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."

Comments

So basically...

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:So basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

*sigh*

If someone is looking at college as something that will help them get a job or make more money, then they shouldn't fucking be in college to begin with. Education is meant to better your understanding of the world and everything around you. We need *fewer* people going to college and university, because a lot of them have a "I just want to get a job/make money!" mentality, and that makes colleges and universities lower standards in an effort to get money from the people who want degrees.

Otherwise, go and fucking learn something.

You can learn plenty without spending tons of money, especially in the information age. As someone who has a degree, it's absolutely appalling that hordes of people who shouldn't be in college or university are causing standards to drop. This 'Everybody's gotta go to college!' mentality needs to die, and fast.

Re:So basically...

[Drethon]

Yes. Given that typically for that person with the 1-2 year degree they have worked longer than I have to get the same pay. After a few years in the field I consider time on the job to vastly out weigh time in school.

Re:So basically...

[nine-times]

Well I think the elephant in the room is that we need a lesser focus on "higher education" and a greater focus on "trade schools". In fact, that's what's happening already, in a half-assed way, when people have the mentality "I just want to get a job/make money!" They're thinking of our colleges and universities as trade schools, and those schools are, to some extent, setting themselves up to be trade schools.

The only real problem that I see with all of this is that we can't make up our minds what we want. Lots of people want to go to schools that will teach them a trade that will make money, but call it a "trade school" and those same people think that it's beneath them, that it's low-class. They don't like learning a broad spectrum of generalized and abstract concepts, but they've been taught that either you go to college, or you should work the cash register at a fast-food restaurant-- there's no middle ground. There are professions like plumbing, which make decent money but people think are for stupid low-class people, and then professions like IT support which are considered more "professional" though it often amounts to similar work-- you're a mr. fix-it working with computers rather than pipes.

It's in coherent.

Meanwhile, colleges are actually more focused on research dollars, sports teams, and frat parties than providing either a "higher education" or a "trade education", all of which confuses these issues even more. I'm of the opinion that these things impede each other, and we need to begin to separate them back out. Young people who have no interest in studying anything and only want to party should go to cities and communities where they can get drunk and messy, instead of coupling that experience with "education". We should have minor league sports teams which have no college association, and let promising young athletes get jobs in those leagues instead of taking sham courses in big universities. We should look at how we fund and handle research and see if so much of it should be taking place in universities. We develop respectable trade schools for young people to learn a trade (or for older people to retrain in a different trade) for instances where people are looking for practical employable skills rather than abstract knowledge.

All of these things are achievable if only we could get our collective heads out of our asses. Unfortunately, I have very little faith in humanity being able to do that sort of thing.

That isn't what a CSci degree is for

[damn_registrars]

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.

It's possible to get a job without a degree...

[mark-t]

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.

Re:It's possible to get a job without a degree...

[mlts]

In my experience, you won't get an HR person's attention unless you have the alphabet soup after your name. A bachelor's gets the resume out of the round file. A MCSE/CCIE/RHCE gets it scheduled. A CISSP or TS-SCI clearance gets it to the tech guys to be interviewed. In fact, when I got out of college, most interviews went like this:

Interviewer: "Do you have a CISSP or TS-SCI? No? Next in line, please."

It really didn't matter about experience... one could be clueless in IT but have a MCSE, and be further along than someone who had many years in the field, but didn't have the cert.

Re:Modded down?

[roc97007]

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.

Oh there are lots of candidates, but they want to be paid first world wages. That's the real issue.

The Consequence

[pokerdad]

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.

So it's the "tech industry", so what?

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:Certifications and experience are more importan

[jcr]

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

Re:Modded down?

[mooingyak]

or you can turn it the other way around, ask the person why he wants to get paid 33$ or 37$ an hour in the first place as I think this is a very high amount to get paid. I could assume that over 50% of a paycheck goes to the house, appartment or mortgage then the problem ain't the paycheck alone but rather what he pays with it. Don't pay for waht you can't afford is what I can tell from lots of people. They got 3 floor house when they can alone afford a garden house anyways.

It's NYC. $37/hour doesn't go that far, especially if you have a family.

Re:If only

[GodfatherofSoul]

That's like a driver saying auto mechanics has nothing to do with his job. You might not understand how computer science influences everything you're doing on your job which is probably why your search algorithm results always suck. Just because there are some glaring stellar examples of guys dropping out and making boatloads doesn't make that best path to success. The average IT guy is...average! He's not some 160 IQ natural born leader with a business sense. This Slashdot meme of crapping on formal education needs to stop. Yes, lots of people can drop out or never go to college and make a good living churning out web pages or iPhone apps, but that's not the best path to take.

The best thing for anyone entering the field to do is get a 4 year degree and get the formal education you'll never get on your own. I say that as a guy in the industry for about 12 years who went *back* and finished my degree. I sat through that last 2 years in class almost every day thinking of coding/design errors I'd made in the past based on what I was taught.

It's true - most programmers don't need college

[garyebickford]

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.

Re:Modded down?

[rwhamann]

Has anyone studied long term survival/performance of businesses that went whole-hog into H1B versus businesses that opted for local workers and paying them to keep high quality?

Re:Modded down?

[roc97007]

Has anyone studied long term survival/performance of businesses that went whole-hog into H1B versus businesses that opted for local workers and paying them to keep high quality?

That's a truly excellent question. Not as far as I know. It's possible that the phenomenon has not been going on long enough for the effects to be apparent from outside the company. Big corporations tend to have a lot of inertia. I think that's the only reason HP still exists as a company.