Top Established and Emerging Tech Companies Prefer To Hire Highly Educated Candidates, Not Dropouts (cnbc.com) 267
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.
Is This News? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Is This News? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is This News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been in college, and a masters degree. I have seen most dropouts are not from being too good for school, but usually due to poor time management skills, or separation anxieties from their home.
Both are not really good attributes for an employee.
The popular Dropouts were actually more then good enough to pass college. But they chose to start their own company, not drop out and try to get employed.
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This is definitely not true. Where I work we have a few senior devs who dropped out, I don't know the reasons why but they are good at their jobs. Another moved on to Google of all places. Not sure what % of people there don't have a degree but he was head-hunted so if you are good enough even they will hire you without a degree.
Yes probably a large % of ppl in the
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Quite likely those people dropped out because they got a job offer and have kept employment for a long duration.
Those are really the only kind of dropouts that employers may overloo
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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
A degree is about ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A degree is about ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not only that, but it is entirely different to drop out and start your own company than it is drop out and look for a "normal" job. Basically:
The point is that either way someone has to roll the dice on you (that is even true for someone who graduated, though the uncertainty tends to be less) their willingness to do so (either invest in your startup idea or hire you as a dropout) is almost entirely dependent on your ability to articulate the value that you bring to the table. That is decidedly difficult to do with a startup, but if you hustle you can start building up your track record with demos of your idea/product, early sales, etc. I would argue that it is much harder as a dropout to build the sort of track record that will convince someone to take a chance on you. I mean, the guy with the start offers investors the possibility of making enormous returns on their investment (if the idea survives). The dropout looking for a job offers the employer the possibility of doing pretty much what is expected of any employee, of which there are many prospective candidates, lots of whom have finished their degrees.
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drop out to land a regular job -> that says "I can't be bothered to finish my formal education (the reason itself is unimportant, though some people have legitimately good reasons for dropping out) and now I want to come work for you" (most sensible hiring managers would look at that and ask "well, what else are you going to leave only half done?")
Depends on the type of job... a lot of hiring managers are trying to avoid people with too much education / experience / ambitions who'll jump ship as soon as the opportunity arises. If you've kinda hit your ceiling already I think you can convince a manager you want a decent job and steady paycheck that's not rocket science and usually they have some work like that. But then you're not really the kind of person you'd see in start-ups or high-end positions, more the kind of guy who knows how to make the TPS
Re:A degree is about ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The larger problem is that the signaling value of a degree has come to greatly outweigh the vocational value of the education it represents to the point that the education has become nearly irrelevant, rendering it merely a signaling device.
We're literally requiring many people to spend thousands of dollars learning irrelevant information just to show that they're willing to do it. It's almost like an introduction to corporate insanity, where they will take jobs that require relentless volumes of busy work (TPS reports, say) for no apparent purpose.
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Re:Let's stop giving this turd frosting (Score:4, Insightful)
You are made to think the way that your betters believe that you should think
You are severely misinformed, at least for courses of study like computer science. In such a program you learn as much from your peers and from self study as you do from your professors. I also had little problem arguing with my professors about something. They in fact seemed to enjoy a student do so rather than just repeat back to them the book or the lecture.
A degree has nothing to do with intelligence and not even much to do with persistence.
No one claimed a degree is some exclusive evidence of intelligence. What it is evidence of is a broad comprehensive body of relevant knowledge, again speaking from a computer science type of perspective. People going the self-taught route exclusively often have gaps. Topics they did not study since they were not interested and/or mistakenly thought unimportant. For example aspiring video game programmers who spent little to no time studying data structures.
Regarding persistence, it absolutely demonstrates the ability to complete a multi-year project filled with things you have no inner passion for.
You'll make it through as long as you can pay the bill and show up occasionally
And get weeded out in job interviews. Its why even those with degrees are subject to the various programming "tests" as part of the interview process.
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Yes, explain "truth" to someone seeing both sides (Score:3)
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 se
Re:30+ years in industry, CS degree within last 5y (Score:4, Interesting)
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Cynicism is the first rationalization of a failure.
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I certainly wouldn't comment without having experienced the system.
Experiencing the system 25 years into a career can be quite different than experiencing the system 5 years into a career. At that later stage in life did you have the free time to take advantage of all the outside-the-classroom opportunities to learn? Even though I was working 25-30 hours a week I was in my 20s so I had plenty of time to work with peers (fellow students) on personal projects, plenty of time to get access to some lab/workstation for no reason other than telling a professor I am curious about
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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.
Then again, there are those of us who never went. I finished what I started in the military, then taught myself to program on the job.
There are a small number of "tech" jobs that benefit from certain specialized degrees. (Most tech jobs, meh.)
A generic degree requirement proves little, other than your ability to spend someone else's money for years.
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Re:A degree is about ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, but that's a substantial minority...
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Might there be a third category besides those who went to college and dropped out and those who completed? Hint: Begins with "auto" and ends with "didactic"
Self taught individuals often have gaps in their knowledge. They passed on learning about something they have little to no inherent interest in. Over several decades I've worked with many self taught individuals doing software development that I'd be happy to work with again, but only two had the personal motivation and discipline to read and learn the equivalent of a traditional CS/CE/etc coarse of study. And of course I've seen graduates that are pretty damn clueless and useless. However, overall, formal
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Each will have gaps. The difference is that the autodidactic fills them on demand while the one requiring hand-holding is simply standing there with his limp dock in his hand.
You failed to note that the university trained also do a lot of independent study, they too do a lot of learning without any hand holding, at least for CS and related programs. Plus the gaps are less likely to be in more critical areas, data structures and algorithms come to mind. There are many self-taught aspiring game programmers who apply for a job at a game studio and are surprised that the screening test/questions have a lot to do with data structures and algorithms and not so much with Direct3D or Op
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Yes, I rember when I first learned what pointers were: "Oh ... so that's what they call what I've been doing with indirect indexesd addressing. Pointer arrays." Then I found out about Yourdain & Constantine. Sorry, all that information is available much more so now than then, and it didn't even hold me back then.
And I read Knuth for fun in my drop-out days. Availability is not the issue. The issue is that many self-taught pass on available info that seems uninteresting to them, or in their erroneous belief not relevant to them. A curated list of topics to study will most likely provide a person with a better base than what *appears* to relevant to their personal interests.
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The point you are missing is that going the University route is additive, it adds to what you would have done on your own.
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The fact that you believe code lives in a vacuum ... res ipso loquitor.
Sorry, no one claimed that code lives in a vacuum. All that is claimed is that (1) some things are left as an exercise for the student, OS configuration, integrated development environments, the fashionable programming language of the day, etc. All these are things students are expected to learn as needed on their own time. University time is better spent on things more persistent such as data structures and algorithms. The students can apply the concepts of this topic to whatever language they use, whateve
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I can tell you from experience degreed CS individuals also have gaps in their knowledge - so don't go there.
Its not the existence of gaps, its what those specific gaps are. CS individuals are less likely to have gaps in common important areas. For example, many self-taught programmers aspiring to game development crash and burn when they apply at a game studio due to a limited understanding of data structure and algorithms.
Today there are plenty of on-line training opportunities to supplement any self study. So, opportunities to 'self teach' isn't just limited to reading computer magazines.
No one said it is. Anything you are doing on your own outside of coursework or the job is self study. And University students have a lot of time for self study. Their University coursework adds
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I personally find that a degree is about a sense of entitlement that has absolutely nothing to do with job skills.
As someone who has done the self-study route, the drop-out route when a commercial opportunity presented itself, the working in the industry route ... I found that going back and finishing the degree (while working) was beneficial with respect to job skills.
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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.
How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, Peter Thiel is encouraging (paying) students to drop out of college...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Nursing (Score:2)
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
That would work great if the economy (Score:2)
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
Yeah, no shit (Score:2)
It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts
No it doesn't.
Debt Slaves (Score:4, Interesting)
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Reality: companies want pre-trained worker bees (Score:2)
but at the same time bypass trade / tech schools (Score:2)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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 p
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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?"?
Why 'A' Students Work for 'C' Students... (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
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That's just a retelling of the Hammerstein-Equord quote
Not quite the same thing. A students are specialists who know how to solve problems in a specific way. C students are generalists who are open to solving problems in different ways. Entrepreneurs should always be generalists who hire specialists to perform specific job functions.
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That sounds more like wishful thinking than an actual rule.
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It seems that Kiyosaki has been thoroughly discredited as a liar and scam artist. Your thoughts?
https://johntreed.com/blogs/jo... [johntreed.com]
https://johntreed.com/blogs/jo... [johntreed.com]
https://johntreed.com/blogs/jo... [johntreed.com]
https://johntreed.com/blogs/jo... [johntreed.com]
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It seems that Kiyosaki has been thoroughly discredited as a liar and scam artist. Your thoughts?
Like the parables in the Bible, taken with a grain of salt.
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You lying, self-deceiving piece of horseshit.
Not sure why you keep harping on this. Your comments don't hurt me, doesn't change what I'm doing or planning to do, and I'll forget about you the moment I hit the submit button.
Duh! (Score:2)
Sure they don't hire dropouts, those who do the hiring _are_ the dropouts, they _own_ the company.
Google wants PhDs (Score:3)
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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.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, and interview people for software engineering positions at Google, but what I'm going to say represents only my own perspective and is in no way an official company statement.
The irony you see doesn't actually exist. Outside of research positions (of which there are quite a few, and those really do require research credentials), Google does not care about your degrees or lack thereof. Many of my co-workers do have PhDs. A majority have master's degrees. But there are plenty
and doctorate degree is not for IT help desk or sy (Score:2)
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.
Still the most basic filter there is (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
These are not the drop outs you are looking for... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Require, or requests? (Score:2)
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?
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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
we need to end student loans and have more trades (Score:2)
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.
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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 wel
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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
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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.
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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%20Mana [ucsc-extension.edu]
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You should hire creimer to clean out your storage closets [...]
Have some Spam with Bacon [amzn.to] for your whine.
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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.
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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 [pmi.org]
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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 requireme
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 t
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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.
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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 liv
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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 [nber.org] 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
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[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 wen
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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 love
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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 hear
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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 everyon
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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.
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It taught me to punch cards. Does that count?
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As someone who was self taught then went for a full degree, I found both to be useful.
When I was self taught, I know how to code, and what the commands to, after getting the degree, (perhaps I got good professors as well) I learned how the commands worked. Building my confidence in looking at the data, and going beyond what the API does, but being able to extent or trick the API to do what I would need it to do.
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While I was working on my degree, I was working as a developer. My biggest problem was my maturity in my late teens, my world view had what was right and what was wrong, I needed to get over myself to write the application in FoxPro and not try to get the company to move to Linux and C. I needed to realize the the speed of the application, isn't always the best thing, if you can get the project done quicker. I was far more rude and brash quick to offer my opinions and slow to listen to the alternatives.
T
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From someone who has been reading /. (Score:2)