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Bachelor's Degree: An Unnecessary Path To a Tech Job
dcblogs (1096431) writes "A study of New York City's tech workforce found that 44% of jobs in the city's 'tech ecosystem,' or 128,000 jobs, 'are accessible' to people without a Bachelor's degree. This eco-system includes both tech specific jobs and those jobs supported by tech. For instance, a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree might be a computer user support specialist, earning $28.80 an hour, according to this study. Tech industry jobs that do not require a four-year degree and may only need on-the-job training include customer services representatives, at $18.50 an hour, telecom line installer, $37.60 an hour, and sales representatives, $33.60 an hour. The study did not look at 'who is actually sitting in those jobs and whether people are under-employed,' said Kate Wittels, a director at HR&A Advisors, a real-estate and economic-development consulting firm, and report author.. Many people in the 'accessible' non-degree jobs may indeed have degrees. For instance. About 75% of the 25 employees who work at New York Computer Help in Manhattan have a Bachelor's degree. Of those with Bachelor's degrees, about half have IT-related degrees."
If you want to earn 1/3 as much as an engineer, and barely enough to survive in NYC, then don't get a degree. Otherwise, go and fucking learn something.
CSci degrees, at nearly every university in the US, are programming degrees. If you aspire to do tech support (or really much of anything other than programming) you are wasting your time with a CSci degree. Don't get me wrong, it is a very useful degree to have, but it is not generally a path towards doing computer support (nor should it be).
Now, that said, a lot of support techs clearly would benefit from more formal schooling - but it could be done in a less cost and time consuming manner than a 4 year degree.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've been trying to find people in the tech industry who actually make these "industry average" salaries pushed out by roberthalf/etc ... so far, no luck. Lord knows I've never made "industry average" ...
also, FP
Needless to say, real world experience (and getting your foot in the door, to get such experience) plus passion & people skills tends to get you further than academic credentials.
I never finished my bachelor, got bored and got a job before even finishing my second year - though I've been programming pretty heavily since I was 13/14 in 'real world' languages (Java, C++, and later C#/Haskell) - I worked quite successfully in high paying full time jobs from 18-22, and I've been doing contracting work since (by choice, since I can land 140/hr+ contracts and get the flexibility to work on my own hobbies between contracts).
I can safely say that I'm quite glad I never finished my Bachelor, the thought of spending tens of thousands (more) dollars and 2-3 more years of my life for nothing is depressing, and having been in hiring situations I can also see it never would have helped me (fresh undergrads tend to be less than useless, with the exception of those who do it for a passion - much like I did).
While across the ecosystem, 44% of jobs do not require a Bachelor’s degree, the majority of tech jobs in tech industries require some degree of education. With a Bachelor’s degree, and in some cases, an Associate’s degree, many opportunities exist within the New York City tech ecosystem.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
The truth is that the vast majority of jobs in any field don't really need a degree, just some critical thinking skills. You learn most everything on the job.
The reality is that the system is built on overpriced degrees, so hiring managers are going to hire people that went through the same 4+ years of work and loans. They aren't going to devalue their degrees by proving degrees are mostly worthless.
Sorry, but in most cases you need the degree.
Let's bring in H1B candidates to replace bankers, managers, CEOs, etc. When those assholes stop getting thousands if not millions in bonuses every godamn year, maybe they'll understand the true value of money.
So 66% of tech jobs are not available to you without a bachelors degree? And the study does nothing to determine the quality of the job you can get?
Sound like while a Bachelor's may not be strictly required if all you want is "a job" that it is still a good idea.
Personally, I've been gainfully employed for the last 15 years as a software developer. I do not have a bachelor's degree, although I do have an associates in Computer Information Systems. I've never had too much problem getting a job.
That said, I am currently working on BS in Comp Sci at a four year state school. Why? For one I've grown more interested in the theory as I've gotten more experienced, and I find learning computer science to very interesting and also pretty useful in my job. Secondly, I may want to get a MS in Computer Science in the future and a BS is a requirement. And finally, some jobs simply will not even interview you, let alone hire you, without a bachelors.
Some people might argue that you wouldn't want to to work for such a company anyway, but I like having every available opportunity open to me when looking for a position. So I'll keep working on my bachelors even if I COULD get as CSR job for a whopping $18.50/hr in NYC without one....
Yeah right. Anyone who has a laptop, can read the web for code samples and post on forums?
I don't know the ins and outs of H1B, but don't they usually require a master degree?
Shows where the bias is here! Obviously, we don't have ANY qualified persons in the US for this GIANT SURPLUS of jobs that we have with the employment numbers DECREASING?!?! So, let's bring some cheap foreigners that we don't have to even pay minimum wage. Let's bring LOTS of them to use Suckerberg's fwd.us propaganda.
I got a Bachelors in Network Administration from a state school. It wasn't required for my current job, but it certainly helped get me noticed and hired. Beyond that, the main advantage of the degree was having hands-on experience with Cisco gear and server OSes in a simulated production environment. Of course, you could find a training course that does that for much cheaper and without the bullshit lib arts requirements. In the end, I'd say it was worth it because I was able to get it at a reputable state school and my ending loans were about 2/3rds of my first year's salary, which wasn't bad at all. I certainly wouldn't have paid private school tuition for it.
In our contemporary world, you can do two things at university: gain knowledge by studying and acquire prestige by graduating. Some people are there for the first, others for the second. For the people who are there for the second reason the degree is nothing more than a leg-up in the hiring process afterwards. This have created a large number of college educated people who, for the purposes of their jobs, don't need to be. The fact that there exist a large number of jobs that don't require a college degree for knowledge-related reasons doesn't entail that there exist a large number of jobs that don't require a college degree for prestige-related reasons. In other words, the conclusions drawn in TFA communicate precisely no information at all.
If only HR managers understood this or knew that computer science has nothing to do with computers. The entire computer industry was built by college dropouts and is ruled by technology that changes faster then a 4 year degree. Hire people that understand technology and can learn new tech on the run. Degrees are meaningless in tech and are becoming more so in all areas.
But honestly, the degree at least helps you get your foot in the door long enough that they may at least be willing to talk to you.
When you are competing with dozens of people for the same job, and if many of them have a degree and you do not, regardless of your actual skill or talent, in my experience it's unfortunately true that the employer probably won't look at your resume any longer than it takes to throw it in the round file.
That said... I've also known people who have lied about their degree in order to get a job... and it hasn't ever worked out for them very well.
It's time consuming, it's expensive, and it'll put you in debt for years to come as you work like an ass to pay it off... but as one who's travelled both roads, I can only say that it's worth it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's not my experience in the "tech industry". Every job I've had - Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee - have required a BS at minimum. I work with people who don't have a degree, and they are in "tech" positions that pay less and have fewer advancement options.
I guess "Tier One Help Desk" would meet the articles criteria, but who would want to do that job for the rest of your life?
In fact, now that I think about it, TFA is 180 from my experience, not only is higher education critically important, but almost equally important is *where* you went to school. Ivy > state > trade > Pheonix > none
Many employers require a bachelors' degree or unattainable amounts of experience for even entry-level jobs doing menial tasks. I understand they dont want folks with the attention span of a gnat, but they should keep requirement realistic. I see job listings every day requiring 5 to 10 years of experience but only offer entry-leve or even minimuml wages.
Would you rather hire a support technician with an arm's length list of industry certifications or a 4 year degree? I know which one I'd choose (the former). It's not a position where universities lay out a comprehensive education program that can compete with industry. Same for DBAs, sysadmins and network engineers. Those are professional positions that require maybe at most an AA's worth of credits in the case of the network engineer to help them understand why they do what they do, but most of it is product knowledge-heavy work. Now if only more companies would realize that they need to ratchet up the difficulty on their certifications, certifications would get a better reputation.
Look at it this way. The HR person will have two stacks of resumes. One for people with a degree and one for people without. Odds are the only time they'll delve into the non-degree pile is if they find no one in main stack to fill the position. This isn't to say you MUST have a degree to get a job. I lack one and have been employed for a long time. But I'm realizing that as my age gets up there, it will be desirable to get one for my next job.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I have three diplomas (two in engineering, one in IT) and very little of the schooling applies in real life, but I couldn't get past HR without a piece of paper that says I'm smart. I don't have to be smart, but I have to have the paper that says I am.
Aside from the fact that I saw this load of crap on reddit awhile ago, this summary is painful to read again. The "is accessible" just made me want to cringe. Any job is accessible without a degree when there is no legal requirement for the practitioner to have a degree. You might as well post that 44% of the 128,000 jobs are prime candidates for H1B. I can spin these figures too.
Exactly!
All the examples are relatively low-paying jobs, not the high-paying jobs that everyone says tech is great for.
... to be a computer programmer or sys admin or DBA. Many short-sighted companies may not hire you, but why do you want to work for a company that cares more about a piece of paper than the abilities of it's staff. Be willing to start at the bottom so you can spend 4 years having someone else train you. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for it yourself.
After several years as in those fields, you won't need a degree to become an engineer or architect. Anything you might have learned 10 years earlier is out of date anyway. And you will know how things really work, instead of just how they are supposed to work.
I know many people who are some of the top 'go-to' people in their companies in these fields that have never gotten a degree, or taken any significant number of college courses. They know how to read, and they learn by doing, either on their own or by taking on tasks that other people are unwilling to because they don't know how to do it.
Your guidance councilor is lying to you. The only thing that stands between you and a job is your own willingness to learn, and how smart you are.
By all means, if you are not that smart, go into debt and get that piece of paper that suggests you know something so you can get a job and have your co-workers hate working with you.
If you have the cash and the time, by all means attend college. College is a great place to learn if you want to take too much time and spend a lot of money.
But don't accept the lie that you have to do that to earn a decent living. And don't accept the lie that those that go to college make more money.
Smart, self-motivated, hard working people make more money than almost everyone else.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
When I worked in IT I used to laugh at anyone who had spent more time or money schooling than I did but still ended up in the same lousy positions. That was until, after some years in the industry, I came to realize that their education gave them a much better chance at advancement. A lot of the people I used to laugh at are doing well in IT 10 or more years later, while I left for greener pastures back in 2009.
It's getting to a point where companies should sponsor their own degrees. Want to work at "Company X"? Then go to school and major in "Company X's Program / Degree"...
Otherwise, everyone and their brother clamoring about what this and that degree is for is moot because every company I've ever applied to / worked at all had their own biased view about what a C.S. / I.T. / M.I.S. / etc. degree was for.
What jobs are they looking at here?
computer user support specialist
customer services representatives
telecom line installer
sales representatives
(With new york city wages)
So what you're saying is that people working in the shit-end of the industry don't need the same credentials as the people working the high-paying end of the industry?
Golly gosh-darn!
It's like manager at the local McDonalds doesn't need to have the same pedigree as the CEO of McDonalds corporate.
And maybe... just maybe... that night-shift manager has just about the same chances of rising to CEO of McDonalds as the help-desk wage-slave has of becoming the lead software architect.
People with degrees value them, people without them don't. News at 8.
I have one, I'll give a few tips:
1. Go to a state school, don't go private unless Mitt Romney is your dad. State school is just as good.
2. When the second dot bomb hits, people without degrees become second class citizens as far as hiring goes. It's all relative, we're in a tech boom right now, of course degrees aren't as important.
3. Employers hire people without degrees because they are usually cheaper.
4. You don't have to go CS. MIS/CIS are very valuable and actually teach you how to normalize a relational database, a skill which is sorely lacking in today's crop of coders.
"a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree"
a. This is not Europe. Cause I do know that folks must have trade certs due to the proper class system they have in culture. Technology if done correctly sort of breaks down those barriers. The current tech is new (last 10yrs), and last I heard Newton didn't need a Math (but he did have one to an extent) nor Physics degree.
"a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree"
b.AKA, a job at Apple's Genius Bar.
The double equal sign is a Boolean logical evaluation operator. You are essentially asking me to evaluate whether no degree is equal to bad pay which I might say true, or depending on the mood, I might instead say false. If you want to signify mathematical equivalence, simply use the equivalence operator, the single equal sign.
=
Having managed myself to generate counter-factual results with such industry certifications, I have zero faith in them. A University may not be your idea of a suitably custom crafted trade school but it does imply a bit more depth than cramming for some multiple guess exam.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, but it's easier to get if you have a master's degree. It's a separate pool with less competition than those with a bachelors.
Would you rather hire a support technician with an arm's length list of industry certifications or a 4 year degree?
The one with the 4 year degree. Any other questions?
Most of the people I know who have those certs crammed for them by buying the tests online and memorizing the answers.
It would kill me when they would show up for a question. They usually had the cert and *should* know how to do it. If they had actually did and understood the class material. I could usually noodle thru it and figure it out having never seen it before.
Reading through the comments did no one else see that in the article the company that was focused on only recruited people with 15 years industry experience?! I suppose the owner wants people to work for 15 years without pay as an intern before getting a position at his company? Looks like there are just too many people for every decent job.
FWIW, those H1B workers typically have degrees.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, if your company makes it's money making and selling software or hardware, SOME of the high end jobs are different. Similarly, the guys that make toilets have some high end jobs that are not blue collar workers.
But most of us don't write the big code. Instead we install, maintain and fix stuff that some idiot took a big dump in.
We are plumbers, not Management. Hell, we even hate the 'suits'.
For the majority of jobs, we don't need a BA. Honestly, my BA was in political science, not computer science. Yes, I took post-graduate classes, yes I taught myself. But NOTHING I learned from teachers at my university is essential to my job.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And despite that, he often knew more than the 'fresh in' Bachelors who were making as much or more than him.
By the end of his time working he was at the pay cap, but for a lot of the intervening years, despite proof to the contrary, he was being undervalued financially compared to his coworkers.
A better question might be: Should somebody be allowed to be paid more just because they have a degree, regardless of whether their skills prove lacking in merit?
Would you rather hire a support technician with an arm's length list of industry certifications or a 4 year degree?
Neither, actually. When I interview people, I really don't care about what tickets they've gotten punched. I want them to demonstrate proficiency.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
this is a problem ****across academic disciplines**** and not in any way related to tech specifically.
dropping out of college is a reductive concept...and using people like Jobs or Gates as examples is patently foolish
if you realize your college **program** sucks, transfer to one that doesnt
if you realize your career goals cannot be reached through a degree, then drop out
if you want to have a **career** in tech, get a degree in tech
these stupid studies are so reductive & leave out so many salient factors...disregard!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Went to work for a software company as a Senior in High School almost 30 years ago. By the time I had been there 3 months, I knew more about their systems than anyone in the company, and became their DBA, their UNIX Admin and programming consultant for other employees switching from Cobol / RPGII to a modern 4GL database language.
When I left the company 14 years later, I was still their top programmer and basically ran the I.T. department managing everything technical.
All of this without any college whatsoever.
Today, I'm highly placed in a Fortune 500 corporation doing what I love to do.
Lack of a college degree hasn't hurt me at all.
Tech industry jobs that do not require a four-year degree and may only need on-the-job training include customer services representatives, at $18.50 an hour, telecom line installer, $37.60 an hour, and sales representatives, $33.60 an hour.
There seems to be some confusion here. What exactly constitutes a "tech industry job"? I wouldn't consider any of the above three positions to be that. Customer service (as opposed to technical support) is a low-paid non-technical job that usually involves reading off a script. In most parts of the country it will pay a lot worse than $18.50 an hour (maybe as little as half as much). Telecom line installer sounds like a blue-collar trades job – not necessarily a bad thing if it pays well, but not the kind of thing that someone gets into the "IT industry" to do. And sales is, well, sales – the average techie isn't going to be at all suited for this.
The question really should be how important a college degree is for real IT jobs like programmer, network admiinistrator, or DBA.
telecom line installer, $37.60
and think WTF have spent the past 10 years doing??? It took me 10 years, a degree, tons of hours of work, to get my salary up to that level and I am sure I could have been running some RG-58 pretty efficiently for the past 10 years.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
Except some companies, like HP, flat out will not hire unless you have a degree.
It is standard HR practice to use whether you have completed college as a criteria for hiring.
Education usually matters to the person looking at the resumes and only if they themselves have dumped a ton of money on education (thus assuming it has value and). I have yet to work for an organization that demanded a college education of any prospect that could actually do the job and add value. It may irritate the people who dumped a lot of cash on a 4 year degree, but I don't their high school guidance counselors were motivated to tell them that they didn't need a degree (or the debt).
Money - This is an interesting topic unto itself. Unfortunately, the people who languish in "shit salary land" believe that they will eventually get to the good money when they get older, get more education, etc etc. It all comes down to negotiation skills, value to the company, etc etc. I chuckle at the $35 an hour comment... what year is it? I have guys working here that are in their 20s (with no degrees) making $10K a month.
MANY jobs do not, technically, do not require a Bachelor's Degree. What's learned in College does not always apply in the workplace and much of it is on-the-job training anyway. Even fundamental development and database skills can be learned through books or on-line information sources.
To en employer, a Bachelor's degree shows a willingness to work at achieving your goals, and tends to shorten the learning curve needed to do the job. It also indicates that you're willing to learn and work hard to get where you want to go.
I earn more than $200k / year in NYC, and am a college drop-out.
Before moving to NYC, the highest paying job I had was on the night shift at a convenience store. In NYC, I found that people valued you based on your skills, portfolio and work ethic, and not a piece of paper that proved that you can study. This has taken me as high as being a c-level exec at a fortune 1000, and there's no signs of this stopping any time soon.
I don't know the ins and outs of H1B, but don't they usually require a master degree?
No.
If I remember right, a 1 year TN visa for a Canadian required either a 4-year degree, a 2 year degree + 3 years experience, or 5 years of experience. I could be wrong, but I believe that the requirements for a H1B are similar.
In my long experience as a coder, systems architect, and manager of teams, I have found that for most programming jobs a college degree in CS just isn't necessary. In my early days, few programmers or 'software engineers' even had CS degrees - we had history majors, music majors, a few math majors, etc. Music majors tend to do quite well as they are attracted to patterns and elegance.
Especially today, web programming is rarely concerned with developing deep algorithms, rather with assembling a set of tools. So a mechanical mind may do quite nicely, and a strong desire to make sure things are correct given all possible inputs - like an accountant, a good programmer won't be satisfied unless every 'penny' is accounted for.
When hiring, I often found the CS majors as having an inflated sense of their own abilities, and a general lack of knowledge of how programming is generally done in the real world - hacking on some other schmuck's broken legacy code that nobody can figure out. And a kid who started programming in high school and just kept working at it may have five years of real experience before they get their first job, and does it because he/she can't _stop_ doing it.
The company I work for now has a chief programmer who started writing games in high school, never went to college. He's pretty good, though he needs more real world experience to see how to prevent problems - that's the hardest thing, knowing enough and gettin the habits to avoid the bugs in the first place, which is only possible AFAIK in just experience.
Once they are in the job, then I would definitely encourage, even require, continuing education - go ahead and take some classes, read the books, try things out. Then they will be learning the algorithms, the techniques, in the context of what they already know.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Who has had to work with lots of people that DO NOT grasp the fundamentals of algorithmic complexity, data structures, and so on, I really want this article to die a terrible death.
Yes, it may be great to have a programmer who can also talk the talk to business types, and in some cases that may have much more apparent value than a solid CS education, but if they aren't a well educated programmer, they DO NOT BELONG in a position where they are making software design decisions.
When you hire people with an inadequate education in the field, whether or not you can tell a difference from a layman/non-techie/management perspective, IT IS NOT WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE. Projects end up costing a lot more in the long wrong when you don't have needed expertise from the start.
Hopefully I used enough caps to get my point across.
^ This right here. In most cases, I want passion for work, and someone with in-born troubleshooting skills (if I'm lucky). Most folks with degrees/certs and no practical experience I have to spend substantial amounts of time unfucking to get them doing their jobs correctly and independently.
You forgot the quotation marks around "tech job".
Honestly, this story is absolute crap. The salary examples given are pathetic for "tech jobs". Adjusted for inflation, I was making that much in my first job 15 years ago. And my salary has more than quadrupled since. And yes I do have a college degree, and what I learned there has been invaluable to me in my career.
Yes but a TN visa is not the same as an H1-B visa. The TN is intended to be used as a temporary work permit and has to be renewed annually. AFAIK, it can be renewed indefinately. If you're Canadian then you're in luck. Unlike many other countries there is no annual limit on the number of TN visas issued. Countries like India and China typically have 5-6 year backlogs (or longer) due to quotas.So as long as you're not looking for permanant residency you can get a TN and just keep renewing it.
If you want to be on the path for "permanent residency" then you need to get an H1-B visa. Which, of course, is more difficult to get. But once you get it, it's good for 6 years. It can only be renewed once. But having an H1-B is a direct path to citizenship. The hard part is getting the H1-B. After that, getting citizenship is easy. You don't even need an attorney. I did mine myself.
It's possible to get an H1-B without a Bachelors degree if you have sufficient experience and you can show that there is a shortage of skills in your particular area.
Yeah -- what if the 4-year degree was from 10 - 20 years ago and the arm's length of certifications were recent?
I can tell you that the classes I took in Modula-2, IBM 4381 Assembly and COBOL aren't too terribly useful to me. They might've been if I ended up in programming, as they can provide a foundation for certain concepts, but I ended up not going that route.
And the experiences I gained in shared mainframe terminals and mini-computers also doesn't come into play.
At least with the certs it gives me focal points to dig and see if they actually have the knowledge. Certs are usually fairly specific, and most should be fairly recent. Tech degrees get stale fast.
um.. 50% of all the tech jobs that I have seen require a bachelor's degree. The rest of the jobs require a master's or Ph.D degree. I must be looking at the wrong job listing website. the website that I am using requires me to send them my transcript.
The phrase "tech job" is often used without distinguishing between engineering-like jobs and technicians' jobs. This study goes further still, including "jobs supported by technology" - given how technological out society has become, that could be a very broad group.
Not necessarily good ones, though. A master's from most schools in India is worth about as much as a master's from Devry in the US.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
During booms like now, experience is most important. But during slow times employers will add more requirements, a degree being a bigee. believe or not the CS industryis cyclic and it has had down periods.
When I think of a "tech job", I don't typically imagine a first line tech support that reads from a script or someone that installs network lines after having in-house training and just doing repeated step-by-step instructions.
Of course you don't need a bachelors for a job that has little critical thinking requirements. If you want a secure job that pays well, is salary, and has good benefits, you may want a bachelors degree.
The Lib arts is the only value of a university degree over a tech school. Yes, it's a value. Yes, that's what historically drove the "need a degree" thing that employers do. However, since universities abandonded the liberal arts, paying only lip service to just ify an extra year and a half of tuition, the university degree is just as useless as a tech school.
Get off my lawn.
Unlike many other countries there is no annual limit on the number of TN visas issued. Countries like India and China typically have 5-6 year backlogs (or longer) due to quotas.So as long as you're not looking for permanant residency you can get a TN and just keep renewing it. If you want to be on the path for "permanent residency" then you need to get an H1-B visa. Which, of course, is more difficult to get. But once you get it, it's good for 6 years. It can only be renewed once. But having an H1-B is a direct path to citizenship. The hard part is getting the H1-B. After that, getting citizenship is easy. You don't even need an attorney. I did mine myself.
You need to get your facts straight.
A: There is no 5-6 year backlog for TN visas for India and China. India and Chinese nationals are not eligible as primary applicant for a TN visa.
B: You could be referring to H1-B visas, but then you would still be mistaken as there is no 5-6 year backlog for those either. H1-B visas are processed on a first-come first-serve basis until the annual limit is reached or when a high number of applications is received (all applications in the first week will usually be put in a lottery system). Unlucky applicants can try again next FY.
C: H1-B is not a direct path to citizenship. The path from H1-B to citizenship requires permanent residence, which requires a sponsoring employer.
D: I suspect you are not being truthful when you say "I did mine myself". That is very difficult, as you generally need an employer to sponsor your permanent residence (form I-140), and BTW, the same goes for your H1-B (form I-129). The only exceptions to the I-140 sponsoring requirements are people who have an extraordinary ability (EB1-A category). If you are able to file all the required paperwork yourself and get it approved, then you are truly extraordinary and I humbly bow to you.
E: It is the permanent residence part that has a huge backlogs, up to 8 years for certain countries.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I've done a mix of admin/helpdesk/desktop support for 10 years, I dont have any formal college training, I just went out and got a crummy job fixing PCs for next to nothing in my early 20s and worked my way up from there.
I see tech support and the engineering side of IT more as a trade, you shouldnt need a degree, you need experience and the right attitude towards it to succeed. I see a large number of tech support to engineering jobs that state degree or equivalent xyz years of experience.
Some of the best jobs I've had with big companies and small are the ones where the people doing the recruiting actually know what they are looking for, sometimes the HR people in the chain know what to look for, sometimes it's been because the manager of the department and/or senior staff are the ones that wrote the job description and then screened the applications, and did the interviews.
I'm sure a lot of these so called HR people use degree/no degree is a simple filter to filter out applications. But I suspect companies are wising up to these guys who just present them with people who have the degree, and a bunch of certifications yet little to no real experience and turn out to be a flop.
"You need to get your facts straight." - They are straight. See below.
"A: There is no 5-6 year backlog for TN visas for India and China. India and Chinese nationals are not eligible as primary applicant for a TN visa" - I was referring to H1-B visas. TN visas were introduced in NAFTA and, as such, are only available to Canadian and Mexican citizens.
"B: You could be referring to H1-B visas, but then you would still be mistaken as there is no 5-6 year backlog for those either." - The backlog occurs as a result of the annual limit on the H1-B. Once it runs out they have to wait until next year, or the year after. Basically there are a lot more applicants than there are visas.
C + D both assume employment and sponsorship by a US based company. That is a given - just like it is for a TN visa.
The part I did myself was the application for Citizenship. That occurs AFTER the H1-B has been awarded. All you have to do is fill out one document and take the civics exam. Piece of cake.
"Tech job" is a meaningless statement.
Sure, you don't need a degree to run cable, OTOH, doing cutting edge robotics for DARPA it would probably be required, at a minimum.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
To all the people commenting about being successful without a college degree, how and when did you get your foot in the door? How might someone who's not too far out of high school get even a helpdesk job without a degree?
You mean that the core classes for teaching critical thinking, the scientific method, and debate are all "bullshit" to you? Sad, but seems to be the socially acceptable thing to say today. I never understood how poorly educated I was until I spent 4 years studying Philosophy, Ethics, and Logic.
Don't blame Liberal Arts for the Universities and Colleges that try and pass off "Humanities" as a Liberal Art. Blame an ignorant public for being duped into believing task based education is better, and then not understanding why their task based education was obsolete in a decade.
You do know what PHD stands for don't you?
You probably did not intentionally slam "liberal arts", but those little statements keep people from investigating and learning.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Having spent soon close to 20 years in the tech industry I have to say that education seems to leave a small imprint onto most peoples ability to raise the level of their output. And I'm not even talking about Bachelor's or Master's but Ph.D's. Even if presented the physics already mapped onto a mathematical formalism from which you only need to apply the mathematical cookbook (or pattern matching), most fail to perform 1 page of analysis, and to dress a problem with the proper math and then solve it without having a book on the subject at hand seems possible only to a select few. I have seen guys with Ph.D's and years of industry experience spending hours on computer simulations of problems that require 10 minutes of calculus, or maybe 5 even. That is actually really sad.
From another point of view, perhaps most tech jobs do not require much more beyond reading (manuals) and typing and, to some extent, because many (or perhaps even most) managers fail to recognize the difference between the average joe who does what he's told to and those who know what to do so that you don't have to do it again and again. It is quite possible that our societies och economic growth suffer because we don't have the smart people in the right places.
Kids were dropping out of high school to work in IT during the tech boom. Whether this is the right path depends on the person's abilities - some kids are total tech heads and a four year degree is excessive. They're still doing fine even today. It becomes a problem if they ever want to go into management, I think, but if they don't care for management, if four year degree may be optional. I, personally, would always recommend completing a bachelors program. If the argument is, "why should I bother since I'll graduate with this college debt that isn't necessary", believe it or not there are ways to complete a degree that don't involve taking on any debt at all. Live at home for four years until you finish your degree.
Surely you realize you're an exception. In fact, your story seems so absurd by today's standards that it almost comes off as parody.
Plenty of people don't exit high school with a good sense of what options are even out there. Many fields are either not represented at all at the high school level or are represented poorly.
Undergrad isn't just about learning about a specific field. Plenty of people go undecided and spend awhile taking the baseline classes that tend to be required regardless of major during which time they get to talk to students and professors in different fields.No matter what you do, you end up learning a whole lot of skills that you don't get from high school, from personal time management to social interactions. It also often involves the first time living away from home and having to manage expenses. The list of benefits of college besides learning a specific field are too numerous to trawl through, but there are many.
A degree does tend to mean you earn way more in the long run -- and tends to correlate with higher job satisfaction and having an easier time getting a job in general (note that unemployment for those with degrees is far below that of those without). The benefits of a degree would also make for a pretty beefy list.
Anybody being advised not to go to college is being done a disservice.
I’m not saying that ALL companies are like this, but in many of the larger ones, the first people looking at your resume are non-technical. Many just have a checklist, and if the over-worked HR person looking at your resume does not perceive that you have every one of the listed qualifications, it goes straight into the bin. An over-abundance of applicants leads to a superficial and stochastic filtering process that isn’t especially good at figuring out which applications can do the job.
I’ve worked as an engineer, and now I’m faculty in a CS department. On an unrelated note from the above, I find that it’s easier to get a job with a CS degree than other major engineering fields. Not necessarily a GOOD job, though. Compared to EE, for instance, there are way more jobs for CS graduates, although many of them are low-paying grunt work that could indeed be done by lots of people with only a high school diploma.
Except that they won’t hire people without the degree, because it’s one of the required checkboxes on the HR form.
If that statement is true then you went to a terrible university or didn't pay attention (or a little from column A and a little from column B). Critical thinking, how to communicate in the written word and learning to proofread don't help you daily with your CS related job? Sadly maybe you didn't learn at your university, half the user's here still can't determine when to use then vs. than.
I don't know who modded you down, but they may have more to lose than you or I; since H!B visas' have been so thinned out as to be useless from their original intent. A multi billion dollar business that has to use H1Bs' is maintaining a fruad.
I was referring to H1-B visas.
I'm not an English major, but that was not very obvious.
The backlog occurs as a result of the annual limit on the H1-B
Not true as there is no backlog. Applications that are filed outside of the annual limit, or not selected when a lottery is performed, are rejected. They are not delayed for processing in the next FY, and new applications for the same beneficiary will not get any preferential treatment.
C + D both assume employment and sponsorship by a US based company. That is a given - just like it is for a TN visa.
That is perhaps a given to you, but that is not what you wrote. Remember that you, as someone who as undergone the process of immigration, may understand all the steps and requirements, but some poor schmuck in India reading your post may think that he has a chance if he files his own H1-B paperwork. Yes, the naturalization forms may not be that difficult that you'd need an attorney, but that was not clear from your post...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I can teach almost anybody Unix or Windows, etc. But I can't teach somebody to show up, work hard, be a part of the team, etc. I try to interview for those sorts of soft skills. I also try to find somebody who can deconstruct problems. These are your troubleshooters and they can apply those talents to almost any skillset.
Basic troubleshooting methodology is unfortunately not something that seems to be taught in schools.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Depends what kind of certification. Certifications like the PE license or PMP (project management professional) does come with a lot of quality, and it is extremely hard to cram those exams.
New Economic Perspectives
Hey guess what, there are a lot of smart, hard working and self-motivated people who ALSO attend college. We study AND we do. It's possible to have BOTH academic AND real world experience. Imagine that!!
I love how people who haven't been to college put it down as just a "piece of paper" and assume that college graduates don't know anything about the real world, or are in massive debt. Speaking as someone who worked all through high school, and college, and graduate school... and got a job right away in my field right after college. And I've been working in my field (Java programming) for the last 15 years, mostly as a self-employed consultant. So I've got tons of experience on many projects, probably more than most due to being a consultant. And I make very good money at it.
If college isn't for you, I've got no problem with that. I don't assume that people who don't have a college degree are stupid or have an inferiority complex, etc. Although I do have to wonder about people who have such strong opinions about something they've never experienced themselves, and are so willing to spout stereotypical nonsense about it. Don't presume to know what other people "need."
Will: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be servin' my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Will: That may be, but at least I won't be unoriginal. But I mean, if you have a problem with that, I mean, we could just step outside - we could figure it out.
Clark: No, man, there's no problem. It's cool.
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
It is a flagrant error and not a typographical error. Do you have ANY idea what a tyopgraphical [sic] error is?
No matter what you do, you end up learning a whole lot of skills that you don't get from high school, from personal time management to social interactions.
All of which can be done without college, as long as you're not an unmotivated loser. But really, this neglects to take into account the vast majority of college goers, who learn practically nothing, and have a laughably suboptimal level of intelligence. This applies to humans as a whole, but the problem is that people pretend that college students are different, when most are not.
It also often involves the first time living away from home and having to manage expenses.
Are people really so pathetic that they need to go to college to learn such things? It wouldn't surprise me, given what I've seen.
The list of benefits of college besides learning a specific field are too numerous to trawl through, but there are many.
The list of benefits of education are too numerous to trawl through, period. Which is why you should strive to be motivated, and strive to be educated. For that, college is unnecessary in some people's cases.
A degree does tend to mean you earn way more in the long run
The problem when considering these statistics is that they compare college-educated people to a general class of people that weren't college-educated; this is a terrible comparison. A more apt comparison would be motivated individuals who self-educated properly, and have equivalent experience and knowledge, but that would be far more difficult to measure, so it gets ignored. Even that would not be precise enough, but it would at least be better than what they're measuring now.
And again, money should not be the point of college.
Anybody being advised not to go to college is being done a disservice.
There's that absolutism again. It differs from individual to individual, as some simply don't fit in to college, which will just make standards drop by practically forcing them to go.
You might not care if they have certs or a degree, but you wouldn't be interviewing them if HR didn't care about those things.
HR doesn't get to veto candidates that friends refer to me.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not to mention most Tech jobs have Tuition reimbursement.
I got a 5k loan to go to MSCE training. Not a completely useless cert for me as I wasn't paper only. Then I got a job doing technical support for Windows, then technical support for Nortel Networks. I paid off my 5k loan in a few months. And that job had tuition reimbursement. 6 years later, I had a degree, zero debt, and 6 years of intense technical experience and a 60k a year job.
If I had gone to school full-time using loans and not worked, I would have finished school in four years with zero experience, 100k in debt, and no job. At the six year mark, I would have 2 years experience, a 40k job and 80k in debt.
There are two things important:
1. Education.
2. Proof of education
College is just one type of "Proof of Education." Certifications are others. I have seen pleny of proof that in the technical industry, if you get all certifications and work full-time for four years, you will be just as highly revered as those who got a degree.
Remember, Microsoft and other companies give perks to companies with so many engineers that have their certification. So you are actually more valuable financially to a company with certifications than you are with a degree.
People get this wrong all the time because the old idea was that most of what you know comes from your training as an apprentice. That can no longer be true because technology is changing so fast. In fact it is more valuable to learn how to learn. That is something a particular form of higher education can help you do. It can train you with thinking and critical skills that guide you to new knowledge. In a way it is almost as if the kind of skills that were taught in Plato's Academy, updated of course, are more important now than ever before. People with no formal education are easy to spot in this standard. They have gaps in their knowledge that are hard to explain logically, and the remedy for that seems to have been a bout in a "sophomoric" debating society. That exercises the mental muscle and challenges the beast of prejudice in a way that an informal or vocationally directed training does not. This shows in the prevalence of crack-pot or pseudoscience ideas in engineers, especially. The electrical engineering people I have known over the years seem particularly prone to bizarre beliefs. The reason for this seems to be the specialization of education and the gaps in their training. People who train in more traditional sciences and especially those who get to experience research learn much more how to think generally, techniques like suspending judgement and a bull-shit detector are great teachers.
What this subject seems to be about really is that some people are "Tools", that is functionaries inside organizations whose self-appointed role is to enforce the status quo. You know the types, these are the guys who make sweeping generalization and give pat arguments based on business or finance as though they are in charge. They may be revealing their own uncreativeness or defending their holding against competition by telling everyone else what not to do, give "advice" which is really negative and self-serving. They may actually be enforcing elitist or insider practices that actively discourage competition.
To the point of the OP, this may be one of those efforts as misinformation made by someone with a hidden (financial) agenda, to get people cheaper than possible if they presented a college diploma. What is of little doubt is that what can be learned of a subject like "coding" is open ended and that a good formal training in subjects like algorithem design and performance is of obvious value, if not always a requirement of the task at hand, and that to be able to know of when formal topics are important is of great value. The issue boils down to what someone wants to pay you for, to be a compliant underling, like all the "Tools" that frequent these forums, or to pay you for that analytical skill that might be needed from time to rime.
I've had 3 jobs in the past 6 years, all of which "required" a 4 year degree. The first job was entry level, the rest all "required" 5+ years of experience in addition to the degree. Obviously I haven't had either until very recently, yet was still able to get the job and work my way up from there. I skipped school while most of my friends went, they call graduated 2 years ago and I now have a job paying significantly higher than all but one of them, 6 years of experience, and without the 20-30k in student loans they have.
And I still got to go to most of the college parties that where the real reason most of them probably went in the first place.
Anyone with five years of relevant experience and no degree can earn at least $100K cutting code in Silicon Valley. But a degree makes getting that first job a hell of a lot easier.