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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."
Or you can get a degree in something you like... but it could be in a field where there aren't many jobs or the jobs don't pay all that well. So then you have to find a job that you hate and work in it because there is no work in what you "really" wanted to do in life. Either way we don't win :(
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.
Beats no job at all and living with your parents when done.
Shoot. I graduated in 2009. 13/hrs was considered GOOD for recent graduates!
I was an older student who went to work 1st and went to college later and my HS classmates were class of 2000. Wow, what a change these younger millenials have no clue what life would be like if they were born 10 years earlier. If any reader graduated in 1970 - 2001 you know nothing what it is like to today and the kind of crappy jobs and low wages await someone with no experience here in 2015. For the younger slashdotters reading this did you know back in the good old days you could make up to $40,000 a year as en entry level salary? No really. You did not need 5 years experience and a major in the right area for an entry level job. You started at $40,000 if you had a degree in anything business. medical, or science related back then. Today these older folks say major in what you like?
For the older slashdotters it is 2015 and having a job you hate for 40 years is better than moving in with your parents and working at Walmart with your art degree while your phone rings from debt collectors wanting student loan repayment and threatening car repossessions. Which is where many if not half of new recent college grads end up shockingly. Of course graduating in 2009 was the worst in 70 years but it shocked me as my friends who made it big all started in 2000 and are now frankly much more successful as a result. Sigh.
I lucked out as I had a resume and even if I made less money after a degree as I put some career prospects on hold and HR only cares about experience and the degree today is worth toilet paper as you are a dime a dozen and you are marked for life if God forbid you majored in the wrong area or do not already have 3 - 5 years experience before entering the workforce complete with 3 professional references for that golden $40,000 a year job.
http://saveie6.com/
HR guy: "We need people who are 22 years old with an M.Sc. and 20 years of specific experience, and we can't find any."
C-level exec: "See, I told you we can't find qualified domestic hires and we need to ramp up the H-1B visas."
Well, you are partially right. If you look for a 22 year old H1B with an MS, you probably will find one. They all seem to have MS from some Indian university or another. I wouldn't vouch for how that university compares to education in the U.S.
Also, you can usually find H1Bs who will happily put down vast quantities of experience in technologies that they don't really have. The same thing happens in the U.S. as well, but it always seems more grossly exaggerated in the H1B resumes. Probably because they are desperate. And because the companies are desperate to pay less, they will accept the lies and hire the person who lied and said they had 5 year when they have zero or the person who told the truth that they only have 4 years. Paying 70% of a salary for zero productivity is better than paying 100% salary for 80% productivity, right?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"Like High School???" I never got OUT of high school (1957), ended up doing long-term, high-level (CxO) consulting to more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms. You can easily confuse education with learning. The school only matters to those who are so insecure they need to affiliate with some "tribe." I met a lot of them in my day; they decided they'd had the "Best education money can buy" and then they ended up having to take orders from the consultant who never went to college for their strategic direction. I've TAUGHT at a substantial number of universities, but never had the benefit/limitation of attending one.
Go read Fareed Zakarias' book ("In Defense of a Liberal Education") and learn how to THINK, to see behind appearances, to adapt and survive. Coding, Systems Analysis, SysAdmin are skills you can acquire. Unless you remain curious (Remember Grace Murray Hopper's slogan, "Born with Curiosity." If you don't know who GMH was, you're grossly undereducated.) you're stuck doing it the way you learned in a text book...which was obsolete by the time you got it.
The other most valuable thing you can do is select your mentors well. Mine are all gone, but Eli Hellerman (at C-E-I-R) was a godsend to me; he not only helped me learn about my chosen profession (at the time of the IBM 1401 and IBM 709), but he gave me a great kickstart on becoming a thinker, and an adult.
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
What I suspect is confusing the parent poster (and I agree with you that they are completely wrong) is that these days, with the
'everyone has the god given right to a university degree!' mentality, people are getting degrees in all sorts of complete crap, and
when you add alongside that the fact that universities have worked out they make money by turning over the maximum number
of students (hence it is in their advantage to make it as easy as absolutely possible to graduate) what we end up with is a huge
devaluing of the average value of a degree.
Once upon a time having a degree in many areas really meant something, and a bunch of companies WANTED you. Now it means
next to nothing since just about any monkey can get one, hence the employers dont want to pay through the nose just for the
degree, you have to have something else to actually show some value/usefulness/talent.
The AVERAGE starting salary of graduates is therefore hugely eroded, because there are many more lower value graduates now.
The good graduates are damaged by this, but not to the same extent.
The only solution is for society as a whole to get over its 'you are a failure if you dont get a degree' alongside universities operating on
turnover based economics, and we may actually one day see a return to their true purpose (training those more special minds that
need such exposure), and then perhaps technical colleges can also return to what they once did (train the middle ground of practical
workers), and apprenticeships can be seen as the right fit for yet a different set of workers.
But I wouldn't hold your breath, that would take a sensible approach - good luck with that.
So the result is that the value of a 'degree' is reduced, but thats the fault of the universities themselves.
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.
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 mind boggling selfishness on display. Seriously the majority of people do jobs they dislike because the majority of jobs suck and as a bonus sucky jobs also pay shit because a minority of self serving arse holes specifically set it up that way, so they can profit off other people doing those shit jobs (sure maids love beings maids and waitresses love being waitresses and soldiers love being shot at and garbage persons love garbage and production line workers love pretending to be machines and exactly why do shit jobs that are the hardest work pay the worst because selfish arseholes, that's why).
Coding, lets see what the real problem. Imagine for a second that the language you speak and read and write, instead of having a common dictionary and grammatical structure instead had many different private for profit dictionaries and grammatical structures, different words and grammar being the norm. Now tie into that the overriding bullshit of copyright and patents and WOW lets teach those languages to children because billionaires pay lobbyists to tell shit politicians what to bullshit spread.
Fix the fucking problem with a lack of a uniform unencumbered (no copyright and no patents) coding language fucking first and until then shut the fuck up, this especially for the morons who can not still manage to make a alphabetic keyboard uniform across the industry because it is too hard.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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.