the areas. This broader base of knowledge hopefully allows the degreed candidate to rise to new challenges better than someone who only knows the narrow requirements of their position. I taught one computer course at my university. One of the most frustrating things for me was when I was lecturing on a difficult topic and a student would raise their hand and ask if this was going to be on the test. What kind of stupid question is this? I guess they don't want to waste their time learning something that won't even be on the test! Even if it isn't on the test it could be something that they need to know to do their job in the future. Their first concern should be learning and the second should be getting a satisfactory grade; for the most part if they do the former the later won't be a problem. I think it is students like this that give people with degrees a bad name.
And then they wonder why so many IT projects fail miserably. This is just the sad realization that employers hired too cheap and too greedily.
HR posts a position for an IT position, and puts on the job description "MIS" as a requirement. So, what do they get, MIS candidates. If they want engineers, they need to post for engineers, not MIS. MIS majors are if you want a Project Manager, not a developer. Sure, that fish restaurant might make a decent steak. But if you want steak, why not go to the steak restaurant?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It seems like the ones working on that website don't have brain STEMs...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I've taken IT college courses before, passed them all easily and made the dean's list. Cosidering what they've taught, College degrees don't really mean anything.
while
I don't want sysadmins claiming to be programmers; I don't want tech support claiming to be more competent at bug fixing than professional software developers.
If by "Most IT Workers" they mean non-developers do not have STEM degrees, then that's a-OK! They better know how to read, write, draw, and interpret literature (like MANUALS and follow INSTRUCTIONS) and not get involved in the real challenges of problem solving software.
As I like to say, the more schooling someone has then the less they know. STEM is broad and people coming out with those degrees are not patron saints, either.
The whole "tech innovators are dropouts" trope is extremely harmful to our industry, IMHO.
I'm not saying you, directly are as bad as the worst, but you def have some of the characteristics...it's an attitude:
that dialectic is a false narrative trope of our industry...
before I continue, plz read these statements:
1. I agree that, "Fact is many of the best IT folks I know who also have excellent technical skill were self-taught."
2. college today is difficult to get eductional value from
3. i used to be a teacher and professor
about the false dialectic you disseminate...gotta cut it out...we the industry, maybe you...but our industry is screwing itself with this bullshit fantasy
My evidence: Y Combinator
Nothing Y Combinator does could not be done in an academic environment....in fact, it would be a sensation and a program featuring a tech entrepreneurship capstone class that is, essentially, Y Combinator, would be the toast of the university!
Blame academia and dumbass biz investors.
Our industry gets the big Billions b/c of hype. I wont deny it. If I was, say, twitter, i'd hype my company as the greatest tech innovation ever in the lead up to an IPO...i don't begrudge success...
I do object when a dishonest narrative is presented as the source of the success.
Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, on and on and on....same 'dropout' BS narrative...and each were successful for different reasons
Jobs used force of will (and a bit of assholishness) to push his singular vision of a user centered design forward (and steal ideas)....and get the RIAA on iTunes...
Gates & his college buddies got an IBM/government contract fall in their lap after the first choice got dickish about a NDA and IBM got impatient
Zuckerberg & his college buddies had the coding chops and the patience to make a free online social network that was not (at the time) horribly obnoxious b/c their rich parents could support them in the interim between the dorm room and Series A funding
we need to be honest about these things...not from jealously, but for the survival of our industry
about college degrees...fact: none of us knew what we were doing in college!
some knew more than others, but compared to what us college grads know now, its night and day...you autodidacts know what I mean b/c you lived it
college is what **THE STUDENT** makes of it...
I tell autodidact types all the time, a university is full of resources, and if they get the right program, the whole academic system is set up to help them succeed
tl:dr You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater
Thank you Dave Raggett
Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees
In a nutshell: IT =/= STEM. Never has. Never will.
In details: most work under the "IT" umbrella (mundane app development included) doesn't require a 4-year college degree either.
I started my career as a software developer with an AA degree (and a shitload of programming courses, with "shitload" being relative to what most sophomore/junior college students have.) Later I completed a BS degree in CS, and later went to grad school. I've done development, software engineering, architecture on both the application and system programming domains, commercial or defense sectors, enterprise, embedded, whatever. I've also done IT work (including systems administration.)
Rarely I've had to rely on significant CS/STEM skills to do work when it came to do IT work. And yet, we insist on people getting a 4-year degree in CS as a mandatory requirement to do IT. That's bull. All you need is a good 2 years under a solid AS community college curriculum to get the necessary skills, with programming courses not on one, or two, but three or more programming languages, in series that increase in complexity of topics, databases and the basics of network infrastructure.
That kind of education will prepare people with the skills necessary for 80% of the work encountered in IT. Anything above that would probably require the skills and education that come with a 4-year degree.
We really need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking IT is a subset of STEM.
It. Is. Not.
In my career, I have:
1) Done Hardware IT (built desktops and modified servers)
2) Technical Support (Phone and desktop)
3) Technical Writing
4) Software coding and implementation
5) Software design and configuration
6) Budgeting and purchasing of IT equipment
7) Server Administration (VMWare)
8) Virtual machine creation, management and deployment.
9) Management of a software QA department
What this shows, other than the fact that I don't seem to be able to keep a job for very long, is that my psychology degree has served me well in ways I never expected.
I've also had to hire quite a number of CS graduates who drove me absolutely up a wall because they didn't seem to be able to *do* anything to completion. They were task oriented (Install the card) rather than goal oriented (Make sure the network on the computer is working well, the user can log in, see the directories they need to see, and everything is fast enough to matter). Someting I would have done automatically. I discovered that I had to ALWAYS explain the *goal* first, or I'd have to send them back to complete everything.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
And that's why the state software engineering laughable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why would you work in IT if you have a STEM degree?
Admittedly I do that, and I have one, but I'm just weird and like messing with computers- that, and I could never get anyone to hire me in my STEM field.
Sure, computers are built with science, technology, engineering, and math, but once they leave the factory they're appliances.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
...you will never work a day in your life."
IT is a hobby that I was fortunate enough to turn into a career. Other than a couple of ROP classes in high school and a few certification exams, I have never received any formal education in IT. I have been lucky enough to have worked for good bosses who were also interested in being good mentors. In turn, I try to do the same for my employees by giving them an environment in which they can succeed, learn and grow as IT professionals.
IT is such a deep and wide field of expertise that in order to excel in it, you have to really enjoy it. Otherwise it will burn you out. Every day presents a new challenge to overcome. It takes a special kind of masochist to keep coming to work, day after day, knowing that no matter how hard you work, there will always be something else that breaks and needs fixing. Or even once you get beyond break fix and fire fighting, there is always the need for optimization and performance tuning.
After doing 25 or more years of work in I.T. myself (and yes, without any degree -- though I do have "some college" as in just a couple credits shy of an Associates degree), I completely agree. Science, math and engineering are fairly irrelevant to working as a PC support person, a systems admin, network admin or even a web developer. The skills that do count for more include good people skills, a LOT of patience, persistence in finding solutions and good writing skills. (That last one is where I do see a difference between many of the degreed and non-degreed I.T. workers. Unfortunately, many people who didn't get the degree also have relatively poor writing skills. It translates to sending out emails that portray an individual as much less bright than he/she really is, and an inability to write clear, concise documentation when needed.)
Like I keep reminding people; there's SO much to know about today's complex I.T. infrastructure, the most useful people in the field tend to be those who are efficient at finding the answers. There's almost an art to forming effective Google queries that the typical computer user doesn't grasp. (EG. If your printer has a strange light flashing on it and you don't know what it means, get *really specific* in your search. Don't just search for "light flashing on printer" or something along those lines. Put in the exact model number of the printer in question as part of the search. Better to get no relevant hits than too many. Then you immediately know to widen the search criteria a bit, vs. wasting time reading through 3+ pages of hits that sound promising but don't really address your specific problem.)
People who are sure they always have the answer off the top of their heads worry me more than those who listen carefully to the problem, and respond "Not really sure, but I can go look that one up!".
I agree with you completely -- but at the same time? What a lousy deal! 4 years of effort to make good grades in a costly college or university where you exit, saddled with student loan debt to pay down. And all that just so you can get past an H.R. worker who automatically filters resumes based on "4 year degree in ...." as a line item.
I know I've definitely been rejected for quite a few jobs since I didn't have the degree, but I've always been able to find work in my field without it too. IMO, the companies who are that closed-minded (or just that inundated with applications) that they'd discard my resume automatically are probably places I'd be unhappy working at anyway.
I mean, a company where the manager takes the time to see what skills I claim to have and what I've previously done, and decides to at least talk to me (degree or no degree) is a company where the manager is putting some effort into the hiring process. That's a manager who is likely more reasonable and sensible in the other decisions he or she makes too.
I was even offered I.T. positions in colleges before, where one would assume it's in the school's best interest to only hire degreed candidates. (After all, don't they want to try to at least attempt to prove the degrees they peddle have value in helping get jobs after school is over?) But again, in these cases, someone liked my skill-set enough to give me a chance to interview -- and once I was in the door, I had the opportunity to show/tell them what I could do for them.
Really, I'm not against anyone deciding to pursue a college degree. I just know that in my case, I tried it for a while and disliked it more and more with each credit I earned. Sure, I had a few "good courses", but also a whole lot of them I felt were irrelevant to anything I'd ever be interested in doing in life. Maybe that's the bottom line though? If you're like many people and just not quite sure what you want to do, college gives a chance to figure that out ... or at least to narrow down some fields you decide you DON'T want to get involved in. I knew from the start I wanted to work with computers and I.T. - but my college didn't have a sensible path for me. I was told to take a dBase III+ class and a C programming course at one point, because that's all it really had to offer. (I never wanted to code or become a DBA, mind you. But my counselor hardly knew the difference between those careers and a data entry clerk.)
This is a very interesting topic. I find it fascinating that such a large portion of IT Workers don't have a degree, but are functioning on, and creating non-fiction technical writing that is at as much as twice the level of a BS degree is currently required to show understanding of.
This is currently an important change being made in K-12 schools today. They know what level of reading and writing that is required in the work place today, so they're beginning to gear up to produce students who should be functioning on this level of non-fiction, technical writing when they graduate. However, it makes me curious what will happen to all those students and IT Workers out there who are operating at this extremely high level of technical writing without the background that one might expect them to have. Are we just the sort of folks who are going to stick around at our current jobs and not hop around as much because we don't have that degreed background, or will we move from place to place based on much of the word-of-mouth sort of thing for work we've done before?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
You only actually need a real engineer if you want to change things - whether that's improving something or making something new. So your best techs now are just techs and can keep things running along nicely - until the game changes and somebody else who could keep up with it is selling to your customers.
Meanwhile it sucks to be an engineer. Nearly everyone wants somebody that can follow a standard operating procedure but hardly anyone wants someone that can work out a new design or a new procedure.
Following a list of instructions without a mistake is admirable but should not be compared with the mistakes that are made when a list of instructions is being determined in the first place.
No degree here, and only some college classes on programming. Although after a crappy day at work with little coding and mostly wasting time in planning meetings, which was an 11 hour day, on the way home I seriously thought about leaving to become a farmer.
I Work in IT. Today I was asked to work on a computer that was not managed by my company and I had zero knowledge of current network setup. Within thirty minutes I had privilege escalated up to the point where I could created my own local administrator account was logged into it fixing the issue. The other day, domain controller goes down early AM, i arrive get it back up. The database built and used by their clinic software was corrupted. Restored from backup my company doesn't give me info about because they don't think I'm smart enough to use it and had company back up and running. I only have a GED.
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.
For many colleges though, that is no longer the effect you get. They have such low standards for passing people that for most of the people graduating, it does NOT tie together!
Meanwhile, the ability to learn in all of those areas outside of school has grown leaps and bounds. There's no reason to think anymore that someone who has attended college is any more well-rounded as someone who has not. In fact I would tend to say that many of the people that skipped some or all of college have led a more interesting and "rounding" life than those who have just sat in school letting the machine mold them.
I agree with you that communication skills are particularly lacking in many people today, but that just means we should focus on that vector as a starting point for hiring rather than degree(s). HR would probably be a lot better off looking for resumes that simply had the fewest software-detected grammatical flaws... hire those people and train them to do whatever!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"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!"
Unfortunately this is probably similar in a lot of other countries as well. A lot of people get degrees that they can't build upon later (either because the market is full, or because demand was not there in the first place) so they fill jobs which could've been taken by people who actually got the proper degrees. Also, they are cheaper for hire at the beginning, since they need to accumulate experience, but after a while there'll be no difference, and companies will prefer experience over qualifications in a lot of cases. Universities should really need to have a reality check when accepting people for certain degrees, since there are always fluctuations in every society and every economy in the need for certain qualifications.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Would you expect a filing clerk who works in a bank to have a degree in economics, or a plumber to have a degree in civil engineering?
In my own (limited) experience, schooling says surprisingly little. I have an essentially phd colleague who repeatedly can literally not read an error message, the text/command he is trying to enter or the extremely clear step by step instructions presented to him. He is working in the general field of his IT degree, he was responsible for some systems for almost 10 years - but it is me and the guy with the music degree(!) who constantly have to help him out even when those systems he supposedly was responsible for are involved. He seems to be quick at making up convoluted theories and then gets stuck why the real world is not like his convoluted theories, except in every single case that has happened he started off of completely wrong foundations and totally wrong assumptions, then spun his crazy off of that.
Some people are just dumb and ignorant and you really wonder how they ever got their degree - but then again almost every education system can easily be bruteforced by learning everything by heart and throwing it up on the test and never be the wiser. Titles actually say shockingly little.
There are a lot of positive things to be had from going the route of education if you choose to actually take advantage of them but ultimately it depends on you, the student, and what you make of it all.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
...missing several points.
Ask not for degrees, but whether or not they studied. The dot-com era was worst, but companies looking for IT talent have never stopped hiring people straight from university, and when you're a starving student and you're offered a really cool job for what at that time appears to be outrageously generous money, dropping out and taking the job is a serious alternative.
I know a lot of people who dropped out, some less than a year away from their degree.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...that is all
There are many jobs in IT that benefit from formal education as much as they benefit from experience and attitude. Not every company has the budget for external expertise and that "girl in accounts" who "learnt the system" has more coal face and systems knowledge that is _relevant to the business_ than any of the shelf grad or expert they can afford.
Not every business is aware of industry best practices but they just want their problem solved with the means they have. The trick is if you have great quals or great attitude / drive then in the business case "just be useful"
Except for Lisp. Lisp is an AST.
the good programs actually give you a **shovel**
sorry you didn't find a good program with a shovel...sorry the truth of my post elicits such cognitive dissonance for you...but fact is, good universities w/ good programs can give you all kinds of resources you cant get on the street
just accept that some university programs are valuable
Thank you Dave Raggett
Senior Software Engineer here; never once set foot in a college or university classroom. I provide for myself and my family by working hard, and learning everything I can from books and online resources.
Code, eat, sleep, repeat.
What's worse is that compared to all other disciplines in the sciences, arts, and trades, computer science is not a "science."
If I go through these comments and find anybody is surprised by this, I will spend the ENTIRE DAY LAUGHING.
College education is a complete waste of time for most IT jobs. You come out of it with zero relevant training and typically no more skilled in the fundamentals than when you went in.
Unless, that is, you grew up lacking a passion for tech. If you weren't into tech growing up, you might need oh wait nevermind, there are internets and libraries. And they don't waste your time forcing you to drive for 90 minutes of lowest-common-denominator pacing.
College - it's going the way of paper news.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
I used to have dealings with a corporation and a woman who's title was "DBA". She "administered" a small MS Access database.
This is one of the problems with surveys and statistics.
I'm not spending $60k on a piece of paper that says I know what I already know.
see you're putting words in my mouth
I *never* said that A. formal education is for everyone or B. self education is always invaluable
quite the contrary...read these sentences carefully:
> Formal education is not for everyone
> Self education is a life necessity
I believe those strongly. They are true. The fact that they are true is in no way contradictory to my original point about the **false** narrative of the "tech innovator dropout"
you see that I'm criticizing false narratives, right?
can you teach yourself to understand wtf i'm saying?
Thank you Dave Raggett
can be != always
facts can be **conditionally true**
I'll teach you the difference:
> "programs can be valuable"
is different than
> "programs are always the most valuable"
see how those two statements are **not the same**?
another example
> "sl4shd0rk's comments can be moronic"
vs
> "sl4d0rk's comments are always the most moronic"
Thank you Dave Raggett
n/t
Thank you Dave Raggett
... if you had an education you would know that an anecdote is not enough substantiation for statistical analysis.
After interviewing and working with hundreds of IT people I can assure you that your situation is the exception, not the norm.
People that learned to put a bit of code together, disassembled a PC to change a RAM chip or do some other menial IT work are promoted to positions for which they are sorely lacking in skills.
They don't care to document what they do (because they never undertook six months or a year of software engineering classes), they don't have the mathematics and physics background to tackle complex problems (because they missed calculus, classical physics and other knowledge imparted at degree level foundation courses) , they try to reinvent the wheel (because they didn't take courses about computational algorithms) and they keep programming undocumented spaghetti code (normally Perl) because they didn't receive formal education as programmers (structured and object oriented programming), or they don't know how to avoid the basic pitfalls when designing a database (because they didn't learn the mathematical theory behind database design).
You tell people that they will be ok without a solid education, those of us that know this to be untrue will have less competition. Many thanks.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I never did the same problem 95 times (I may have done 95 different problems, applying the same principles).
So writing a paper is also "busy work"?
Under such limited perspective, pretty much any intellectual endeavour will just be "busy work".
That is how people that didn't have the drive or will to go through higher education devalue the hard work of others. It's ok to vent frustration that way, but is fundamentally nonsense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ohh Dear Lord! No Degree at All? How do they know how to function without being taught in over priced schools by teachers that barely understood the technology that was already outdated by the time they realized it should be taught? (Sorry, it just bugs me when people imply that not having a degree means a person is stupid, lazy, or incompetent)