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The Danger of Picking a Major Based On Where the Jobs Are
theodp writes: In his new book Will College Pay Off?, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree's usefulness is risky, especially since one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be. "A few generations ago," notes Cappelli, "the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they'd get different skills. They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That's a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can't get the people they need, but it's pretty obvious why that's not happening." On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught. In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what's happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that's about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way." One wonders what Cappelli might think of San Francisco's recent decision to pick a preschool curriculum based on where today's tech jobs are, echoing President Obama's tech industry-nurtured belief that "what you want to do is introduce this [coding] with the ABCs and the colors."
There is always a substantial lag in choosing a career. I got bit by that. Wait out the bad job market getting a Ms and the market is even worse!
Most corporations are so badly run that well educated employees only make everyone else look bad.
Seems like the biggest reason not to pick your career based on the economy is this: you'll probably won't like the job. So, instead of doing something you enjoy, you get to spend 50 years doing a job you hate. Now, if you guessed right, maybe you'll hate your job, but at least make some money. But if you guessed wrong - you'll have huge student loans to pay, and a lifetime of misery, all because you' placed money above your happiness.
In other words, the employers are idiots, and there's very little that a student can do about it.
Most of the STEM students that I've met chose their major based on their interests and/or already possessed skills. It seems to me that there are viable career opportunities in all STEM fields. Why worry about your choice of education when you'll develop skills regardless?
Finding any job is a full time job regardless of your major. And you neither entitled nor guaranteed to get a job you'll like.
any degree any college. it's just an admission ticket, anyway. sorta like a High School degree back in the day.
I partially picked a degree where the jobs are (Computer Engineering), but the _real_ valuable skills I have which make me very employable were NOT things taught at university. It was mostly from hobby stuff and open source hacking. If I just followed all the stuff in school and did nothing else, I wouldn't be very employable.
Do what you like and what you are good at.
When i started studying physics, we were tolde that we would be all unemployed. So few people studied that we never have problems in finding a Job....
I used to wonder why I was always being singled out at work and that's it. Simply being smarter is an issue even if you're not being condescending.
Also it's impossible to get your resume seen for decent jobs unless it's exactly what they want. Which doesn't happen unless you lie or have extremely low standards.
...the push was to get us high achool blank slates into engineering, at least in Washington state. The driver for this was Boeing, but it was also a national thing too. Most of the noise was about the wages. Of course, what i noticed then, by '91 or so, was that area was getting filled back in, and those jobs were getting harder to find out of college.
Microsoft, Aldus, Visio, Wizards of the Coast, etc, were starting to get on a roll, and my peers in CompSci were the ones on the front of the wave... as well as Silicon Valley too. Good times then.
So, the moral of the story is... if you follow things, the winners will be the ones already well into that pipeline. People just getting into it will most likely lose. The catch is those who already got going weren't prescient when they did.
You want a relatively good gig (in the US)? Go welding, diesel mechanic, electrician. Oh crap, all those gigs require actual work, though...hard work in crappy conditions, though. I'm posting this in the wrong forum.
You need the degrees (and certifications) to get past the HR department drones, not because they're necessary to do the job...
College professor without specific skills says you don't need to know specific skills while standing on the backs of adjunct professors with no skills.
While you shouldn't necessary pick a major based on the hottest job, you definitely need to pick something in consideration with how you will use it. And you sure as heck should go to college to learn and make yourself better--not just to receive a piece of paper. Racking up 5 or 6 figures of debt without learning anything of value is a terrible idea. Unfortunately, we haven't given students the tools or perspectives to understand the consequences of the decisions they are making. Everyone is always warning athletes coming into college "the chances of you making it as a pro are extremely rare". And yet, the chances of someone making it as a tenured history professor at a major university are probably just as rare. At least the athletes aren't going into massive debt.
Add onto the fact that we have massively watered down many majors to the point of uselessness. The reason liberal arts majors get a bad rap isn't that it is a useless subject. If people came out as hard working critical thinkers they would be valuable contributors. Unfortunately, it is filled with people who just want a piece of papers and do the minimum to get by. This is a generalization, of course, but I believe is backed up by stats on plagiarism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...). And the courses are watered down to be worthless. For example you can graduate from Yale with an English without having a Shakespeare course (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/23/skipping-shakespeare-yes-english-majors-can-often-bypass-the-bard/). So in 4 years of education in English, you don't have to actually take a course in the most influential English writer in history. But, you know, he is challenging to read and understand. As an alternative you can take a course in Literature for Young People http://english.yale.edu/course... which includes J. K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss.
At least with Engineering/Math/Hard Science you have to demonstrate via projects and tests that you have actually learned something.
you have a better than good chance of being employed. So chose what you have a good aptitude for!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
As someone who has managed a dozen dev teams with nearly a hundred different programmers, yes a person with a CS degree is typically a superior nuts and bolts developer -- that is stronger in development related skills, but not necessarily overall.
Some of the best devs I've worked with or managed were english or biology majors. While typically less well versed (all else being equal) in the hard skills, thier 'soft' skills were much better and often compensated. For example, they weren't the best algorithm designers, but they were better able to communicate with each other and with clients. Combine those learned 'soft' skills with decent self taught 'hard' skills and you generally have a better overall dev.
And that's the crux of the matter. University is not a vocational training program. University is where a person goes to learn about a broad range of subjects. And, most importantly, where a person goes to learn how to think and learn.
If you want a code monkey (and only a code monkey), look for someone with a vocational/technical education background. If you want more than a cog in the machine, look for a university grad.
The corollary is that, yes, those general ed and elective requirements DO serve a purpose. Chosen well, they help expand your horizons and teach you a little something about the world. So, when whatever major you did pick becomes unmarketable (and many do), you aren't left with nothing but useless knowledge.
That people were not pushed to University. Now that are being pushed, cajoled and threatened to go in that direction. Not only that, anything that isn't a STEM degree is touted as worthless.
It also used to be that employers trained their employees; be they young apprentices or fresh and clueless out of uni.
It also used to be that people valued education in and of itself (to some degree) and did not treat it as a checkbox system, where everything taught could be forgotten after the box had been checked. Seriously, ask some of these "straight A" planks anything that they should know, as it was in their syllabus, they got an "A" on the test, and then claim they've never heard of it, or that it doesn't matter, they'll just google it.
Now, more than ever, people are treated as mere mindless widgets. Not that that didn't happen before, but it's pretty much the norm today, when in a past era or few it wasn't.
A lot of the issue boils down to a gap between college and "career" for the first 2-3 years after college. Employers know that hiring a guy with a physics degree to do an engineering or programming job job will be a money loser for at least a couple years, even if they are pretty darn sure he'll come up to speed and be a major contributor. It is safer to either hire someone who is already trained (and grill them about their possible lack of loyalty), or to get someone with just the right set of skills to minimize the training. After a new guy/gal has some experience there is no assurance that they will stick around. Often you can't get a decent raise, no matter how well you are performing, without jumping ship to another company (a dose of bureaucratic stupidity worth ranting about all by itself).
At-will employment has made this entry level dance crappy for both sides. Everyone knows that they can be let go at any time with nothing guaranteed beyond a cashout of their meager vacation accrual. Employers know that if they sink a large amount into an employee to bring them up on a new or in-demand skill it increases the likelihood that the person can get headhunted away. Stock options and other incentives try to patch this broken relationship by putting some carrots out there, but the young guys usually get very few of those until after they have proven themselves (and a lot of companies has dispensed with them for peons entirely). Other companies know they most incentive plans are crappy and they matching the loss with a hiring bonus and/or sign-on options and still be cheaper and easier than training one of their own (and outsiders are smarter, obviously, than the whiners already sucking at the payroll teat).
It is all pretty perverse. I work in the states for a foreign company, and having a counterpart doing the same job with a very different employment setup regularly makes me question the US system. My counterpart is part of a union, has many more holidays, more vacation, has his hours strictly limited, is not allowed to work at all from home, and cannot be easily laid off (and his college was tuition free).
I notice that when applying for work I have to be super good in something like symfony or zend 2, while before it didn't matter too much. I think it is economic, because it creates business for many recruiters that are asked to look for the specialized employee. It balances out with the loss to the company from educating the new hire. Meanwhile schools are differentiating and offering all kinds of shit courses so students will sink themselves into debt, debt universities need them to go into to pay for their 'development', so building stuff unrelated and not serving education. It is a clusterfuck of waste and abuse that nonetheless maximizes the utilization of fossil fuels, the basic goal of the economic system..And students? Nobody gives a shit.
In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees
Silicon Valley have existed long before these applied IT degrees, like computer and software engineering, or business degrees in IT systems even existed. The degrees formed around the industry, not the other way around.
Physical science rarely gets outdated so much as it gets added to. Physics, chemistry, geology, mathematics... these are skills that don't depreciate much over time.
I can think of one thing in CS that I see gives people with little to no CS education a lot of trouble. Algorithmic analysis, to be specific big O notation. I've seen people not get algorithmic growth at all and end up implementing something that is O(n^2) when they could easily come up with something that's O(NLogN) or even O(N). Surprise surprise when they have to process even a middle amount of data they have problems. I have learned something else though. If someone tells you that their app runs in N^2, log(n), or nLog(n) time they probably know what they're talking about. If they say N! or even C^N they really know what they're talking about. If they tell you it's linear that could either mean it really is linear or that they don't know of any other running time.(Literally I saw code that was obviously N^2 but the developer said it was linear because he didn't know of any other type.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Can only speak for myself - but I did biochem, then a masters in bioinformatics (mainly as my degree had taught me I didn't enjoy it, and seemed sensible to not throw away what I'd learnt and add some IT to it, which I'd always enjoyed).
I then got an entry level IT job on the basis of (I believe) 20 hours of formal java and maybe 10 of formal Oracle (plus maybe double that in labs) - and threw away all my biochemistry.
Company that employed me had just left their startup phase - but mainly seemed to employ anybody they liked and had an interesting chat with in the interview. I never quite worked out if this was deliberate, or just a consequence of HR being pretty non-existent
Initially I thought I'd "chanced it" - but then eventually the scales were lifted from my eyes as I found out what everybody else had done prior. Plenty of arts doctorates. Maybe it was a mass experiment, but I wasn't an exception.
Bit I look back fondly on was that we all mucked in and I learnt so much from those around me and the liberal pile of O'Reilly books scattered around. I thought I was catching up on my formal IT education - but again, looking back, I wasn't - was just a continuation of what I'd done before. Stumbling my way through with plenty of swearing, beer, with the odd moment of breakthrough and inspiration.
Without the rose-tinted glasses, there was an awful lot of knowing what I wanted to do, needed to do, and blindly running around screaming for help from my colleagues (which was given - and I loved giving to anybody who needed it in turn).
Then we got bought by big-scarey-international-market-behemoth, and I had a few years of misery. Again, looking back, I can see why I hated it. Everybody was told to sit in their little silo and stay there. I loathed that. But again, looking back, it's really really useful to learn what you hate.
I'm still with them, as I got dropped into a pilot project with a bunch of smart and lovely people (including the customer).
Notionally I'm a "solution architect" now - which I'd always used to think meant I should be leading from the front with my unequalled vision and expertise (maybe it does, and I'm just a shit SA). My view is that it's simply to sketch out what we collectively need to do, and let those with real ability drift in to have a go, whilst covering them from above. I'll probably look back in another few year though, and realize I'm massively deluded, again.
Back to the points of the story and what I've learnt in 15 years of chancing it in an environment I don't officially belong
1) You're not the best at anything. You might, if you're lucky, be the best at most of what you need to do - but mainly you're going to be relying on others. Both to do the work, and to learn from. Accept this, be open - *never* tell anybody their thought is unimportant. Worst you can do is teach why it won't work - Best is that you realize you're wrong and you get better.
2) Follow-on: Don't micro-manage. You don't like it happening to you, you don't do it to others. More importantly, people try different approaches - if they feel they're on the right path, they'll stick to it. But, if they decide they want to try another tack, for god's sake let them - rather than making them justify themselves (they've already have to convince themselves).
3) "Science" is a method. It gives you a great big pile of tools/understanding to build on - but no reason it can't be improved. No. That's not right. Everything you have is an improvement on what went before - and it's your job to improve it more. You're not going to win a Nobel, but you should make things better - and nothing, nothing feels better than solving a problem with that feeling of 'elegance'.
Actually, I'll finish on 'elegance' - I've been subjected to all manner of methodologies and management techniques - but 'elegance' is what makes me happy and usually gets completely ignored (with exception of bland terms like 're-use')
I'd always taken science to be true, over the arts. The answer lay with
I don't normally post, but feel this article is kinda not going deep enough.
Employers are not always interested in hiring "locals" or naturalized citizens.
HR usually purposely tosses in everything + the kitchen sink when it comes to job posting and skill set requirements.
They do this so they can justify getting H2 visas, importing that person and pay that person much less than the going market rate.
I ran into this issue after being abroad for 4 years (2008 - 2012) teaching English and returned to a poor economy.
I have general skills, reliable, can learn quickly and have a post secondary education in technology.
After sending out multiple resumes, getting a few interviews and not getting any offers -- I knew something was up.
After I just completely put what employers wanted to read on my resume (to get past robo screener) and tell interviewers what they wanted to hear during interviews -- I started getting job offers! *The secret is to apply for jobs you KNOW you have the skills/ability to do!)
Once I got my job, I worked tons of OT to learn the job, got the skills, and gain valuable experience because I was a hard worker, showed up on time, took extra shifts and didn't cause outages (network analyst position).
I was with that company who hired me for 2 years, and learned tons and got a few certs.
I got a better position with a different company which paid 20k more, better work hours, benefits, etc... I am still really successful and enjoying the position!
Anyhow, the moral of the story = companies/HR/Managers are just looking to scam cheap labor. And temp foreign worker visas allow companies to bypass new grads as well as keep salaries artificially low. (compared to being forced to hire/train from the available "local" labor pool)
..is to look at your passion and talent. Of course, you can't ignore the job market, but it should be a secondary consideration
For example..when programming is the HOT market..
The talented, passionate people do very well because of their talent and passion..and are rewarded handsomely (like me)
The not-so-talented or passionate may get a job during the boom, it may even pay well, but when the bust comes, they are the first ones "staff reduced"
NEVER pick a career based on the job market unless you have (at least a little) talent and passion for it
I find this most refreshing. I've always been confused by corporations insisting on hires based on knowing the job already. What? You, Mr. Corporation aren't innovating and training your crack staff to forge the new world you keep telling us the 'free market' slides on like ice? Guess not. Considering the news that in fact, even Silicon Valley has used collage grads, who are dragging massive depts just to get the 'specialized skills' corporations have been screaming about for frickin' years, were actually paid crap and worked like dogs while, Oh, these companies colluded to do just fucking that. Free market seems to mean "we get labour free". Well, cheap, at least.
Even the much maligned Liberal Arts Degree should be enough for any employer to see that this young person can, you know, LEARN THINGS.
Switching to the "career of your dreams" is usually a bad idea I know several reasonably competent engineers and scientists who bankrupted themselves, and crippled their family finances, "pursuing a dream" of being a stay at home parent, pursing an artistic career and lost their engineering edge while they did it. They now regret the decision, but have no chance of recovering their engineering edge sufficiently to return to their original, much better paid fields. They'd have to start over as a 40 or 50 year old intern with obsolete skills, and there's no market for them.
If your dream is so important to you, fund it yourself as a hobby or a pasttime. I know too many reasonably competent engineers who blamed their lack of focus on their "lack of inspiration" on their lack of interest. They switched careers, and turned out to be as unfocused in their new "inspired" career. But because they were "unfocused" in a poorly funded career, they've either gone hideously broke or drained their family's finances finances supporting their career. I've known several who are literally a million dollars poorer between the loss of engineering income and with the educational costs of the career switch, for jobs they can't get because they're competing with much, much cheaper kids who are also dependent on family support to keep them fed. They spent their retirement funds and their kids' college funds on their "dream" careers, and they're pretty unhappy about it now.
Frankly, I see the same thing played out regularly for people who have doubts about their lovers or their spouses. They abandon decent, workable relationships in favor of their "soul mate" or someone else tempting who is "the one". If the alternative pastime, or alternative partner, is so ideally suited to you, let them work for it. Don't abandon your current working life or your current working relationship in favor of an unlikely dream. There are far too many broken careers, and broken hearts, from such switches.
Most simply put, I'll offer the advice that so many agents and editors give to their dreaming clients. "Don't quit your day job". If you turn out to be that good at your hobby, you'll find the opportunity to turn to it later as a full-time career. It's much less heart and wallet braking to work at your primary job and your primary relatonships. Just don't _lie_ about it, and over commit.
Quantity Surveyors are one of the highest paid. Go for that.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
"...and they would retrain them..."
Yeah. Mostly for blue collar jobs which no longer exist.
On the job training works great, if you are going to be bending pipe or running a lathe.
It kind of doesn't work worth crap for bioinformatics or machine learning.
Back in my day, we were required to recite all the dialog from one of Shakespeare's plays from memory, and then, the following Monday write 300 lines of FORTRAN code that compiled cleanly the first time. Which we had to feed into the card reader ourselves, of course.
Good thing well educated doesn't mean they are very smart.
So the corporate mess that is caused by Business Administration Masters degree holding morons still fits perfectly into american corporate culture.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I work for an international company with majority off-shore by headcount - and reasonable number brought on-shore
I get *very* pissy when people start disparaging my colleagues, solely because of where they came from and their visa status.
However - there is some truth in the complaints - the level of bullshit on CVs (not internally, but on prospective hires) is quite incredible - but I can see why. Entry level pays like shit, and more importantly you seem to get treated like shit - the goal set is to get on-shore or promoted off-shore. To get noticed.
Usually good people get promoted - but what *really* hurts me is where somebody I consider to be awesome isn't recognized by the larger company - mainly as they're expected to compete in the escalating CV-bullshit, and they refuse.
Personally I'm convinced the next step in corporate evolution is for us all to express our love for the genuinely great off-shore people we've worked with, some smart company to pick up on this (and then hopefully my ex-colleagues will hand me a token job in this timezone out of gratitude).
Colleges are stating to create drone piloting programs. There is going to be a huge demand for them over the next 5 to 10 years.
Well, a lot of people are self-taught and started coding very eary.
My kids are all grown up now, and some are married with little ones of their own now... but this is the advice that I gave them. There's no promise of great wealth in it, certainly I am not overwhelmingly successful by most wordly standards, and unless you are very very very lucky, you will have to settle sometimes or maybe even a lot of times on doing jobs that you dislike just to survive, but you get only one chance at living... and by gosh, if you don't do everything in your own ability to try and make that life as happy as you possibly can, then there will always be some part of you that resents the compromises that you made to get to wherever it is that you are.
Do what you love.
Period.
*EVERYTHING* else is secondary to that. I won't sugar-coat it... society doesn't owe you any fortune or any success, but you *do* owe yourself the chance to be as happy as you can... and you will have nobody to blame but yourself if you don't do everything you can to achieve that end.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The whole requiring a degree thing is a way of quickly eliminating a lot of people to make life easier for HR and hiring managers.In many jobs, a degree is not an indicator of success, but a degree is still required.
... what their role is.
Higher education is there to train people to - get this - FILL JOBS! But these days, universities believe that their job is to just 'educate students' in whatever curriculum they (the universities) see fit.
They forgot that the curriculum itself is not the ultimate goal. Gaining the skills necessary to be able to successfully fulfill the job role is the actual goal.
I have a Masters in Electrical & Computer Engineering, which I got in 1994. From 1995, I started working in the semiconductor market, and got into marketing after 2 years. I did that for a good 11 years.
After the meltdown of 2008, I lost my job, and after a couple of years of searching, I ultimately went into recruiting. As a recruiter, one thing I quickly found out is that companies won't hire people who haven't been doing what they want for the last 2 years. That eliminates a lot of people, and then they complain about not being able to find what they need. I hate my current job, but can't go back if I wanted, since nobody would even look at someone who's been out of the field for 7 years. And when I source people, sourcing those who have been out of the line of work for any significant period of time is enough to get me resume rejections.
So picking a specific major for a career - don't bet that that career will be your last. It hasn't been since 2000.
Written like most MBAs I have met. Full of assumptions and redirection.
I don't know why people think the "getting stuffed in a locker" treatment stops in high school. Nobody likes a smart ass because you make everyone feel/look inferior by comparison.
Solution: only "shine bright" when alone with your direct supervisor. They move up->they take you with them. You don't want to upstage your coworkers publicly, and you definitely don't want to upstage your supervisor. Further, to avoid your coworkers becoming jealous of your upwards mobility you must tithe/pay tribute by helping them do their jobs better/hooking them up with concert tickets/introducing them to women/etc.
If you want to be successful, you need to be popular with upper management. If you want to STAY popular with upper management, you have to make the plebes love you. There are plenty of meaningless ways to achieve that without pissing off upper management in the process. Find people's "pain" and make yourself essential to making it go away.
Office Work is 2/3rds politics, 1/3 actual work(and I'm not so sure about the "actual work").
In terms of resumes: if you're getting your resume to HR via the official channels then you're doing it wrong. Those channels are for the appearance of fairness. They're almost universally written around a candidate they already want to hire, but still have to list the position for the sake of compliance.
I'm not telling you where I go fishing when I want to eat, but it sure as hell isn't the "help wanted" section.
It's funny because it's true.
College is, or should be, learning how to learn. I don't mean taking more classes, I mean just learning what you need to know to get what you need done DONE.
I graduated with an engineering degree in 1970 and am now 68 years old and "retired." I retired as a network/security engineer back in 2007. Any idea as to how much of that was taught in college in the late 1960's? Well, actually NOTHING I worked on for the last 10 and very little of what I worked on for the 10 years before that even existed when I was in college.
An example of what I mean by learning how to learn is when our upper management decided in the late 1990's that their entire infrastructure based on Token Ring was not going anywhere and I was given the job of converting everything to eithernet. I was told we had a vendor conference in about two weeks to begin picking a vendor and the equipment that would best fit our needs. I knew very little about ethernet at that time, but was able to learn enough in just two weeks to be able to filter the BS and FUD out in the meetings and ask the right questions that needed answering. I did this on my own in my "spare" time by reading everything I could find about eithernet and all the vendors products we would be looking at. I had enough "education" to know how to learn this on my own very quickly. A background in electronics, knowledge of Boolean Algebra (yea, that is REALLY how a net mask works) helped, but were background to understanding how the new "stuff" worked.
There is a difference between education and training. With education you can learn on your own, sometimes with training your your "learning" becomes obsolete with the next change in technology. It is easy to remember the difference. Which would you prefer for your teen age daughter to attend -- a sex education class or a sex training class.
A university degree or any high degree for what it matters , should show to potential employer two things : 1) that you are at least have the smart to get to that level 2) that once you "bite" into something you do not let go and continue for long period of time.
2) is especially important if you train somebody for a job.
In my experience firms which expect their new employee to be immediately productive are either new start up not having learned the rope, and they will or they will die, or old firm in manager hell. Good firm with manager which are not totally idiot will know and take into account a period of time (varrying depending on the job) in which they consider you to be "in training" and thus only worth a certain percentage of a normal worker workload. I doubt it changed. What probably changed is that in some domain like development, some manager make the mistake of thinking "fuck it, if I have to rain somebody I'll train somebody cheap from india rather than the local guy". but here is your mistake : the architect of your software today, were the apprentice of yesterday. Kill a whole generation of apprentice today, and you will have no architect tomorrow. I expect that roughly 15 to 20 years after the peak of outsourcing, we will see a derth of good software designer , or good software manager. Because those who should have learned the rope on the job and climbed hierarchy, were replaced by cheap worker.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
I did this. I spent 10 years in IT (network admin), and when the bubble burst, I took my savings and went back to college.
In 2005, according to government data, the top paying jobs, in order, were lawyer, 11 kinds of doctor, and then physicist, so I majored in physics.
Anyone see where this is going?
When I graduated in late 2010, NASA was already shedding employees, and just a few months later, laid off 3,500 physicists (a good chunk of the total number of working physicists in the country). The two jobs I had lined up disappeared, and I found myself competing with Masters and Ph.D.s with years of experience for $12/hour lab tech jobs.
And, of course, my IT knowledge was completely out of date, at that point. I spent 3 years delivering pizza and repairing bicycles before finally getting a job as a chemist, for a lower salary than my last IT position.
I've come to that conclusion. There's things I would have done differently if I had it to do over. I'd have gotten an internship like the rich people I knew straight out of college. I would have made damn sure that my parents filled out the financial aid paper work so that I could have a job during the 9 months out of the year I was in school rather than just in the summer.
Also, I like how I'm a troll because I'm complaining about a very real problem. I'm guessing it was somebody who got ahead and would like to think that it was purely based upon hard work and being good at it. To be fair that is often a part of it, but you're right that there are other things.
They are there to fund themselves, usually by writing grants and getting their indentured grad students to do the work.
College education is to give you the 1st principles of any subject. The best way is to choose a major you like, but a minor in potential field. Also, one should take the elective from different fields – marketing, business law, accounting and either legal assistant certification or real estate certification. What this does is to give you a big took bag and ability to bring tools and ideas from multidisciplinary areas. It helps you to transfer your skills to any job and also give a hobby job. But if you take junk courses, it will come and haunt you later. When you in college (18-22) your front lobe is not mature and that is the area used for decision making. So, while the universities and colleges (community colleges are for adult baby sitting only or use it for just auditing)should not admit majority of students who are not matured and admit them around their 27th birth day. (Exception to this rule is based very small % of student population). Now, every one has motivation, found what they enjoy, what are their strength and weakness, ability to work in teams without ego and later go on to graduate study if interested. The world is very complex and even if you refuse H1B visas(as many have bogus qualifications), the corp. will move the jobs outside USA and your success of getting a decently paying job is minimal. So, work for few years in sweat shops and decide it is time for higher studies and go a decent college where teaching is given more importance. Find a mentor. Get an apprenticeship with some company and move on.
The biggest problem is that there is large length of time between deciding on a degree and getting a job after graduation. A typical STEM degree will take 4-5 years, and another 2-3 to complete a master's degree, unfortunately a requirement for many positions. With the 7-year gap between entering a degree program and graduation, the employment market could fundamentally change. Degrees that pay well currently do so because there is a shortage of qualified people in those programs - if large number of people enter those programs, it is likely there will be a glut of people later on in those programs, and the wages will return to average levels.
Things I'd like to see. I won't go into specifics.
1. Cap interest for Direct loans at inflation based on CPI. Have the government subsidize it this way.
2. Restrict colleges from receiving federal aid if administrative costs exceeds X% of tuition.
3. Two free years of college for those below 250% of the poverty level.
4. Single-payer universal health care.
5. A negative income tax or basic income for citizens and permanent residents. Nothing major. Topping out at $5k or $6k per person per year at most. It may not be much to live on, but if you get multiple adults to share a resident, it might uncomfortably work (better than being homeless). Not a replacement for SNAP. If we scrap SNAP, increase it by $200/person/month.
1: pick something that relates to your passion. Not a hobby. Not a fad.
2: as the great Wayne Gretzky said, skate to where the puck is going to be.
Got to admit I did that - there was clearly going to be a big future in manufacturing so I studied to be an engineer.
Pity the manufacturing ended up happening in China.
Fail! Gaining the education they can base the skills on is the goal. No point turning out shit-hot COBOL, BASIC or Modula-2 coders instead of someone who can learn the language of the day when things move on.
Training is the task of the employer where they tell you where to hit the buttons on a model XYZ machine. Education is where you know what the machine does and you can work out which buttons to hit without much trouble.
As far as I can tell the higher the degree the less competent someone really is.
So, instead of whining using self-defeating logic, why don't you grab the steering wheel? ...oh wait, you're an anonymous coward.
You just made me take an inventory of all the MBAs where I work. Yep. Universally the ones who know the least and need the most help with absolutely everything.
Maybe you found something that works for you in whatever hideous corporate workplaces you've decided you want to work in, but if you're so smart you would have left employment per se a long time ago, just for the tax relief, or found a nice startup to work in where you got to work instead of play office politics. But you didn't because you love office politics, that's why you spend 2/3 of your time focusing on it and you don't even bother working the other 1/3 by your own admission. You are the problem with office politics that people are going to run into. Please do tell us where you go fishing, so we can avoid that particular lake.
even if you're not being condescending
"even if" strongly suggests that being condescending is the norm for you. Blaming "being smarter" for your issues is another red flag, I'm afraid. I'm not trying to be rude, but smart people who go around being condescending because they believe they are smarter than everyone else are not popular. The reason they're not popular is that other intelligent people who didn't follow your particular career path understand - correctly - that actually they're every bit as smart as you. Knowing some complicated math doesn't make us better than everyone else. When we understand this, we become better liked generally. Just sayin'
Commenting to remove mis-moderation. Apologies. Your post was "Insightful", but apparently my trigger fingers thought you were a troll.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
"...people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. "
Unfortunately, many of the people who think that seem to be in HR departments and IT management positions. Without the right keywords, your resume will be scanned and discarded before a human ever sees it. Some places even want a Master's degree of PhD, when I suspect that the jobs don't really require one.
Maybe Si valley is different than the East Coast, but the job market here is tough. I can't imagine getting an interview without that piece of paper, even though it might be irrelevant to the actual job.
If you're picking a degree subject because you hope to earn more money later, don't bother. Seriously. That's not the point of a degree at all. It's also seriously crass commercialism of your talent.
Pick a degree in a subject you are GOOD at. You go there to learn, not to make money later. You will enjoy it, you will learn lots (no matter how good you thought you were), and you will want to stay in academia as long as you can.
Academia is for you to create a brain that learns, learns fast, learns lots. That skill is transferrable to any career path. But you don't WANT a career path. If you are at all good enough to not have to have a career outside academia, you are living the dream, my friend. Careers are horrible, boring things that you do for money even if you love the underlying skills (and I guarantee that you won't exercise much of them if you go into a career).
Study what interests you. Prove that you can expand your mind. Then people will give you jobs on that basis. And you'll be bright enough to begin startup, work for yourself, etc. rather than get stuck doing someone else's dog-work that just happens to coincide with one skill you have that they don't.
My degree is in maths (with computer science as a "minor" as it would be called in the US). I work in IT. I don't use any of it unless I'm explaining deep theory to other IT guys that have never needed to know what a spanning-tree is exactly, but are curious.now they have someone who can explain it. But my first client of ten years of self-employment hired me because I had a degree. It proves something about ability to stay, ability to learn, base intellectual level, dedication, etc.
My girlfriend is a PhD. All her friends are PhD's. Most of them didn't get "real" jobs until way into their 30's. And most of those are high-end jobs in labs that you need to have a PhD in order to even be considered for. She's given talks to conferences over all the continent, has published papers with her name on and techniques in, and earns more than I ever could.
Don't base 5-7 years of your life on a bet to win the most money later, based on making your life a misery now. It won't pay off if you do that. Do what you enjoy, then choose a career as a last resort if you really need to and end up in that position. Work is far from everything. And money, though nice, doesn't come automatically just because you have a degree in a related subject. In fact, I'd claim the opposite.
I work in schools. You know what they say about teachers? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Most of the teachers I've worked with my entire life are out-qualified by someone with a master's. The only Dr (PhD) in my latest school was a librarian.
It bears no correlation, you do it for yourself, which makes you a better, happier, more learned self. Then you go into a career you enjoy when you realise you need money.
Fuck people who work just for money.
There's more to being your own boss than "just being smart". A lot of people are simply more specialized than that. That's a benefit from living in society. You don't have to do everything yourself.
This isn't the stone age.
Although you can minimize the politics somewhat by working for a smaller company where they don't have the luxury of putting up with any dead weight. Silicon Valley is probably great in that regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No. They are NOT every bit as smart as us. It's amazing to see how many of them (the most egregious idiots) even manage to remain employed.
Also, quite often this doesn't even boil down to ignorance. They know better they just choose to ignore procedures, or how they've been trained, or industry best practices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught.
I've worked with six software companies over my career and in all of them the vast majority of programmers have a CS degree. Mind you this is advanced software development. I do not doubt that people out there developing web sites never got a CS degree.
At least some of those with the laundry list of required skills as long as your arm are not really job postings, but a company going through the motions of trying to hire domestic workers before they whine about not enough H1-Bs to fill positions that they can't find Americans to do. That job description is custom tailored to the H1-B they want to hire. Nobody has the exact same skillset as someone else, so of course they won't find anyone that EXACTLY matches that list of skills. So they get their H1-B at 60% of the salary an American worker would command, as well as an abuse sponge that can't complain or face deportation.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I love working with incompetent people. They make me look good.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
(Tech degree here = any engineering degree, Comp Sci, physics, chem, maybe math)...the issue is this, when in competition between the kid with a generic basket weaving degree (anything that ends in 'studies', most B.A.s or looks like a degree any college entrant can get) we always select for the tech degree for entry level since it is harder to get on average and indicates the ability to solve problems in a creative manor. Before anyone chimes in on Art, etc. not that most engineers good at the field are also artists (i.e. painter, musicians, illustrators, sculptors, etc.) . Before english and psych majors chop in, note that those were the classes engineers etc. took to boost their GPA. Now lets say you are looking at experienced level, then the look see is at specific skills and experience over degree, though again the scales will tip to the technical degree. I know it isn't fair, but it is the way it works most of the time in a world flooded with degrees.
Past few years a PE could get almost 6-figures with a BS. Departments jammed with students. Many recent PE grads dont have jobs with the oil price crsh.
As far as I can tell the higher the degree the less competent someone really is.
I take it you prefer people who flunked out of med school as your physician then? LOL
I'm implying that if you go around like a condescending jerk people won't want to work with you and you'll have a hard time getting a job and they'll run you out as soon as possible. Most people aren't as bright as they think and don't want to be reminded of it, so actually having good ideas is a problem no matter how you put it.
It's unfortunate but true. The worst thing is to volunteer ideas to people who aren't looking for them. The second worst thing is giving them too many good ideas when they ask and the 3rd worst is contributing too much during brainstorming sessions.
The fact is that being smarter is itself a status attack no matter how kindly you do it and no matter how much you restrict it to times when people are asking for it.
Being condescending just makes it happen more quickly and with less pretending.
I always viewed the bachelors degree not as a gift of learning but as a demonstration of basic literacy in a particular subject area. I don't expect an engineer to be an expert in their field coming out of college, but if they have an engineering degree, I can have some confidence that they at least understand basic chemistry, physics and more complicated mathematics while also being able to handle a little bit of stress and get stuff done. Same with an art degree - they may not be an expert in their particular field, but at least they have demonstrated some level of competency in terms of artistic sense, a level of "trainability" in the tools used in the art field, and the minimum grit in getting things done. Certainly not saying that people without a college degree don't have these characteristics, but a college degree at least provides an easily visible certification that helps reduce the risk of a dud hire.
"I don't know why people think the "getting stuffed in a locker" treatment stops in high school."
It never happened to me. Probably because I was over 6 ft tall in HS and worked out (though I loathed team sports, the coaches were jerks) and knew how to be smart without making people angry. It was even remarked once , "He's smart but he doesn't rub your nose in it", which I took as a compliment.
That and when I was a Freshman I snapped after being hazed a while so I took a bully, a Sophmore, and stuffed *him* into a locker. I guess word got out.
Lessons:
1) Learn how to communicate, be nice.
2) Learn how to take care of yourself.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
A huge problem is the disjoint between college and the work force. The work force says that college is to prepare you for the working world, while college says that they are making you a better 'citizen' and more well rounded. I have been told by faculty directly that it is not college's job to prepare you for work but to make you a 'better human being'. My CS degree was almost two thirds general classes. Every class seemed to be saying "There is a lot to learn on this subject so we are just going to touch on the basics". If it was flipped, and we only needed 1/3 or less generals, then we could have the 2nd and 3rd classed needed to tech us deeper concepts. We could get out of college with a couple of certs that make us marketable. Instead, we are stuck taking basketball and eight credit hours of humanities.
I see the economics in it. If a college did that, then they would have to hire more faculty. specialized classes require specialized teachers. More overlap of degrees means less faculty, which means less cost per student. This overlap has also lead to the devaluation of the degree, as all degrees, STEM or not, have 2/3rds in common and the 2/3rds are designed to push people through as fast as possible.
I feel apprenticeships need to be integrated into college. like for CS, local community driven projects are lead by seniors which lead several teams of juniors, who have teams of sophomores and freshman under them. Each group needs to put x hours in a month/semester and performance is evaluated by professors. By the end, you can say that you have 4 years experience as a coder in a group, and one year as a project leader.
Until colleges embrace this attitude, students will have to develop experience outside of college in parallel just to be viable for a job.
Goddamn; excellent advice.
That sounds like a perfect description of what it's like to work at Microsoft. I should know.
However you'd be a fool to believe that EVERY company works that way. From my own experience companies where the REAL opportunities are are also those where politics are kept at a minimum.
A job at McDonalds. I also worked at a dry cleaners and a Dairy Queen.
So there you have it kids. If you want a successful, fulfilling career in IT, learn how to make fries and Blizzards and learn how to press Wrangler jeans...with extra starch please!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
"I used to wonder why I was always being singled out at work and that's it. Simply being smarter is an issue even if you're not being condescending."
Reminds me of a friend who's worked a dozen or so jobs over the past couple of years and inevitably ends up complaining about how his boss and coworkers don't like him. Perhaps, like him, what you consider to be condescending and what everyone else around you considers to be condescending are two different things?
I mean, if you were "really" smart, you might have figured out by now that communication skills are important.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
... what their role is.
Higher education is there to train people to - get this - FILL JOBS! But these days, universities believe that their job is to just 'educate students' in whatever curriculum they (the universities) see fit.
They forgot that the curriculum itself is not the ultimate goal. Gaining the skills necessary to be able to successfully fulfill the job role is the actual goal.
I really think you have gotten this exactly backwards if anything. It varies by college, but most are there to pass along pure knowledge and pretty much groom those who are looking at academia. That the way it was for my physics degree. My physics councilor had my degree and had no idea what jobs there were in the real world. When I went to engineering college, it was much more oriented towards at least thinking about what happens after graduation.
The parent is the only one here that offered an observation that has emperical evidence - and he got modded funny.
I love working with incompetent people. They make me look good.
Yeah, but you make them look bad, so they're looking for ways to give you the shiv.
Office Work is 2/3rds politics, 1/3 actual work(and I'm not so sure about the "actual work").
As an IT contractor for the last ten years, I don't get involve with the office politics as that is the fastest way to the unemployment line. Most employers have the good sense not to involve contractors into their office politics. If they do, it's time to look for another job.
Reverse the situation. You have great skills, but don't get hired as the useless guy/lady next to you bullshits, and gets the job.
Whilst not moral - I'd be tempted to equal their bullshit to get my foot in the door, and hope my ability covered me, whilst removing them. What else am I supposed to do. Hope this lot get found out and fired, then the next lot - and then eventually somebody decides to do their job and recognize *me* for my real abilities?
Poster above mentions "a whole team got fired" - was anybody onshore fired for managing to miss the fact an *entire team* was lying about their qualifications and abilities?
The offshore people I tend to respect and defer to are those who are a little bit older - with a spouse and maybe children. They've survived on their technical and social ability, have a track record, and aren't either fishing for their first job, nor hellbent on getting onshore somewhere.
What rankles is that they often get overlooked.
Linkedin and the like maybe help - but what I'd love to be able to do is give praise to great people and have onshore HR from another company pay attention.