With the tech industry still on the ropes and many experienced SysAdmin's unemployed and looking for work, you'll likely have trouble finding entry level work without a degree. That said, the tech industry will swing back up once the rest of the economy gets firmly back on its feet and starts growing again. This could happen in a few months or a year or two, but it will happen.. And when it does, there will be a huge demand for SysAdmin's. Experience will once again be more important than education and if you're still in school and stay in school you might miss your window of opportunity.
My recommendation is this. Go to school. Study and learn. Take some software programming courses (yes I know you don't want to be a programmer, but a SysAdmin who knows how to program is a valuable assett). But watch the industry.. Get an unpaid internship as a Jr. IT person (there's not a lack of need for IT people, there's just a lack of money). Get a few certifications.. When you see the industry opening up and demanding experience over education, leave school and go to work.. You can always go back to school later if you decide to.
It's unfortunate that you're coming into the industry just now, but if you watch it closely and plan carefully, you might be able to get in at just the right point and make a name for yourself.
Let me give some input from the perspective of a systems engineer rather than a software developer. Someone who has to run the crap you programmers put out.
So you can end up running your entier company from within the Outlook Interface, with different web pages hosted within the Outlook UI. Take it off-line, sync to a local MSDE database and everything is available on the road.
That sounds like a marvelous idea. And the next time a nasty virus/worm creeps in that exploits some flaw in Outlook, you've just lost all your corporate data because that worm will crawl from component to component thrashing everything in its path, completely oblivious to Microsoft's so called security. All in the name of integration. Does it still sound like such a great idea? There's nothing you as a developer can do to stop it, because all you're doing is writing tools for a fundamentally flawed platform. You can't fix the platform, and you can't choose a better one. You're locked in to Microsoft.
There's nothing wrong with using a single vendor as long as you're not locked into that vendor. Any production systems engineer will tell you there has to be a back-out plan before you make any change. Where was the back-out plan when people started choosing Microsoft? With Unix, if you don't like one vendor, choose another. If your code is well written it takes little to no effort to port it and recompile (if any porting is even necessary). Switching from MySQL to Oracle? I don't know about C, but in Perl, it's as easy as changing one line of code (if you were foolish enough to hard-code your DSN string). Want to port your business logic server but not your clients? If you want to switch from Microsoft to some other vendor, well.. Good luck, and have fun re-writing your application from scratch. I said I'm not a developer, but I'm a systems engineer who occassionally writes useful tools to make my job as a systems engineer easier. I write AND TEST those tools on my desktop Linux box. I run them on $500,000 Sun Solaris servers. I generally don't even have to change one line of code. I can do that in C/C++, Perl, PHP, Java, Python, and any number of other languages. I can even write a program in C that interacts with another program written in Perl. Try writing a tool in C# or VB or some other new proprietary Microsoft language or even one of the standard languages like C. Now try compiling that code and running it on a Sun server. Won't work.
The people who think Microsoft is the best solution, generally have lived their entire lives locked into Microsoft and don't know of a way out. This is how Microsoft has made its billions, and how despite all its devistating flaws, remains a top competitor.
Ahh, but you're missing something. The pre-emptive multi-tasking system in *nix (and yes, even in winblows to some degree) allows you to assign priorities to your tasks. You want adobe to bring the rest of your system to a stand-still while it's got full use of all your CPU, go right ahead and make it the highest priority task! Easy as that. I never do it personally, so I can't remember the command to do it, but I think it's called something like "nice".
I was just thinking the same thing and so came up with the very beginnings of something I call gnuTaxes. The URL is: http://www.ergonet-ent.com/pages/gnuTaxes . I'm no developer but know enough to be useful and I'm looking for some people who are willing to put some coding in.. It's going to use a combination of XML, XSLT, and PDF hopefully going to be easily portable.. Take a look.
Slashdot Mirror
With the tech industry still on the ropes and many experienced SysAdmin's unemployed and looking for work, you'll likely have trouble finding entry level work without a degree. That said, the tech industry will swing back up once the rest of the economy gets firmly back on its feet and starts growing again. This could happen in a few months or a year or two, but it will happen.. And when it does, there will be a huge demand for SysAdmin's. Experience will once again be more important than education and if you're still in school and stay in school you might miss your window of opportunity.
My recommendation is this. Go to school. Study and learn. Take some software programming courses (yes I know you don't want to be a programmer, but a SysAdmin who knows how to program is a valuable assett). But watch the industry.. Get an unpaid internship as a Jr. IT person (there's not a lack of need for IT people, there's just a lack of money). Get a few certifications.. When you see the industry opening up and demanding experience over education, leave school and go to work.. You can always go back to school later if you decide to.
It's unfortunate that you're coming into the industry just now, but if you watch it closely and plan carefully, you might be able to get in at just the right point and make a name for yourself.
Let me give some input from the perspective of a systems engineer rather than a software developer. Someone who has to run the crap you programmers put out.
That sounds like a marvelous idea. And the next time a nasty virus/worm creeps in that exploits some flaw in Outlook, you've just lost all your corporate data because that worm will crawl from component to component thrashing everything in its path, completely oblivious to Microsoft's so called security. All in the name of integration. Does it still sound like such a great idea? There's nothing you as a developer can do to stop it, because all you're doing is writing tools for a fundamentally flawed platform. You can't fix the platform, and you can't choose a better one. You're locked in to Microsoft.
There's nothing wrong with using a single vendor as long as you're not locked into that vendor. Any production systems engineer will tell you there has to be a back-out plan before you make any change. Where was the back-out plan when people started choosing Microsoft? With Unix, if you don't like one vendor, choose another. If your code is well written it takes little to no effort to port it and recompile (if any porting is even necessary). Switching from MySQL to Oracle? I don't know about C, but in Perl, it's as easy as changing one line of code (if you were foolish enough to hard-code your DSN string). Want to port your business logic server but not your clients? If you want to switch from Microsoft to some other vendor, well.. Good luck, and have fun re-writing your application from scratch. I said I'm not a developer, but I'm a systems engineer who occassionally writes useful tools to make my job as a systems engineer easier. I write AND TEST those tools on my desktop Linux box. I run them on $500,000 Sun Solaris servers. I generally don't even have to change one line of code. I can do that in C/C++, Perl, PHP, Java, Python, and any number of other languages. I can even write a program in C that interacts with another program written in Perl. Try writing a tool in C# or VB or some other new proprietary Microsoft language or even one of the standard languages like C. Now try compiling that code and running it on a Sun server. Won't work.
The people who think Microsoft is the best solution, generally have lived their entire lives locked into Microsoft and don't know of a way out. This is how Microsoft has made its billions, and how despite all its devistating flaws, remains a top competitor.
Ahh, but you're missing something. The pre-emptive multi-tasking system in *nix (and yes, even in winblows to some degree) allows you to assign priorities to your tasks. You want adobe to bring the rest of your system to a stand-still while it's got full use of all your CPU, go right ahead and make it the highest priority task! Easy as that. I never do it personally, so I can't remember the command to do it, but I think it's called something like "nice".
I was just thinking the same thing and so came up with the very beginnings of something I call gnuTaxes. The URL is: http://www.ergonet-ent.com/pages/gnuTaxes . I'm no developer but know enough to be useful and I'm looking for some people who are willing to put some coding in.. It's going to use a combination of XML, XSLT, and PDF hopefully going to be easily portable.. Take a look.