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Top Established and Emerging Tech Companies Prefer To Hire Highly Educated Candidates, Not Dropouts (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report:It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts, but in fact, they're the exception to the rule. Going to college pays off, and to land a job at one of the most coveted tech employers, you'll need to stay in school. Data analysis site Paysa looked at over 8,200 job posting and over 70,000 resumes at tech "titans" (companies worth at least $100 billion with an IPO more than 10 years ago) and "tech disruptors" (companies worth at least $10 billion with an IPO within the last 10 years) and found that employees at these companies are highly educated, not dropouts. A disproportionate number of employees at these sought-after companies actually have advanced degrees, and one company stood out as employing the highest percentage of workers with Ph.D.s -- Google. A whopping 16 percent of positions at Google require a doctorate degree. Less than 2 percent of Americans have earned a doctoral degree and an even smaller percentage have studied topics that are relevant to Google's work.
Because they don't actually do anything but marketing and sales. They aren't "tech," they're salesmen. Salesmen need connections.
2 decades in and I've yet to meet a single developer who was both not self-taught and was competent. College can't teach someone to code, only how to read code (partially at that.)
The only Drop-outs you see in the tech industry are people who dropped out because they got too busy managing a company they created themselves. The quality of developers is bad enough even among those who graduated. The people who couldn't even be bothered to finish their degree and then have to send out resumes looking for jobs are even worse off.
Your best bet is to complete your degree and do interneships or co-op placements to get real world experience. In addition, you should be working on your own personal projects in your spare time so that you actually understand how to do software development by the time you graduate. It may sound like a lot of work, but if you only depend on what they teach you in class, you will get out of school with very few marketable skills.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A degree is not merely about demonstrating that you can acquire some minimal base of knowledge to start your career from. It also demonstrates that you can finish what you start, even when it is a long process that requires you to do many things you have no particular interest in doing.
I'm guessing this is addressing that silly tech narrative that you can drop out of college and become a billionaire Does anyone really believe that? If you take even a cursory glance at the rich 'dropouts' they were all from well to do families who could afford to take a break and come back. Meanwhile my kid basically gets one shot at college since if she takes even 1 year off because she didn't get into her 300 level courses (not enough space for somebody with a measly 3.8 GPA / average is 3.9 to be admitted to her major) all her loans come due and you can't get more loans until the first batch are paid off.
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It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts
No it doesn't.
If you take an "average time" to get a degree, it is unlikely you are the type of candidate sought. Better candidates have, on average, planned their futures. They take five year combined BS/MS plans, and don't always take all five years to get through it.
So higher credentials take them less time, which costs them less money. Even if the degree is not what matters,it is a signal that candidates have at least minimal qualifications beyond that of derp derp derp pot and booze party time losers. They don't want to hire some 350# foul smelling loser who will misuse their day spamming websites with affiliate links and dick picks.
Debt Slaves are easy to manipulate
love is just extroverted narcissism
I worked my last position as a contract-to-hire for two and half years. Since I only have an associate's degree, they were barely able to get me approved at the initial hire. Human resources ended up making that bachelor's degree mandatory by the end of my contract and they refused to even consider hiring me. But I'm okay now, because somebody else hired me, eventually. Fingers crossed that this contract-to-hire works out!
There are some things that you learn when pursuing certain degrees which would be fairly difficult to learn on your own, but most job minimum education requirements out there are less about getting someone who has learned some advanced stuff and more about having a worker that has been trained for the job you want to assign to them on that worker's own personal dime instead of the company's. As a bonus, most degrees incur debt on par with an expensive car or a mortgage and the debt plus interest can potentially take decades to repay in full, so not only do the degree-demanding companies get a worker bee they didn't have to spend money training, they also get a more loyal worker bee starting financially well in the red and who can't afford to just walk away if the employer treats them badly.
You're practically guaranteed to not become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but that doesn't mean you require a degree to succeed. Persistence and constant autodidacticism are far more valuable things than a college degree. A degree is no substitute for persistence or personal desire to learn and grow.
Getting an advanced degree is a huge gamble that not many people are willing to make.
It really depends on what you get your degree in. As long as you think of your education as another form of investment it shouldn't be too much of a risk. Sure people can get screwed if they make stupid decisions, but you can also get screwed by putting a $300k addition on your home where home values are only $200k. Making stupid educational investments is just as easy as making stupid real estate or stock market investments.
First off, let the education industry itself help you decide if you are a good fit for your chosen field. If you cannot get in a top 20 university for your PhD, what makes you think it is likely you will get into a top 20 employer after college? These colleges' admission programs are giving you valuable information about your marketability. Think of it like getting an appraisal on a home before you buy it. You might be an exception, but it's still probably a bad investment. The size of the market will also impact this decision. You might be willing to go to a lower ranked Comp Sci PhD program because of the high demand, but maybe shouldn't get an English PhD outside of the Ivy League.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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So higher credentials take them less time, which costs them less money. Even if the degree is not what matters,it is a signal that candidates have at least minimal qualifications beyond that of derp derp derp pot and booze party time losers. They don't want to hire some 350# foul smelling loser who will misuse their day spamming websites with affiliate links and dick picks.
Creimer's multiple Associate Degrees are paying off, fool. He doesn't need an advanced degree because he knows the secret is to get a new Associate Degree every few years to keep them fresh. As long as he looks like a young recent grad on paper, creimer is golden like the rooster that laid the golden cock egg.
It's interesting to compare software development communities that appreciate having higher education versus those that do not.
Take for example the Rust, Ruby, JavaScript and PHP communities. Higher education is looked down upon within these communities. Many of these practitioners are actually high school dropouts. They aren't even qualified enough to apply for acceptance to any higher education institution.
Look at the software they produce. Most of it is slow, bloated, and far too complex for what it actually does. Since these people have no formal education, they often end up reinventing the wheel very poorly. They also introduce unnecessary complexity, perhaps in an attempt to feel smarter than they actually are. Rust is perhaps the epitome of this. The language itself is so absurdly complex that it's nearly unusable. Most of the software that these programmers create actually gets thrown out because it failed so badly.
Compare those communities to the C, C++, Java and Python communities. These are communities that respect, if not demand, higher education. Despite being relatively simple languages, the practitioners of these languages use them to write some of the most important and widely used software around. Essentially all of the major operating systems, windowing systems, network servers, web browsers, compilers, interpreters, virtual machines, and business systems are written in one or more of these languages. These are the kinds of systems that are used and extended over the course of decades just because they're so vital and useful.
Can people without higher education try to create software? Of course. But the end result is like when an untrained "handyman" tries to build his own shed. Maybe it kind of looks like a shed, and maybe it only partially collapses, but it's still a pathetic disaster compared to what somebody with proper training could produce.
A degree is about indoctrination, as is all education. You are made to think the way that your betters believe that you should think, so that they find you useful in their bureaucracy.
A degree has nothing to do with intelligence and not even much to do with persistence. You'll make it through as long as you can pay the bill and show up occasionally.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Robert Kiyosaki has a book called "Why 'A' Students Work for 'C' Students and Why 'B' Students Work for the Government", where A students (graduates) work for C students (dropouts) and B students (everyone else) work for the government. You don't need a college degree to own the corporate ladder, you just need to hire people who are smarter than you.
http://www.trending9.com/top-1...
Sure they don't hire dropouts, those who do the hiring _are_ the dropouts, they _own_ the company.
Creimer's multiple Associate Degrees are paying off, fool.
I got a General Education A.A. degree in 1994 because I skipped high school and didn't know what I to do with my life. After I started my technical career as a software tester in 1997, I went back to school to get a Computer Programming A.S. degree in 2007 for FREE with a $3K tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11.
He doesn't need an advanced degree because he knows the secret is to get a new Associate Degree every few years to keep them fresh.
Next degree will probably be a project management certification in the next five to ten years.
http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/certificate-programs?cname=Project%20and%20Program%20Management
As long as he looks like a young recent grad on paper, creimer is golden like the rooster that laid the golden cock egg.
That's why I don't list my 1994 A.A. degree or the 2000-ish dates for my Windows/A+/Network+ certifications.
See, it's because the name "Comp Sci" is misleading. They should instead call this program "Programming circa 1961"
I find it ironic that Google invests so heavily in online education programs, but only hires people who have gone through the higher education song and dance. They straight up claim that their Udacity Android nano-degree will get you a job in the field, but how many of those grads are they hiring?
and doctorate degree is not for IT help desk or sys admin work. Unless they want to hire an H1B with an job that no USC can be slotted into on paper.
I suspect this is where the 1 in a million successful dropout screams, but I make 6 figures! College is bad! OMG, don't waste your time or mommy's money.
You are assuming anyone can get one, which is very much not the case. I've a neighbor whose son did not make it, and I remember in school there was a guy who had been around forever. I asked my adviser about him and he said the prof's had given the guy hints but he did not seem to get he was never going to get a PhD. Just like I was never going to be in the NFL, most are not going to be able to get a PhD. As to cost, back then a PhD was only time. If you were good, you had an RA that paid the tuition and a stipend.I paid zip for my masters, actually I got paid to get it.
i will never hire another lawyer to clean our pool.
College is a _lot_ more competitive than it used to be. 20 years of non-stop federal funding cuts (mostly to finance tax cuts) mean they've had to be insanely selective with students. Even with a 4.0 GPA she'll still have an interview because there's too many applicants with high GPAs.
This is one of those things nobody talks about. The only way to solve it is to fund schools again, but fat chance of that. It means people going to the polls and voting for tax increases. Yeah, those tax raises would need to come out of the rich mostly (since they've got most of the money) but folks just hear tax raise and shut it down. I'm guessing it's because so many folks live paycheck to paycheck (60-70% depending on which study you're reading) that they're terrified of even a 1% raise.
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Most of the tech business is in the boring stuff.
Coding and recording CRUD apps, manipulating data, database stuff....
You are not on the cutting edge, but you are getting a steady paycheck.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
we need to end student loans and have more trades schools. IT / tech needs the union apprenticeship systems. you don't need an PHD to be an good plumber and by the time you make master plumber you will have a lot real work experience with out the student loans.
Also: If you enjoy doing the actual work (instead of being Management), anything more than a Bachelors degree guarantees that you won't actually being doing work. Instead you'll be babysitting a bunch of people with less debt, less responsibility, and doing the actual fun part of the work.
Depends on what part of the "actual work" you enjoy doing. If you like the writing code aspect of software development, then managerial responsibilities will only get in the way. If you like designing large scale solutions to difficult problems, this work usually goes to IT trained individuals with managerial responsibilities. These are your CTOs, VPs of Software Dev / Architecture / etc, Directors, Software Architects and the like. A Masters degree often helps considerably in getting those jobs.
I have loved programming since I was about 10, but it was always about designing software and finding solutions to problems, not typing code. Now that I don't write much code but instead just design the systems others will do the grunt work creating, much more of my job is focused on the parts of software engineering I like. I still write enough code (often POCs and examples for others to use) and do enough code reviews that I know the details about systems I am designing, but that is at best 10% of my work.
I learned early in my career that the smart senior developers rarely get to make the important and interesting decisions. Their boss's boss does.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I'm BS/MS in CS. The market is pretty is soft on MS's, IMHO, as far as landing a job goes. My client boss got pretty excited with a candidate he saw who had a MS once. I've seen data showing if you have an advanced CS degree you can maintain a high salary into age-discrimination territory. People with less education appear to be less likely to find work later or get pushed out as they get older. I'm 35 and have no idea what I'm in for.
Tech Certifications are worthless, because they are focused on one technology that normally will be popular for a few years.
Hey get .NET certified, learn to do SOAP services. Oh wait we are now using Restful web services. The job you got the .NET certification, decided to switch to Java.
An actual Degree in focuses more in learning to learn then how to do the flavor of the week.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The recruiters push for certifications. On average a person with an MS certification makes 7 to 13% more than those who don't. If it didn't improve your odds the recruiters wouldn't be able to make money off you doing it. There are a ton of people with certs (and some of the MS people I graduated with) who can't code anything to save their lives.
I certainly wouldn't comment without having experienced the system.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If you have little to no experience, a degree is the most basic filter the HR department can apply to the 12,384 resumes they are receiving for the open positions. No degree? Garbage, and yes I'm well aware of how unfair that is and how many potential good people they lose. A degree from the right program shows you can at least stick with something that's reasonably hard long enough to make it through, and can probably solve a few non-trivial problems given enough time and guidance.
I've been working for big companies for almost my whole career, and the simple truth is that you have to play a lot of stupid, asinine retarded games to get and keep a job, and advance in your current one. if you don't like it, go work for one of the 4 billion "Dude, GitHub is my resume!" web startups. A zero-knowledge, C-student HR generalist is going to apply whatever it takes to reduce that pile of resumes down. She has a degree -- it may not be CS and she may have spent most of her time at sorority functions, but she's going to feel she's college-educated and you should be too. If you're trying to cold-call your way into a job, it's a rare medium to large company that will even consider someone who hasn't completed a degree of some sort.
I'm in IT and we have _plenty_ of people with just a BS, AS or no degree at all who are very good at what they do. A lot of us don't even have a traditional computer science background. But, woe upon any of these smart people who can't network their way into their next job when they need one, because it puts them at a disadvantage no matter how smart they are.
Accomplishment is the salve for your ego, not sheepskin.
But you're apparently one of those snowflakes. Keep it up with the REEEEEEE... It'll get you far.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If you have a CS degree and cannot get a job in the tech sector you must be carrying around a substantial amount of negative qualities as a person. You most likely come across as the type of person no one will hire no matter how many degrees you have. Techies are not usually known to be very good interviewees. A lot of techies tend to be introverts and display a lot of social awkwardness. Only the really smart and competent techies can get away with carrying around those types of characteristics. Most of those complaining they cannot get a job are overly inflexible in their stated goals. They decide they only want to work with certain technologies in certain industries and are most likely unwilling to relocate. These two qualities also show someone unwilling to take the initiatives necessary to find their perfect job. A college degree is only really useful for one thing. It shows a person who committed themselves to achieving a goal, namely a college degree, and was willing to do everything necessary to reach that goal. But if you think a CS degree actually prepares you for the real world you are woefully misinformed. College curriculums have a hard time teaching the technologies currently in use today because the technologies change faster then the curriculums can be updated. You end up knowing the basics which should allow you to adapt and learn the technologies not covered in your degree program.
"and found that employees at these companies are highly educated, not dropouts"
This statement makes the gigantic assumption that "dropouts" may not be highly educated but that doesn't mean they are not highly intelligent. There are high school students capable of running rings around the degreed professionals. If you are paying a lot of money for your degree but feel you have the skills to make $100K a year instead of spending $50K a year for your education the smart thing is to "dropout" secure your job using the only thing that really matters which is your knowledge level and go back later to finish up your degree. A lot of companies will even pay to offset the cost of finishing your degree. Even if the company doesn't offer tuition reimbursement you will be in a better financial situation than you were when you started running up your debt to get a degree.
Never get a master's. Never ever ever. You might as well spend your money on a gun and shoot yourself in the head.
A former college roommate who graduated as an Electrical Engineer in the mid-1990's got his MBA degree after getting laid during the dot com bust. Somehow he ended up in IT Support. He gets mad at me because I make money than him even though I never took out any student loans, don't have a bachelor or master degree, and went into IT Support ten years before he did.
The drop outs they want to hire aren't applying for jobs because they're busy starting their own companies. I started my own companies and completed college and worked full time. It was frankly nuts and I would have been better off dropping out to just start my own companies. No customer has EVER asked me for my diploma or even where I went to college. They want to know I'll solve their problems, not what my education was.
Let's get this straight: you've been writing code for 30-40 years and you're pissed that someone didn't learn to code as well as you in four years? Also, you dropped out in 1981, when a lot of universities didn't even have undergraduate computer science departments and had no problem finding a job? It's almost like technology and the economy have changed since then.
but at the same time bypass trade / tech schools people are more trained for the job and then say the college people have skill gaps in the hands on work.
Like that PHD at google who had no idea on how to turn his workstation on.
This is because computer science is a theoretical discipline, one of whose applied skills is programming. Complaining that new CS grads aren't amazing programmers is only slightly less ridiculous than complaining that a person with a mathematics degree is a lousy accountant. Sure, a math student understands the math behind the accounting but they're not very familiar with the accounting process itself. Now imagine that everything anyone knows about accounting changes every five years and perhaps you'll understand why brand new CS grads face hurdles at their first jobs.
You should hire creimer to clean out your storage closets [...]
Have some Spam with Bacon for your whine.
Depends a lot on WHY you get a Master's. In full disclosure, I did not finish mine, but did take an extra year of graduate courses with the original intent of getting it (and then being reached the point of being badly burnt out of school).
In EE there are some great master's level classes that can be really helpful. I stuck around the extra year to take a power electronics class, an antennas class, and the microwave class. I also took an advance numerical analysis class.
All of those have been at the heart of the work I've done over the last 19 years since graduating. A Master's often gets counted at as equivalent to a few years of experience, which has become increasingly hard to get if you only have a BS when you hit interview circuit.
He was so happy he got laid he went out and got an MBA? Man that dude must have had some confidence issues!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
A whopping 16% of Google employment ads request a PhD, but what is the actual hiring rate? Are 16% of new hires PhDs? Also, what's the retention rate - when a PhD is hired, do they stick around for 20 years, or are they out in 2?
Not the infosec certificate you've been crowing about for at LEAST the last 3 years?
Still on my to do list. Thanks for the reminder.
Any tool with money to spend can get a certificate.
The project management certificate is from the University of California, Santa Cruz, extension in Silicon Valley. It costs $6,000 to take. These are known as professional development courses.
There are many places in this world where there are simply not many interesting tech jobs. I know I live in a smaller city where a large company let go of 600 people and now the entire market is saturated.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
He was so happy he got laid he went out and got an MBA?
He got his BS/MBA degrees after serving in the U.S. Army. Not sure how the Army gets laid.
That's a lot of words to simply state that you agree.
I hope that made you feel better, buying all that bullshit.
Now, the truth. Colleges do not teach people how to be good programmers. Almost all of the biggest lazy, no-talent shitbags in the industry are CS graduates. The colleges indoctrinate people into subservient, bureaucratic modes of thought that are conducive to operating as a cog in a large organization. That, and a little English Comp to compensate for the illiteracy of those that are turned out of high schools.
The weeding you claim - hah. Just about every no-talent shitbag ends up getting a job somewhere. Most firms don't bother with a good interview process, and government agencies least of all. You'll find a home eventually, even if you suck. Only those who refuse to show for interviews, or refuse to relocate don't get hired. Obviously, getting a programming job in Bumfuck, IA is not happening, unless you can telework it.
On a related note: the interview process you describe reminds me of the scrum of people looking to get into the 'best schools' the summer after they graduate high school. Both groups - the young programmers and the prospective college students - have been marketed to heavily. They think this somehow makes a difference, working for MS or Amazon or Google - or in the other case going to a highly rated school.
Both groups are seriously deluded. Your internal wherewithal counts far more than acting as a cog in some bureaucratic machine. Having that line item on your resume is not that helpful in the future. Accomplish something, have some drive, and all of those certifications - which is all the degree or the job at the firm with the flaming hoop interview process are - become irrelevant faster than you would think. Caring about these certifications is all about despair, a belief that you have nothing unique to offer. I suppose some people might feel that way, but that sounds more like a mental illness - depression - than a logical strategy, to me.
And how is it persistence to drink beer, smoke weed and experiment sexually for (more like) five years while you occasionally pay attention to studies while someone else foots the bill(...at least in the short term)? I suppose it's persistent hedonism, so you might have a point there.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Very few jobs actually require a graduate degree ...
Graduate degrees include Masters, not Just PhDs.
Few, yes. Its rare that a computer vision related job pops up locally, computer vision being my area of research in my Masters program. Where the Masters is more commonly useful is in a position involving leading a development team in some way, of course it has to be combined with experience.
As to cost, back then a PhD was only time. If you were good, you had an RA that paid the tuition and a stipend.I paid zip for my masters, actually I got paid to get it.
That's still true for a PhD in almost any technical field (well, any PhD worth getting: if you're paying for a PhD in STEM, you're being fleeced), and many Masters degrees, though not all. Mind you, the pay isn't very good unless you get a fellowship or go to a handful of private universities, but you should be being paid enough to live on, if only barely.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Let's get this straight. You took the statement "They both had almost no ability to write code" and morphed it into "...you're pissed that someone didn't learn to code as well as you in four years?"?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I have worked at places which fired people on the spot if their CCIE, MCSE, or RHCE expired, saying that the person failed to maintain proper training for production critical machinery. You won't even pass HR unless you have certs.
Yes, they are important. They show you can actually do stuff.
I hope that made you feel better, buying all that bullshit. Now, the truth.
Yes, please try to explain the "truth" to someone who has seen things from both sides. Who dropped out of a computer science program the middle of their sophomore year to pursue a unique startup opportunity, worked in such an environment for a couple years, moved to a more traditional software development job, went back to school and finished their degree.
Colleges do not teach people how to be good programmers.
The classroom is not the sole source of knowledge for computer science and related fields. You learn as much from your peers, fellow students, and from self-study as you do from professors. A University is a unique environment. Not only is it dense with peers from your field of study but also with peers from other areas. Other areas that may provide insights that are beneficial. A University also can provide access to equipment and software unavailable by your own means. Been there, done that. Access to people, info, equipment, software, etc, is amazing at a University. Add to that the University making me take classes I expected to be of little value, and much to my surprise turned out quite useful on the jobs years later.
In summary, a formal degree program can make you a better programmer than you would have otherwise been. It is additive to what you are doing on your own.
Since nearly it's start in the 90's (before user IDs) (not worth my time to log in anymore), I would say it's a combination of being actively killed in the OS/2 / IBM sence and an end of interesting and relevant and truly innovative technologies being developed. IOT and 3D printers meet neither of these criteria. Neither do Musk's ventures.
I too have a 30+ year career. However I earned my CS degree 5 years into that career, not 25 years into it. Who might have the better perspective on how a CS degree affects the early portion of one's career?
This. IT is stable enough [1] that it doesn't need even a B. S. in CS to work well. It should be a trade, and vendor independant. Certs are pointless, because if one uses plumbing, why would you need to know ProPex's specific pipes in order to know plumbing in general?
Plus, it sets a standard. Someone can be a chatter-monkey, but it would be like an A/C repairman without their TACL license (here in Texas).
We need a licensing and trade body. We already have junior, mid-level, and senior IT, might as well make that apprentice, journeyman, and master.
[1]: Stable as in in 10 years, we will still have the same issues as now. Mail will still have spam, databases will still have bad table designs, we will have ransomware, and so on.
would stop crashing every 10 years. But it's been doing that since I was a lad and if I want to look it up before that.
You survived 20 years of layoffs, were rocking a college degree and still couldn't avoid bankruptcy. At some point we have to stop stop blaming the parents and blame the system. The government, using tax dollars taken from the wealthy must fund college. Why the wealth? Because they benefit most from having an educated workforce.
Parents already put massive amounts of time, effort and money into raising the next generations of employees. They're already doing their part. It's the other side, the employers, who aren't keeping up their end of the bargain.
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You are assuming a degree in computer science and computer engineering are the same thing, though it is not necessarily your fault. . Some Comp Sci programs in the US do not require students to write a single line of code. The thinking is that Comp Sci is about a higher level view of the concepts and principles of computing. There is a disconnect between what Academia and Industry think a Comp Sci degree is. Until that gets sorted out, there will continue to be problems such as the one you have encountered.
All they mean is that the person had some spare time & money, and felt like doing something easy.
The project management certificate (35 hours of education) is a prerequisite for the Project Management Professional certification. The other prerequisites are a secondary degree and 7,500 hours of project experience. There's nothing easy about pursuing this certification.
https://www.pmi.org/certifications/types/project-management-pmp
Dammit, hit the wrong mod option, meant to mod this up not down. Posting to undo my downmod.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
Everyone knows that phone support sucks, but it's a great place to get in the door and hone troubleshooting skills. And, once you know the products of a company, you have a far better chance of moving into the engineering organization that does QA on those products ... That's how I did it. Now I'm working at one of those companies that thousands of people try to get jobs at, and over 99% get turned away.
That may have worked for you but it is risky. The effects of taking lower paying jobs or those which are not a great fit for your career ambitions can remain for an entire career. For most workers the effects of a poor first job dissipate after about 8 years, but it take more average or slightly under average graduates far longer.
And research has shown these workers generally catch up by moving to new employers, not by getting their foot in the door and being promoted. I know someone who literally moved up from the mail room to becoming a senior developer, but that is by far the exception to the rule (it was a very small company when he was moving up the ranks). Everyone else I know who was in similar circumstances got stuck in low paying QA jobs and couldn't break out of that role.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There are many places in this world where there are simply not many interesting tech jobs. I know I live in a smaller city where a large company let go of 600 people and now the entire market is saturated.
Not every location is going to support every industry. Being a software developer in a small town is kind of like being an actor in a small town. Maybe it works out for some people, but most should go where the jobs are.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yes, it would be great for people without family connections to a place wouldn't it? Or to simply not care about your family. Many have obligations to family and cannot move.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
[Citation Needed]. The lawyers I know of my graduating class are driving Ferarris and Lambos, with 700+k houses. The CS people, at best, are barely scraping 120k, 10 years after graduation.
Law school graduates have a very bimodal salary curve, and that remains throughout their career. A select few (about 20%) make around $160k+ right out of law school. Most of the rest make under $80k per year. Median starting salaries are at around $60k.
I know quite a few law graduates, and most of them either barely scrape by or move to another career. A couple of them have those huge houses you mention. My guess is either you have lost track with the unsuccessful members of your graduating class or you went to a very good school where most of your classmates were likely to succeed. Or its just an anomaly, since the statistics bear out that the results you claim are uncommon.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I don't have any degree or any of that crap either and I make 5 times what you do.
Good for you. So what?
1a) A four year degree + 3 years (4500 hours) of project management experience.
Which does apply to me.
1b) A high school diploma and/or Associate's degree + 5 years (7500 hours) of project management experience.
The sticking point is the 7,500 hours of project management. As a lead video game tester (2001-04), I was responsible for ten projects over a three year period. But I didn't pursue project management at that time because I could get an associate degree in computer programming for FREE on a $3,000 tax credit. So I'm restarting the clock for project management experience. My next job or the job after that one will have to be project management oriented in order to fulfill that requirement.
I got a fellowship that paid my tuition + a stipend that covered housing. The stipend was only available to Ph.D. seekers, but I ended up leaving in 2 years after getting a Master's degree. Granted, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to get fellowship.
Why? I did one that didn't require a thesis. So, basically, I just took 4 more semesters of graduate level C.S. coursework.
Good for you. So what?
I'm just a providing an opportunity for you to be negative about me so you can feel better about being a better human being.
If you are paying for an MS or PhD, you are doing it wrong. For engineering, they typically pay you.
I had two particular grads from the University of Washington come in for an interview for some openings I had for software engineers. They both had almost no ability to write code. I was so pissed that they both got their degrees and I was left wondering just how did they get their Comp Sci degrees.
Frankly, I'd question your interviewing skills before I'd question their coding skills. They had at least 4 years of progressively difficult software education. You had what sort of training for interviewing? How often do you do it? How many years of progressively difficult interviewing have you put in? How often were you tested and reviewed on your interviewing skills by educated interviewing experts?
Software engineers who are more used to constantly dealing with machines are typically poor judges of people. Add in the Dunning-Kruger effect and you get engineers who think their shitty interviewing skills are much better than they actually are and can't recognize their own interviewing deficiency.
On top of that, the software interview process is broken at most companies. Interviewers will base their hiring decision entirely on whether the candidate can answer some random algorithm question. If the candidate hasn't encountered that exact question previously and can't solve it exactly to the interviewer's requirements, which can often be ridiculous, then they're screwed. If the candidate has encountered the problem before, then they win the job lottery. You're not determining whether they can "write code" or not. You're finding out whether they've seen that problem previously.
Further, I bet you're not sitting them in from of an IDE and giving them plenty of time to complete the task. I bet you're doing it on a whiteboard or a text editor on a short time scale with the added pressure of an interview. The typical coding interview is so completely alien to the way that developers normally work that I'm surprised anyone gets hired.
And for what? Writing algorithms are maybe 10% of a modern software engineer's job. It makes no sense that you'd base your whole hiring decision on something that's relatively so trivial.
So what's so special about university that makes it worth thousands of dollars? The knowledge is in books. Figure out the books used in a curriculum and buy'em used. Couple that with someone willing to help you in sticky situations and you can avoid college altogether.
Simply reading a book is not the same as studying a book before quizzes or an exam. Further, most professors lecture on topics not covered in the books. Only shitty profs work straight from the book. Lab work and homework problems drill those lessons into your head.
Computer science courses are much more difficult than other courses at university. On weekend nights, the business majors are out drinking beer and hitting on girls. The computer science nerds are busy writing their programs. After 4 years of spending weekend after weekend writing code, you end up learning quite a bit. And no, it's not the same as just reading a few used books.
Yes, it would be great for people without family connections to a place wouldn't it? Or to simply not care about your family. Many have obligations to family and cannot move.
Then they will have a somewhat limited amount of career options. Almost no one really has access to 100% of all possible careers, regardless of what your kindergarten teacher might have told you. If your family provides you enough enrichment that they are worth more to you than the career you could have if you moved, then live with that decision. I'm certainly not going to tell people their priorities are wrong. But some choices in life have consequences. My choice to have two children, and my choice to live in the best school district in my state (aka most expensive housing) limits my career options (no going back for my PhD). It may be a bummer at times, but I doubt many people would feel sorry for me. And they shouldn't, because these are the choices I made and continue to make.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
One of my ex-gfs was on the graduate admissions panel for MIT's philosophy department. She told me that if you didn't do your undergrad at one of a handful of elitist schools, nothing else about your application mattered. They tossed it in trash unread.
I suggested to her that their method seemed like a poor way to select the smartest applicants. She agreed but said in her opinion that didn't really matter and she strongly supported their policy. She was an unashamed classist and thought it important to admit the "right kind"of students. I think she'd made some very mistaken assumptions about my background.
Incidentally, that particular girl had a great ass, but for a philosophy post-doc wasn't really all that bright.
Take it for what it's worth - YMMV.
Neither of you has the better perspective on your own because alone both of you lack a control to compare yourselves to. Only together do your experiences acquire comparability and meaningfulness, and for any inferences drawn to be significant, we need to take lots of one of you (no degree during early career) and lots of the other of you (degree during early career). Anecdotes are useless for drawing inferences about the worth of something.
I'll second this. I did a MSc because it was the only way to stay in the city I was currently working in. It gave me some experience learning C++, parallel processing, ASIC design, sci-viz, but local employers were not interested in anyone who had been out of industry for a year. So I had to emigrate anyway.
Then you have to deal with the hazards of management who "want the brightest graduate" or "want whoever has the most qualifications" to work on whatever is their personal itch at the time, while everyone else more or less gets to do what they want to do.
Sometimes you will have admins with the view that "Oh, you've done a Masters, you want to go into management?"
With a PhD it's even worse, as many directors have the goal of promoting everyone up into a hierarchy based on qualifications.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Never get a master's. Never ever ever. You might as well spend your money on a gun and shoot yourself in the head.
Masters are a mixed bag. Some get success with them, others don't.
Now your advice is 100% correct for PhDs. They are a big waste of time and money.
So many degrees yet the biggest accomplishment in your life was the time you worked for Google help-desk as a contractor and had to deal with a new grad that couldn't turn a computer on.
Google taught me how to work at light speed, as they were hiring 300+ people per week in Mountain View at the time. This is why I can do eight hours of work in one hour or finish a one-year contract in nine months. I laugh whenever I'm warned that a company has a fast paced environment. Every place since Google ihas been dead slow.
1) You have a low paying job
Which pays the bills and 20% goes into savings.
2) You are a virgin
Which I'm perfectly fine with.
3) You are overweight
I'm losing a pound per week.
4) You are ugly
Which I'm perfectly fine with.
5) You can't write
And 30+ anthologies later...
6) You're stupid
I went straight from Special Ed to community college, skipping the idiocy of high school.
7) You live in a closet
After my father died and 99% of his stuff got thrown out, I've been tossing out all the clutter in my life. My 475-sqft studio is too big now.
8) Everyone laughs at you
And I laugh with them.
9) No one likes you
Only on Slashdot.
10) You will die alone
Everyone dies alone.
What? Your bestest palsy Jesus won't be there?
Jesus will be on the other side. Or maybe not.
MSc is really an intermediate step to getting a PhD. But it also lets you learn a completely fresh set of skills that would allow you to change fields; embedded vs. desktop vs. supercomputing/cloud computing/big data. Doing the right PhD will let you move into research positions in industry or academic work. Doing a MSc, let me learn C++/STL/parallel processing/supercomputing techniques, which have lasted 20+ years. Everyone else in my class has given up on software development.
The important thing is to keeping up to date. Easiest way is to download research paper PDF's, read them and implement your own version.
Take advantage of free trial periods of software.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Are you calling Ivy League colleges and universities diploma mills? Hmm... Ah, I see you post as an Anonymous Coward. I guess that's the way you went.
it's pretty brutal. So much so she's been taking summer courses to keep up. That wasn't her idea, her consoler advised her to. She's still putting in full time hours to keep up.
To her credit she's keeping up, but it's been pretty tough. I don't envy her the work load. I have a full time job and she works harder than me.
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School systems cater to the average child, not the exceptional one. So you had better want your child to be average if that is your motive for moving to any given place. The only people who will help your child become the unique individual they should be is family and having a lot of others around them that care about them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.