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A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree (nytimes.com)
Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times: A few years ago, Sean Bridges lived with his mother, Linda, in Wiley Ford, W.Va. Their only income was her monthly Social Security disability check. He applied for work at Walmart and Burger King, but they were not hiring. Yet while Mr. Bridges had no work history, he had certain skills. He had built and sold some stripped-down personal computers, and he had studied information technology at a community college. When Mr. Bridges heard IBM was hiring at a nearby operations center in 2013, he applied and demonstrated those skills. Now Mr. Bridges, 25, is a computer security analyst, making $45,000 a year. In a struggling Appalachian economy, that is enough to provide him with his own apartment, a car, spending money -- and career ambitions. "I got one big break," he said. "That's what I needed." Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs. As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience shows how a worker's skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references. [...] On Wednesday, the approach received a strong corporate endorsement from Microsoft, which announced a grant of more than $25 million to help Skillful, a program to foster skills-oriented hiring, training and education. The initiative, led by the Markle Foundation, began last year in Colorado, and Microsoft's grant will be used to expand it there and move it into other states. "We need new approaches, or we're going to leave more and more people behind in our economy," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.
It seems strange to call this "new" since a few decades ago, it seems like there were lots of people like this in tech, including my high school buddy who never went to college yet did quite well designing computer printers.
An accountant who obtained training 20 years ago can still find value and use most of those skills today. That is not the case for those in IT, and more people outside of IT need to understand that instead of looking down upon the highly skilled IT professional who can still provide great value without being a ringknocker with a sheepskin under their belt.
This statement might be true for lower-end IT jobs, but it's bullshit for development work.
A computer science degree from a decent school teaches students a number of things including data structures, algorithms, hardware architecture, project management, etc. Lists, sets, and maps haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Algorithms don't change either. Dijkstra's algorithm were first published in 1959. Hardware architecture hasn't changed all that much over the years. As for project management, the main significant change in that time is that agile processes have become popular. Agile isn't exactly hard to pick up. All of this knowledge I've personally used in my years since graduation and plan to continue to use in the future. In fact, having this base level of knowledge helps me pick up and understand new technologies, which come and go.
Developers definitely benefit from computer science degrees. That's true even 20 years after the fact. Frankly, I wouldn't hire a developer without a degree. Yeah sure, maybe I might miss out on that diamond in the rough. I'd rather not deal with the uncertainty. With a degree, a developer shows that they've been exposed to a basic set of information and persevered through difficult circumstances.