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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
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.
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?
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'
So 66% of tech jobs are not available to you without a bachelors degree?
The remainder is 56%, not 66%... and of those 56%, we don't know how many of them are accessible with an B.Sc but require, for example, an M.Sc.
But of course, your point remains...education gives you much more job opportunities.
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?"
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
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
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
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. $37/hour doesn't go that far, especially if you have a family.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
or you can turn it the other way around, ask the person why he wants to get paid 33$ 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.
Or you have, say, a family, and your children have a desire and aptitude for fields that really do need a college degree. Or should only the children of the ruling class get to aspire to something other than a phone tech gig?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Companies are not interested in wasting time teaching you skills on the job if they can avoid it.
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.
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.
Or we could turn it around again and point and laugh at losers like you who think everyone should be psychic and not buy homes with a 30 year mortgage because they should see that 15 years in the future some cretin will say "why should this person get paid $33 or $37 an hour" and work to cut their pay.
What does your crystal ball see in your future?
Mine sees wages continuing to deflate. Of all my friends during dot com boom, only two of us kept our houses after the bust. He, because he fully committed his salary at the time and now owns it outright, and me because I bought a smaller house in a child friendly neighborhood, and managed to find enough work post boom to keep up payments. Those who bought huge show pieces in gated hives are all gone now. Living in apartments or had moved out of state looking for work, or in very rare cases moved into sales or management. And don't let the rhetoric fool you -- sales and upper management are worked like dogs, constantly aware that they need to justify their inflated salaries or be replaced at a moment's notice.
My crystal ball sees a continuing flood of third world workers willing to accept convenience store salaries, and a lot more locals out of work. My boss actually brags in status meetings how much money he's saved with H1B workers, and how he intends to hire them whenever possible. (I'm a "legacy employee" grimly determined to hang onto my job.) In the meantime, morale has never been lower, communication suffers, and project continuity is almost nonexistent. But as long as the practice looks profitable on the short term, it will continue.
Part of me thinks that business is running mostly on inertia at the moment. Eventually we'll reach the point where consumers can't afford the non-essential trinkets that make so much money, because there aren't jobs anymore that pay enough to afford them. Currently it's a downward spiral, with companies paying less, causing consumers to have less to spend, reducing sales, which cause companies to find more cost cutting measures. (Currently, the biggest fad of which is hiring third world workers.) In the meantime, it's just a different kind of race to the bottom.
Oh, and I'm not just sitting around waiting for the axe to fall. I'm working on starting a new business in a completely different kind of work, one that involves directly interfacing with people, a skill that H1B employees generally lack. As a local, communication skills are your biggest advantage. Don't forget that, it might become useful some day.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
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.
Then it might be time to move. Back in the nineties I moved out of the San Francisco bay area, where I had lived most of my life, because I took a hard look at the cost of living and the chances of ever owning a home, and decided that my salary as an engineer would never get me out of the apartment, much less raise a family. Finding a high tech job at the same salary in an area with lower cost of living was like getting a huge raise. And the quality of life is higher, the level of crime is much lower, and there's significantly less traffic. Of course, the temperatures and weather vary dramatically from the bay area, but the other things made it worth the trade, and we can always visit.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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?
seg fault
Good choice.
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.
This.
A computer user support specialist at $28 an hour is a pipe dream; most companies sub-sub contract those people, pay them $14-17 an hour (at least in Chicago), expect free overtime, provide no healthcare or any benefits, take a cut of travel, maybe 10 days off a year, and that's it.
Last time I checked, no Call Center Worker made $18 an hour. More like $10-12 an hour, tops.
But do remember, this is Computerworld. They are a tabloid.
There does come a point where working 60-80hr weeks make you reconsider your profession and your willingness to participate in it. There are so many people out there who've been burned repeatedly.
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.
"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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"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
Not all "support specialists" are "Bob" in the callcenter talking to lusers about downloading the internet. Even medium-sized companies often have an internal support department. From some I've seen firsthand, $28 is doing pretty well, but not so well as to be in "pipe dream" territory.
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.
I have a different view on this matter and it's very much linked to my experience and not necessarily what is actually happening.
When I was working as a supervisor in a call centre for a well know h/w manufacturer, we were struggling to keep staff because pay was too low. Increasing pay was not an option as the product revenues were way too low and support is just an overhead nobody wants to pay for. An option would have been selling the products for more but that would mean less product sales. At the end of the day due to shortage of staff (due to better jobs available out there) and the requirement for cheap support it was almost fully outsourced.
All in all, this problem is caused by each person's greed. Here's why I say this. Lets say you go to Best Buy to purchased a gaming mouse. If you have the same mouse with 2 options: 1) $40 with support from Asia, 2) $45 with support from North America. I can assure you that most consumers will pick option 1. This is where we fall flat on our faces.
Why is management making these decisions? They are doing their jobs. Even if they know how harmful it is to our working class, they still have to do it. Companies pay their managers well to do this. Saving money is an important part of management and is one of the easiest metrics to measure. In the long run managers will be next on the list but for now they are safe.
If you look at TED talks there is one that somewhat covers this topic. It talks about how outsourcing jobs will eventually cause economies to level out. This obviously isn't good for us right now since we are at the top of the podium but we can hope that within 15 - 20 years things will have leveled off.
For now my only advice to anybody working a job is: Work hard because if you give management a reason to outsource, they will.
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.
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.
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.
Then it might be time to move. Back in the nineties I moved out of the San Francisco bay area, where I had lived most of my life, because I took a hard look at the cost of living and the chances of ever owning a home, and decided that my salary as an engineer would never get me out of the apartment, much less raise a family. Finding a high tech job at the same salary in an area with lower cost of living was like getting a huge raise. And the quality of life is higher, the level of crime is much lower, and there's significantly less traffic. Of course, the temperatures and weather vary dramatically from the bay area, but the other things made it worth the trade, and we can always visit.
I can certainly see an argument for moving, but the poster I was replying to suggested that the only reason people might need more than that kind of wage (roughly $80k / year) would be because they're wasting it on luxuries like a massive house or some such. Which is not the case.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
The problem with this thinking is that outsourcing jobs reduces the number of people, holistically, who can afford to buy non-essential products. So eventually, your sales go down anyway. Perhaps not right away, especially if you were on the leading edge of the outsourcing curve, but it's inevitable.
A "gaming mouse" (to use your example) assumes people who (a) have the free time to play games, (b) have the discretionary income to buy games, (what are computer games, still $60 per seat?) and (c) have enough discretionary income left over to buy a gaming mouse. And it is a certainty that some of the young people manning your call center are in that demographic. Except they can't afford that anymore, because you just outsourced phone support off shore and they're back living with their parents.
Of course, there isn't a 1:1 correlation, but the example above illustrates how, on a macroscopic level, every reduction in the number of locals working reduces the number of purchases made by locals. And if you're not exporting, that probably includes consumers in your sales demographic. It's a downward spiral, and it only seems like a fun ride if you're leading the pack. And then, only for a short time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I can certainly see an argument for moving, but the poster I was replying to suggested that the only reason people might need more than that kind of wage (roughly $80k / year) would be because they're wasting it on luxuries like a massive house or some such. Which is not the case.
I agree with that. It's a classic problem -- a high cost of living in a given area tends to either drive wages up beyond national average, or drive living conditions down compared to the same career opportunities in other areas. Usually a combination of these.
I still keep in touch with a few people in the Bay Area, and the only ones who own a home live many miles to the east and endure an hours-long daily commute. Most are still renting apartments well into middle age. A few have invested in condos, which in most cases are repurposed motels and apartment complexes.
I've never lived in New York, but from personal experience living in SF, $33/hour isn't exactly rolling in cash.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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."
It's leveling out faster than that. India and China have been experiencing 20% inflation for high skill jobs and 100% inflation for low skill jobs (still making under $5000 a year but... at 100% a year...).
The quality of workers available thru offshoring has been dropping since 2005 BUT-- offshoring companies have a unique advantage in that they can turn on and off large numbers of workers at a given client rapidly. I.e. you have a project that needs 20 developers, 3 analysts, 1 architect-- and on two months notice- you've got it at an agreed upon rate. Turns out you only need 15 developers or you need 25 developers-- and you've got it.
Meanwhile- the private company has interviewed 17 candidates- offered to 5, and gotten 2 to accept. And 1 of those may not work out. And the private company has a shitty reputation for being a sweat shop PLUS no training PLUS layoffs while the offshoring company values programmer candidates (because they are revenue sources unlike at the private company where they were a cost).
But.. don't trust that the offshore people *really* have the skill sets-- probably 15 of the 20 they send you will have no skill set to a 2 month training course and they'll be training them on your dime. And the offshore people tend to say YES to everything-- which management loves-- but which results in expensive failures. I.e. Can you do the impossible and delivery it in 90 days, "YES! We'll do our best!"
Five million dollars later.. a piece of crap is delivered in 90 days. It finally works (maybe) well enough to use after 180 days and isn't really fully functional for a year... or more.
A fundamental problem is the technology in IT is still changing TOO DAMN FAST. When I started- you could learn a skillset (Cobol, JCL, RPG, Vax Assembly) and use it for 10 to 15 years. Now- outside of maybe SQL- there is a new technology every... single... year... If you miss the boat- you quickly become unhireable.
But you can't really master it and you are always working tons of hours on your own time mastering the new languages and tools compared to the management and sales team who is doing maybe 12 hours of fluffly training combined with drinks in vegas and who are making more money and who don't have to work nights, weekends, and holidays (especially holidays since the systems can be quiesced then).
And then- even if you manage to keep up- massive age discrimination at age 50 (some as early as 45. my god- i pity the poor kids) without legal recourse. Infosys for example requires your high school graduation date on the job application. Not that you graduated. I.E. The EXACT date when you were 18. It should be illegal.. but it's not.
I'm glad I was able to make it, retire, and now I only program for fun again like I did back when I was young. But I did that by living on half of what I made (which was a lot thankfully).
The last year has been one of the best of my life. I'm playing ultimate frisbee again, time to frolic with the girlfriend and time to spend with the grandkids. Life is Good.
Oh.. and way too much minecraft.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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."
There is a way to look at this issue, by turning it on its head, especially given the political economics of the present. The core issue here may be that private business, relying on investment to operate, cannot create the jobs that might be needed. That is, what people want to do for a living. The point about going to university for academic reasons, i.e. intellectual interest in the subject, is fine, but even people who love a subject have to eventually support themselves and to do that their industry has to be supplied with investment and revenues that can support a decent wage. So, those who reverse the decision priorities and look at what disciplines pay more first may be wrong headed, but also if you made a decision about what interested you in 1970 or 1980 that it may not be well funded by now. That makes a case for following your heart instead of the market for jobs. It also says that a significant number of people do not have a strong sense of what to do with their lives. If you have a strong direction, the joy of doing the work will compensate for reduced compensation.
Maybe the weaknesses of market economics, especially as a world economic order, will retrain people especially in America, to be less interested in economic gain as a reward for their role in society and at the same time they will spend fewer hours working and be far less concerned with compensation and look to other rewards of having a role. The inefficiencies of the economics will cause this shift. Many desires are not funded by the economic system even though they are viable roles.
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'm glad I was able to make it, retire, and now I only program for fun again like I did back when I was young. But I did that by living on half of what I made (which was a lot thankfully).
This is hard to confess. That's one of my biggest regrets, that I wasn't strong enough at the time to stand up to my wife and say, yes, I make six figures right now, but it may not last forever and we should plan accordingly. I was under huge pressure to spend money on her, to the point that for a time I was spending more than what I was making. (I calculated once that just under 2/3 of my net pay was going into food and entertainment alone.) By the time I grew a spine and started cutting back, I barely had enough time to approach debt-neutrality before the bust came. And then, a long period out of work. I nearly lost the house.
Anyone who wasn't an idiot would have continued to live simply, invest, pay off the house, and get ready for hard times. Had I done this, I might have chosen to retire when the crash came, and pursue activities that aren't as profitable but are more enjoyable than my geek job. I take small comfort that I didn't live quite as large as some of my associates during the boom, and didn't fall as far during bust. I could have done better, and should have.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.