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Now more than ever a degree is less important to a career in IT. If it is important at a later date there are increasingly non traditional options like WGU to get a degree.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:19
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lampey posted:Now more than ever a degree is less important to a career in IT. If it is important at a later date there are increasingly non traditional options like WGU to get a degree.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:29
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lampey posted:Now more than ever a degree is less important to a career in IT. If it is important at a later date there are increasingly non traditional options like WGU to get a degree. Having a degree only getting more important in every other field in the world, why would you think that IT is the exception? Going back to school and getting a degree when you're settled in to work life is a lot less appealing than doing it when you're young and relatively free from other responsibilities.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:50
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NippleFloss posted:Having a degree only getting more important in every other field in the world, why would you think that IT is the exception? Going back to school and getting a degree when you're settled in to work life is a lot less appealing than doing it when you're young and relatively free from other responsibilities. It's true that your odds in many technology jobs are better than they would be in other professions, if you're coming at them without any kind of degree at all. If someone finds themselves in this position, the questions he or she needs to ask are:
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Aug 15, 2014 07:02
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Misogynist posted:There are certain areas where that's true. For example, the technology industry has a much healthier startup scene (quantitatively, anyway) than a majority of other fields, and most of these companies tend to be looking for young, doe-eyed professionals who fit their countercultural ideals. Software development as a profession has tended to lean heavily towards self-taught programmers, partly because many computer science curricula haven't been updated since Fred Brooks wrote 30 years ago about building one to throw away. Entry-level helpdesk positions tend not to have degree requirements because they're aimed at people in their late teens and early twenties, which confuses some people into thinking that degrees aren't useful in a desktop support or sysadmin track. My problem was with the assertion that it's *less* important than ever to have a degree in IT. It's less important than in many other fields, certainly, but just like everywhere else the large number of people graduating from college every year is raising the bar for entry level jobs to the point that many that once didn't require, or at least strongly prefer a degree, now do. HR departments will almost always prefer someone with a degree to someone without, all other things being equal, and the number of people entering the workforce with degrees is only getting larger. Having some experience or coding projects to your name is useful, but if you're going up against people who have those things and also a 4 year degree your resume is getting moved to the bottom of the pile.
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Aug 15, 2014 07:15
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lampey posted:Now more than ever a degree is less important to a career in IT. If it is important at a later date there are increasingly non traditional options like WGU to get a degree. The increasing availability of nontraditional options makes it more important, not less, as the number of people you're competing against who have degrees goes up proportionally. The industry's legacy of "no degree, no problem as long as you can do the job" stems from the relative newness of the field and the tendency of early professionals to come from other specializations as the "computer person" who's now managing the business' VAX and math/physics majors learning how to code to run computations. When pretty much anyone can get a degree these days, stagnating wages, and a glut of unemployed degreed people, what's an employer's incentive to hire entry level people without them? To pay you wages on par? There are people in these threads all the time asking for advice switching to IT. Why hire a high school grad or dropout when someone with a degree will do it for the same price? It has never been more important, and it's only going to keep getting more so. There will always be exceptions, but the industry is changing. And, as noted, it's better to do it while you're young than to wait until you need it and you're trying to juggle other obligations while you try to finish a multi-year program so you can get on with your life and your career. Even the nontraditional options take years as a best-case. Do you want to wait until it's "important"?
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Aug 15, 2014 07:17
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More Anecdotal evidence here: Did College/Uni for 2 years to get a degree (Network Security specifically, CCNA/CCNP level stuff with some Coding/Databases/Linux units) but quit half way though when I got a NOC job as I was learning heaps more and getting paid for it. I think certs / experience are worth more than degrees for technical stuff, as what you learn in a degree gets outdated pretty quickly by new tech, but you need to refresh your cert(s) every 2 years (although these days it's so easy to braindump it, so I place little value on certs now as well). I've found it's easiest to tell someone's tech knowledge in an Interview, no matter what certs / experience / degrees they have. Even better if you get a lab setup with a 30-60 minute exercise and see how they perform configuring things from scratch (we had a 3 router 1 switch setup and asked them to configure VLANs, EIGRP, a GRE tunnel and some access-lists, etc.). If you know your poo poo and can get in the door, it should be easy enough to convince them you're the man for the job. hanyolo fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 08:16
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Tab8715 posted:Has anyone without a degree hit any stumbling blocks? Or actually have been denied a position because they didn't have a degree? The one large company I worked for pretty much had a cap for advancement for me without a degree. Granted that cap would have been director and the pay would have been pretty decent but I wasn't quite ready to settle. Even today I wish I had a 4 year degree.
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Aug 15, 2014 08:48
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I declined the opportunity to go to university due to not wanting to go into debt and not being really interested in the uni lifestyle, but I was still able to get an apprenticeship... though I admittedly did spend two years unemployed or volunteering before that. Still, I think the certs and the knowledge gained will be more useful to me in future than the degree would be, though I now kind of regret missing out on the life experience. v v C'est la vie.
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Aug 15, 2014 09:17
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Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write.
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Aug 15, 2014 11:14
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hanyolo posted:I've found it's easiest to tell someone's tech knowledge in an Interview, no matter what certs / experience / degrees they have. Even better if you get a lab setup with a 30-60 minute exercise and see how they perform configuring things from scratch (we had a 3 router 1 switch setup and asked them to configure VLANs, EIGRP, a GRE tunnel and some access-lists, etc.). If you know your poo poo and can get in the door, it should be easy enough to convince them you're the man for the job. Unfortunately demonstrating your tech knowledge is only one part of getting hired. I agree with everything you're saying about how to determine a candidate's competence. But there are people who are involved in the hiring process that will automatically veto anyone without a certain level of degree. It has nothing to do with your competence, it's just a personal bias that you have to deal with. Even if they don't automatically reject all non-degree candidates, if they have two very similar finalists that both know their poo poo and both are perfect for the job, but one has a degree and the other does not, who do you think will be chosen? Obviously this doesn't apply to all jobs - I doubt most Tier 1 helpdesk positions require a degree. But hell, that just supports my point - if all a degree lets you do is jump past Tier 1 helpdesk, might that alone be worth it? The debt involved in getting a degree is a major problem, and it's something you have to weigh in your decision making. Just realize that you will have fewer opportunities without one, and while that may not leave you unemployed, it lowers the likelihood that you will find that dream job. psydude posted:Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write. Perhaps not worth crushing yourself with debt for a third of your life on its own, but I can certainly get behind this point. This industry is reliant on the precise transmission of correct information, and that includes between your peers. Please make it easier to work with you by being able to construct a readable sentence.
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Aug 15, 2014 12:06
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Well, you don't need to go to Middlebury; even if you don't want to get a full degree, taking several courses in expository writing and argument construction at your local community college will pay dividends in the long run. There's a massive backlash against traditional secondary education right now, which I think is driven partly by the ridiculous student loan debt, partly by far-right forces that see it as an easy way to appeal to the uneducated (see: Rick Santorum), and partly by the success of college dropouts (many of whom come from white upper middle-class families, but people tend to gloss over that) in the software world. I still think it's a great idea, even in IT, so long as you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how you plan on paying for it. These issues may not be resolved until further in your career.
psydude fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 12:20
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The past conversation is excellent and but I do not want have to go back to college  Not sure how the rest of the thread feels but an Associate's from a reputable Community College (not some random online one) will put you a good position without mountains of debt.
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Aug 15, 2014 14:22
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psydude posted:Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write. This is really true, but I will say this as a person with a BA from a very well-respected school: Do not go to college just to go. Know what you want to major in, and why, and what you're going to do with it after. Otherwise you'll end up spending 5+ years burning money.
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Aug 15, 2014 14:23
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If you could borrow money for college at a reasonable interest rate, it would be a no-brainer. At 6.8%, you really do have to run the numbers because it starts becoming more of an investment than an education. I was lucky enough to have my parents help pay for college, and I don't know where I'd be without it. I graduated in December 2012, got my A+ the same month, a temp job in desktop support that week, (and was told I wouldn't have gotten the job without my BS), a full time offer in July '13, promoted to Sys Admin by November, now I'm on the fast track to IT manager. At no point has my employer praised my technical skills (I don't think anyone knows what I do), but they fall over themselves about my writing, productivity, and project management. I wouldn't have any of those "soft skills" without college, and I probably wouldn't have developed them working on help desk for the same amount of time.
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Aug 15, 2014 14:46
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psydude posted:Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write. Hell yeah. One vendor engineer we had a meeting with apparently quote a book on the subject. He wrote me an email the next day with so many typos and grammatical errors it was ridiculous. He seriously mis-used "your". Apparently his book is pretty terrible too. But hey, he wrote a book 
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Aug 15, 2014 15:46
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Our "guy who wrote a book" showed up wearing the same shirt for his first week and kept asking questions about networking that he himself wrote about. It was like he killed the original author, hid him in his walls, and stole his identity. Lasted a week.
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Aug 15, 2014 15:55
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Hey Guys, OK...you are right, there's always better to have a degree than not have one; unfortunately when i was in the second year of college my parents told me that they can't support me anymore and not with the taxes that i paid myself but with keeping me in their house and feeding me. So obviously i had to go to work and i had to freeze school. I began to work as a helper for a warehouse keeper, loading and unloading trucks manually for the minimum wage, from there i began my ascension moving first to a warehouse keeper after the guy left the company and finally after 7 long and painful years i was promoted to regional sales director in that company, but after a while i realized that i wasn't in the right place, i wasn't doing what i liked, i wasn't passionate about it and i dreaded every day going to work. I was always passionate about IT, the first day that i got my first computer (again a bank loan) even if it had the warranty sticker on it i opened the case and i took out all the components to see how they look. So when i realized that I'm not in the right place i decided to quit and i took a job as a junior help-desk analyst for a 50 top Forbes company after a hellish screening process. The hours were awful and i was working 9 hours out of 8 but i felt that i was in the right place, i was happy, i was doing what i was passionate about. From there trough hard work and some luck i guess i was promoted to senior analyst, after to duty manager, major incident manager, quality assurance and finally reporting. In all this time i wasn't asked about a degree, i didn't confront with the lack of a degree, maybe I'm an exception or maybe i was just lucky and I'm not excluding the possibility of going back to school as now i can do it but anyway...if i would have the choice again i would stay in school. Now it's your choice.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:02
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georgesil posted:Hey Guys, psydude posted:Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:12
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If you actually apply yourself at it, university teaches you many valuable skills aside from just your field. Writing, research, critical thinking, time management, having a 4 year degree tells an employer a lot about you and makes you a more attractive option compared to someone relatively equal who also applied without a degree.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:16
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 I have had every interviewer ask why college isn't on my resume but it hasn't stopped me from getting engineering jobs. Management would be a problem but I don't really desire to go that route since I want my business to be full-time once I build up my contacts enough. I have like 30 credits at a state school, one recruiter said that should be on my resume but that doesn't seem like a good idea.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:18
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If my writing is not to your liking i have to specify that English is not my first language and what i wrote, i wrote for people to extrapolate an idea, also is easy for the ones that don't write to judge the ones who do. Ta!
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Aug 15, 2014 16:24
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Can't learn nothin' in school they don't teach you on the street.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:30
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Sepist posted:I have like 30 credits at a state school, one recruiter said that should be on my resume but that doesn't seem like a good idea. Yeah I wouldn't bother even listing that. If anything people would think that you tried and gave up/couldn't play well in structured environment/whatever.
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Aug 15, 2014 16:41
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Tab8715 posted:Has anyone without a degree hit any stumbling blocks? Or actually have been denied a position because they didn't have a degree? I haven't had any problems, but as evol262 alluded to, if you ever want to have a title with "Director" in it at a big/old company, a bachelor's is a non-negotiable requirement. Generally speaking, the east coast is a bit stiffer and more old fashioned than the west coast (in the US) and if you're looking to stay "pure tech" and shoot for principal engineering type roles then you can get there without a degree, but a degree certainly is not going to hurt you regardless of what you want to do. If you think you might ever want to be upper management, you should get a degree. Edit: also I guess if the distinction is important to you, I work in infrastructure/ops and I've never worked internal IT, so I can't speak to the ecosystem there at all. I just do the linux. Comradephate fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 16:55
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What's the difference between internal IT and Ops? Sounds the same to me...
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Aug 15, 2014 17:09
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Tab8715 posted:What's the difference between internal IT and Ops? I work with/on the infrastructure for the website (I work at a company whose product is a website) while internal IT maintains the VPN, workstations, office network, email, printers, etc. My "users" are software engineers and I don't know a single thing about printers, basically.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:16
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Tab8715 posted:What's the difference between internal IT and Ops?
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Aug 15, 2014 17:16
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At any tech company whose primary presence is online (Facebook, Twitter, any startup with an app that is going to ~change the world~, mobile games, etc.) is going to have infra/ops be separate from IT.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:20
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Comradephate posted:At any tech company whose primary presence is online (Facebook, Twitter, any startup with an app that is going to ~change the world~, mobile games, etc.) is going to have infra/ops be separate from IT. This. "Ops" exists in companies providing a service that is large or complex enough that it gets its own dedicated system and network admins who don't have time to manage AD, printers, Exchange etc. Those folks are often called "internal IT" or "corporate IT" or something along those lines.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:24
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We were having the degree conversation over lunch last week, and the consensus (IT Director, two managers, architect, and I) agreed that while a degree is not required, it definitely is preferred. The primary reason is that a 4 year degree is a huge commitment monetarily and to finishing what you start. There is a reason that only 20% of people who start at a community college ever attain a degree: it is not a cake walk, and college isn't for everyone. What you studied isn't as important as the 'soft skills' others are mentioning, such as writing, planning, time management, drawings (Visio/CAD), and working with others on a project. You can certainly gain those skills from outside of higher ed, but they are built into a graduate at some level, which is why you see that strong preference for the degree from HR and hiring managers. If you have a technical degree, then you have another level of applicable knowledge and skills like troubleshooting, design, and underlying knowledge of how technology works depending on the your specialty. My BS was in Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology, but was really more just EE than anything computer related, which was mostly circuit design, build-out, and troubleshooting more than it was any kind of computer architecture or performance. However, the biggest takeaways I have from undergrad in my daily job of Senior Systems Engineer in IT is ability to look at a complex system and break it down in to components to test and find the problem. That coupled with knowing how the components of a system actually work together (or don't in some cases) gives me huge advantage over those without that skill. I am certainly not doing any circuit analysis, but my technical writing skills are beyond anyone else here because of the sheer amount of it I did for my BS. As for my graduate degree, I chose to do it in Communication in a program designed to be alternative MBA with more of a focus on leadership and supervision. Of course I was working for the university at the time and they footed half the bill, but getting an advanced degree in engineering wouldn't provide me anything extra in my career anyway, and I wanted to build my soft skills and be more than the angry anti-social engineer, which my graduate program helped me with in spades. tl;dr Getting a degree is more than a piece of paper, and in today's market, you will pretty much have to have one to get anywhere other than entry level. mayodreams fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 17:28
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mayodreams posted:The primary reason is that a 4 year degree is a huge commitment monetarily and to starting what you finish. Anecdotally, I've heard that Google actually looks at incomplete degrees in a more negative light than no degree for this reason - they want you to demonstrate that you can finish what you start. I personally know two people who I would consider solid candidates who were told to finish their degree and then apply again, but I also know people with no degree who hold similar roles to the jobs being interviewed for.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:32
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Comradephate posted:Anecdotally, I've heard that Google actually looks at incomplete degrees in a more negative light than no degree for this reason - they want you to demonstrate that you can finish what you start. A lot a major companies will flat-out refuse to hire anyone with "water-downed" degrees - DeVry,University of Phoenix, etc
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Aug 15, 2014 17:36
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Comradephate posted:Anecdotally, I've heard that Google actually looks at incomplete degrees in a more negative light than no degree for this reason - they want you to demonstrate that you can finish what you start. Absolutely, I would too, same as like Tab8715 said, degrees from online or sketchy or watered down places. The advantage and gain from a degree isn't from the technical skills you learn, it's the "soft skills".
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Aug 15, 2014 17:37
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Comradephate posted:Anecdotally, I've heard that Google actually looks at incomplete degrees in a more negative light than no degree for this reason - they want you to demonstrate that you can finish what you start. Thanks for pointing out that I worded that wrong.  That's what I get for effort posting with a lot of crap going on today.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:50
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hanyolo posted:I think certs / experience are worth more than degrees for technical stuff, as what you learn in a degree gets outdated pretty quickly by new tech, but you need to refresh your cert(s) every 2 years (although these days it's so easy to braindump it, so I place little value on certs now as well). This kind of got glossed over. If you're investing 4 years of time and money in a bachelor's to learn how to configure a Cisco switch or administrate Active Directory or any other concrete "this is you use this specific piece of tech" skill, you're doing it wrong. Likewise, you don't get a BS in CS to learn to program in Java. You get it to learn algorithms and data structures and logic and math so that you can program well in any language your job may demand. As 5 other people have said, it's about learning fundamental principles which will still apply 30 years from now. As well as all of the soft skills. If you want to learn those specific, concrete skills then save yourself 3.8 years and a heap of money and just buy a CCNA study guide. Certs aren't an alternative to a college degree, and vice versa. They're complimentary.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:51
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I'm in way over my head here at my new job and have a quick question I hope someone could help me with. The IT department created 10 VMs for a project I've been assigned. My workstation is running Windows 7, as is all the VMs. Instead of using the graphical remote desktop tool that is packaged with Windows 7 and controlling a VM through the GUI, how do I just connect to the VM through a terminal? What I'm trying to accomplish is to log into the 10 VMs and schedule a program to execute at a specific time. The only way I know to do it is use the remote desktop tool -> connect to VM -> go into the VMs control panel -> use task scheduler -> disconnect. Then repeat that for the 9 other VMs.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:07
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Hughmoris posted:What I'm trying to accomplish is to log into the 10 VMs and schedule a program to execute at a specific time. The only way I know to do it is use the remote desktop tool -> connect to VM -> go into the VMs control panel -> use task scheduler -> disconnect. Then repeat that for the 9 other VMs. For example: code:Look into Powershell too, I recommend.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:13
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College can also be great just making connections with people, and the school will have a job department to help you find work. I also had to do quite a few group projects so you learn about working with other people (some of who may be annoying control freaks). I started out as Comp Sci but took a break for a while in the middle of college to pursue a job. That didn't last and the company folded. At that point I didn't have a lot of experience so it was hard to find a job without the degree. So I went back and got a BS in IT. Which may sound like BullShIT, but it was computer science degree without as much of a focus on being a programmer. Most of the curriculum overlapped (pretty much the entire first year was the same). Anyway, its still what you make of it. There are people that take classes and do what they need to do to get good grades without really understanding how all the pieces fit together and don't have a passion for it. There are also people that do things as a hobby and have an actual interest in everything but never went through the degree and they end up doing fine. Those kind of people are less common these days though, and you no longer have to know anything about how a computer works to use one. In sumary: If you can go to college do it, and try to find a part time job and get into the market before you graduate so it will be easier afterwards. If you aren't going to college at least show some initiative, start your own projects, look for ways to help improve where you work now Otherwise just get a cert and become a boring robot person that doesn't think about what is going on and just does "IT" for the money.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:14
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CLAM DOWN posted:For example: The Task Scheduler gui can also connect to the Task Scheduler on a remote computer, you just right click on where it says "Task Scheduler (Local) and put in the name of the computer. Not sure what kind of firewall access that requires though.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:16
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