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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.
...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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.