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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."
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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
And they won't get it because nobody wants to train newcomers and they don't want to pay for somebody that has the experience.
If people think millenials are spoiled, just look at the people running companies.
any degree any college.
Nonsense. Someone with a psychology degree earns a third what someone with a chemical engineering degree earns, and if four times as likely to be unemployed.
..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.
I made the same mistake. I decided that I needed a "general" degree; so I got an MBA, there really isn't much more general than that. The result is that I do have a job, but a terrible one. I teach Computer applications at a middle school.
The only real advice I can give is to be tall and good looking.
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.
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'
I was hired by an Indian outsourced (I am local) and they brought in a consultant who would like for references and made a fake resume for me. I quit in disgust!
The problem is when people do this shit HR will simply demand more on a resume and look for keywords in Taleo and rank them by score and filter out all the good people. Resume inflation was also an issue but it really did start in outsourcing companies.
You put an unrealistic demand and a million headhunters from Bangalore say my guys have 10 years of experience in HTML 5 and what are you going to do?
Not saying your guys did this per say? But it hurts natives too as management gets the impression $45,000 a year is the average for a senior developer who has 8 years experience in 5 dozen languages and will now consider no less.
THe worst is Taleo that HR uses. It was never designed to do HR's job but the salespeople mentioned hey do your HR stuff while my website does the recruiting for you etc. So it scans for keywords and only the top 5 ranks get emailed to the secretary for the interview ... all the ones from Bangalore with 10 years experience in HTML 5.
http://saveie6.com/
The full text should have read:
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. And they'll dump them back on the street whenever their skills don't match what the employer "needs" this quarter.
Seriously. What went wrong? Employers used to not think they were entitled to perfectly-shaped disposable cogs. They not only brought new hires' skills in line with their needs, they imbued them with the corporate culture and philosophy, ensured that they were kept trained or retrained, and in exchange avoided the continual expenses that come from bringing a new, untried person who doesn't even know where the paper clips are kept. And, as an added bonus, the employee might feel loyal enough to put a little more of themself into the company's ongoing fortunes.
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.
Are you average? Or below average? Because otherwise your anecdote is just noise in the data.
You failed to graduate a long time ago, where your experience is not relevant to the automated resume filtering in place today. Learn to think is not the lesson.
Learn how the game is played, and play it. Unless you are well above average. Are you average?
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.
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.