I got my (master's) degree at 34 years of age. Mind you, I had started the studies much sooner and have been working in IT all the time. I got the degree mostly in order to pass formal requirements which many companies deploy to narrow down the number of applicants. It has not changed my life but especially in harsher market situations you get a better edge. On the other hand, I've never had a job that I didn't get by recommendation or contacts, so I don't really know how much it matters.
In Sweden where I live, unions also have quite a large impact on salary levels and having a formal degree makes it easier to qualify for higher levels of payment, especially in large companies. It's not as if it's impossible without, but it removes one obstacle that a manager otherwise would have to make some argument for.
As someone else says, you'll be that age soon anyway. The question to ask yourself is if there some other way to get more value of your time. And I'd take a university degree rather than any number of certifications.
The issue of routing table poisoning isn't exactly previously unknown, and I guess quite a few have at some point suffered from problems with incorrect routing tables, which is essentially the same thing, though unintentional. There are techniques for limiting the problem, and I believe the "wasn't believed practical" to a rather high extent still holds for real purposes.
I may be proven wrong.
Generally, rumours that a University site is going all non-MS or vice versa are cr*p. There is just no central administration capable of making decisions of that sort at a University site. Most likely, many if not most computers at Uppsala University, like at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, are already non-MS. There where rumours that KTH was going all-MS a couple of years ago which we, being one of the system administrators groups, thought rather funny. Meanwhile we ran some 150 Intel-Linux machines, 450 Sparc Solaris, 150 Apple Mac OS X and 200 Intel MS Windows 2000.
Rumours of this kind are usually based on decisions regarding systems used for administration, and they consitute a minority of all workstations.
The same is even true for most larger companies. I'm currently with a big well-known Swedish firm that has previously taken strategic decisions to be "all MS", and sure I have a Windows laptop which I usually read email on. Only, I haven't bothered to start it since the harddrive broke down and the support staff replaced it. All real work is done on a Sparc Solaris and an AMD SuSE Linux workstation. In fact, our unit does not even use Word, but Framemaker for technical documentation, but that is not popular at all with our IT management.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my (master's) degree at 34 years of age. Mind you, I had started the studies much sooner and have been working in IT all the time. I got the degree mostly in order to pass formal requirements which many companies deploy to narrow down the number of applicants. It has not changed my life but especially in harsher market situations you get a better edge. On the other hand, I've never had a job that I didn't get by recommendation or contacts, so I don't really know how much it matters.
In Sweden where I live, unions also have quite a large impact on salary levels and having a formal degree makes it easier to qualify for higher levels of payment, especially in large companies. It's not as if it's impossible without, but it removes one obstacle that a manager otherwise would have to make some argument for.
As someone else says, you'll be that age soon anyway. The question to ask yourself is if there some other way to get more value of your time. And I'd take a university degree rather than any number of certifications.
> These days, e.g. Python is installed everywhere you need to go.
Sorry, but no, it isn't.
The issue of routing table poisoning isn't exactly previously unknown, and I guess quite a few have at some point suffered from problems with incorrect routing tables, which is essentially the same thing, though unintentional. There are techniques for limiting the problem, and I believe the "wasn't believed practical" to a rather high extent still holds for real purposes. I may be proven wrong.
This is nothing but FUD. Please keep your mind at least somewhat as open as you claim you want your source to be.
Rumours of this kind are usually based on decisions regarding systems used for administration, and they consitute a minority of all workstations.
The same is even true for most larger companies. I'm currently with a big well-known Swedish firm that has previously taken strategic decisions to be "all MS", and sure I have a Windows laptop which I usually read email on. Only, I haven't bothered to start it since the harddrive broke down and the support staff replaced it. All real work is done on a Sparc Solaris and an AMD SuSE Linux workstation. In fact, our unit does not even use Word, but Framemaker for technical documentation, but that is not popular at all with our IT management.
The world is not black or white.