The Danger of Picking a Major Based On Where the Jobs Are 306
theodp writes: In his new book Will College Pay Off?, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree's usefulness is risky, especially since one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be. "A few generations ago," notes Cappelli, "the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they'd get different skills. They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That's a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can't get the people they need, but it's pretty obvious why that's not happening." On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught. In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what's happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that's about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way." One wonders what Cappelli might think of San Francisco's recent decision to pick a preschool curriculum based on where today's tech jobs are, echoing President Obama's tech industry-nurtured belief that "what you want to do is introduce this [coding] with the ABCs and the colors."
They just want people that can BS through the day. (Score:2, Insightful)
Most corporations are so badly run that well educated employees only make everyone else look bad.
Re: They just want people that can BS through the (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to wonder why I was always being singled out at work and that's it. Simply being smarter is an issue even if you're not being condescending.
Also it's impossible to get your resume seen for decent jobs unless it's exactly what they want. Which doesn't happen unless you lie or have extremely low standards.
Re: They just want people that can BS through the (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why people think the "getting stuffed in a locker" treatment stops in high school. Nobody likes a smart ass because you make everyone feel/look inferior by comparison.
Solution: only "shine bright" when alone with your direct supervisor. They move up->they take you with them. You don't want to upstage your coworkers publicly, and you definitely don't want to upstage your supervisor. Further, to avoid your coworkers becoming jealous of your upwards mobility you must tithe/pay tribute by helping them do their jobs better/hooking them up with concert tickets/introducing them to women/etc.
If you want to be successful, you need to be popular with upper management. If you want to STAY popular with upper management, you have to make the plebes love you. There are plenty of meaningless ways to achieve that without pissing off upper management in the process. Find people's "pain" and make yourself essential to making it go away.
Office Work is 2/3rds politics, 1/3 actual work(and I'm not so sure about the "actual work").
In terms of resumes: if you're getting your resume to HR via the official channels then you're doing it wrong. Those channels are for the appearance of fairness. They're almost universally written around a candidate they already want to hire, but still have to list the position for the sake of compliance.
I'm not telling you where I go fishing when I want to eat, but it sure as hell isn't the "help wanted" section.
Re: They just want people that can BS through the (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you found something that works for you in whatever hideous corporate workplaces you've decided you want to work in, but if you're so smart you would have left employment per se a long time ago, just for the tax relief, or found a nice startup to work in where you got to work instead of play office politics. But you didn't because you love office politics, that's why you spend 2/3 of your time focusing on it and you don't even bother working the other 1/3 by your own admission. You are the problem with office politics that people are going to run into. Please do tell us where you go fishing, so we can avoid that particular lake.
Re: They just want people that can BS through the (Score:4, Insightful)
There's more to being your own boss than "just being smart". A lot of people are simply more specialized than that. That's a benefit from living in society. You don't have to do everything yourself.
This isn't the stone age.
Although you can minimize the politics somewhat by working for a smaller company where they don't have the luxury of putting up with any dead weight. Silicon Valley is probably great in that regard.
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"I don't know why people think the "getting stuffed in a locker" treatment stops in high school."
It never happened to me. Probably because I was over 6 ft tall in HS and worked out (though I loathed team sports, the coaches were jerks) and knew how to be smart without making people angry. It was even remarked once , "He's smart but he doesn't rub your nose in it", which I took as a compliment.
That and when I was a Freshman I snapped after being hazed a while so I took a bully, a Sophmore, and stuffed *him*
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At least some of those with the laundry list of required skills as long as your arm are not really job postings, but a company going through the motions of trying to hire domestic workers before they whine about not enough H1-Bs to fill positions that they can't find Americans to do. That job description is custom tailored to the H1-B they want to hire. Nobody has the exact same skillset as someone else, so of course they won't find anyone that EXACTLY matches that list of skills. So they get their H1-B
Other reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Other reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you can get a degree in something you like... but it could be in a field where there aren't many jobs or the jobs don't pay all that well. So then you have to find a job that you hate and work in it because there is no work in what you "really" wanted to do in life. Either way we don't win :(
Re:Other reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Get the most stable job of all. Professional Assassin. Because as long as there are three people left in this world, one of them will want the other guy dead.
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If you study something you do not like, you are most likely not very good at it. So you won't get a lot of money. Maybe you get even laid off and have to find a job somewhere else. Furthermore, going to university is NOT about getting trained for a specific job. You are trained (hopefully) in scientific and critical thinking, working self-controlled, and be able to solve problems on your own. there is no big difference between the sciences and most arts. Only the method set is different. Most CS majors do n
Re:Other reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days employers used to look at a degree not as a skill directly relevant to the job, but as a sign that the person could study on their own and learn to do the job to a high standard. My mum has a degree in Latin. A dead language with almost zero commercial value. Didn't matter, employers were happy to provide training. Oh, and education was free back then anyway, so no debt.
Nowadays employers are too cheap to provide training, they want people who have the skills they need right out of university. That's an unrealistic expectation. Rather than be granted permission to get an H1B visa applicant they should be required to train someone. At the very least set up an apprenticeship for every H1B. That has been suggested in the UK, every imported worker must be matched by an apprenticeship for a UK citizen.
Re:Other reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be surprised when the town's Philosophy Factory shuts down and there aren't any Philosophy jobs to be had.
Re:Other reasons (Score:4, Funny)
If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.
-- Steve Martin
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Fifty years at the same job? Not it the world that we live in...
And one reason why the employers don't want to train is that there isn't time...the time-to-market requirements are so short these days.
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The mind boggling selfishness on display. Seriously the majority of people do jobs they dislike because the majority of jobs suck and as a bonus sucky jobs also pay shit because a minority of self serving arse holes specifically set it up that way, so they can profit off other people doing those shit jobs (sure maids love beings maids and waitresses love being waitresses and soldiers love being shot at and garbage persons love garbage and production line workers love pretending to be machines and exactly w
Re:Other reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like the biggest reason not to pick your career based on the economy is this: you'll probably won't like the job. So, instead of doing something you enjoy, you get to spend 50 years doing a job you hate.
Now, if you guessed right, maybe you'll hate your job, but at least make some money. But if you guessed wrong - you'll have huge student loans to pay, and a lifetime of misery, all because you' placed money above your happiness.
Beats no job at all and living with your parents when done.
Shoot. I graduated in 2009. 13/hrs was considered GOOD for recent graduates!
I was an older student who went to work 1st and went to college later and my HS classmates were class of 2000. Wow, what a change these younger millenials have no clue what life would be like if they were born 10 years earlier. If any reader graduated in 1970 - 2001 you know nothing what it is like to today and the kind of crappy jobs and low wages await someone with no experience here in 2015. For the younger slashdotters reading this did you know back in the good old days you could make up to $40,000 a year as en entry level salary? No really. You did not need 5 years experience and a major in the right area for an entry level job. You started at $40,000 if you had a degree in anything business. medical, or science related back then. Today these older folks say major in what you like?
For the older slashdotters it is 2015 and having a job you hate for 40 years is better than moving in with your parents and working at Walmart with your art degree while your phone rings from debt collectors wanting student loan repayment and threatening car repossessions. Which is where many if not half of new recent college grads end up shockingly. Of course graduating in 2009 was the worst in 70 years but it shocked me as my friends who made it big all started in 2000 and are now frankly much more successful as a result. Sigh.
I lucked out as I had a resume and even if I made less money after a degree as I put some career prospects on hold and HR only cares about experience and the degree today is worth toilet paper as you are a dime a dozen and you are marked for life if God forbid you majored in the wrong area or do not already have 3 - 5 years experience before entering the workforce complete with 3 professional references for that golden $40,000 a year job.
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The average starting salary for CS graduates in 2014 is $60,000. Engineers are $62,000. The average business graduate is $54,000. So sorry, you are completely wrong.
Re:Other reasons (Score:4, Interesting)
What I suspect is confusing the parent poster (and I agree with you that they are completely wrong) is that these days, with the
'everyone has the god given right to a university degree!' mentality, people are getting degrees in all sorts of complete crap, and
when you add alongside that the fact that universities have worked out they make money by turning over the maximum number
of students (hence it is in their advantage to make it as easy as absolutely possible to graduate) what we end up with is a huge
devaluing of the average value of a degree.
Once upon a time having a degree in many areas really meant something, and a bunch of companies WANTED you. Now it means
next to nothing since just about any monkey can get one, hence the employers dont want to pay through the nose just for the
degree, you have to have something else to actually show some value/usefulness/talent.
The AVERAGE starting salary of graduates is therefore hugely eroded, because there are many more lower value graduates now.
The good graduates are damaged by this, but not to the same extent.
The only solution is for society as a whole to get over its 'you are a failure if you dont get a degree' alongside universities operating on
turnover based economics, and we may actually one day see a return to their true purpose (training those more special minds that
need such exposure), and then perhaps technical colleges can also return to what they once did (train the middle ground of practical
workers), and apprenticeships can be seen as the right fit for yet a different set of workers.
But I wouldn't hold your breath, that would take a sensible approach - good luck with that.
So the result is that the value of a 'degree' is reduced, but thats the fault of the universities themselves.
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Re: Other reasons (Score:2)
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The average starting salary for CS graduates in 2014 is $60,000. Engineers are $62,000. The average business graduate is $54,000. So sorry, you are completely wrong.
Ok we are in a bubble right now for 1 major in particular. I was told by folks here to avoid IT as only Indians would do these jobs by now back in 2006.Most of you all were soo wrong.
I majored in business and yes only a few us had jobs that paid $13/hr - $16/hr.
I had experience so I could make just a little more less than 40% of what I used to make pre-Great Recession. Of course in 2015 the labor market is much better than this horrible one I was in back then.
Ask any young slashdotter here who is right on t
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Majoring in what you love without any plan for how to turn it into a revenue stream might be stupid, but so is choosing a major solely for the money. Neither extreme is a good approach. The way I look at it, you have only two good options:
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Re: Other reasons (Score:2)
I was born in '88, currently 26 years of age.
Started my own business while still in highschool. Moved out on my own the summer before Grade 12. Graduated on time in 2006.
After highschool I got a job at a small-time advertising agency doing mostly graphic design and minor IT stuff. I had a feeling business wasn't going so well for the owners, and after 6 months or so, I left and focussed on growing my own business. The ad agency failed shortly after.
A while later my girlfriend (now wife) became pregnant. I j
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I'm glad things worked out for you, but how the fuck did you not learn your lesson about using birth control after the first unintended pregnancy?
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Not that it's really any of your business, my wife was using the birth control pill, and it failed. It happens [io9.com].
With that said, I'm glad we had our second child so close to the first. They are best friends, partners in crime. They get along very well, and will hopefully continue to be close going into the future.
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"You started at $40,000 if you had a degree in anything business. medical, or science related back then."
Simply, bullshit.
I graduated from high school in 1986, college (u of mn) in 1990 with a degree in international relations, with minors in German, geography, and European area studies, all of which at the time were considered desirable (if non specific) subjects. Minimum wage at the time was, iirc $4.25/hr. I started my first career level job in international business (specifically logistics) at $20k. I
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"You started at $40,000 if you had a degree in anything business. medical, or science related back then."
Simply, bullshit.
I graduated from high school in 1986, college (u of mn) in 1990 with a degree in international relations, with minors in German, geography, and European area studies, all of which at the time were considered desirable (if non specific) subjects. Minimum wage at the time was, iirc $4.25/hr. I started my first career level job in international business (specifically logistics) at $20k. I was delighted to make more than my age around age 27-28?
To suggest that $40k jobs were falling like manna is just complete nonsense.
Yep
Ok according to http://www.usinflationcalculat... [usinflatio...ulator.com] $20,000 in 1990 = $36,204.90
FYI inflation is not accurate anymore as it does not cover food, cost, insurance, and higher education costs! So in essence image in 1990 if $20,000 required 5 years of experience to top it off :-)
That my friend is what recent grads have to contend with plus $1,000 a month for a 1 room apartment in most metropolitan areas to top it off which is not counted in inflation
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No, it wasn't like that. After graduating with a CS degree in 1998, the job offer I was planning on taking paid $25K -- or $36K in today's 2015 dollars. I wasn't happy about it, but I was happy to have an offer. At the last minute another offer came through at $35K ($50K in today's dollars), and I was the envy of that year's CS grads for getting the largest job offer. Literally no one received this "started at $40,000" business you're talking about.
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According to usinflationcalculator.com $30,000 in 1998 = $43,545.83 in todays dollars.
Yep sounds accurate and that was during the .com boom too! If you are not in engineering could luck earning that today
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But if you guessed wrong - you'll have huge student loans to pay, and a lifetime of misery, all because you' placed money above your happiness.
I love my country, Finland.
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Picking a major is easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the STEM students that I've met chose their major based on their interests and/or already possessed skills. It seems to me that there are viable career opportunities in all STEM fields. Why worry about your choice of education when you'll develop skills regardless?
Finding any job is a full time job regardless of your major. And you neither entitled nor guaranteed to get a job you'll like.
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University is one, expensive, way to acquire skills and great for long term career prospects. I never did a degree as I wanted to be a businessman with IT skills. That worked out well but in my mid 40s that was over. So
Undergrad doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
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It does and does not in many ways.
Yes years of experience is what counts yada yada, but how do you get them? A HS diploma won't mean much but what is your worth without even that or a GED? It is a rough world in 2015 for new grads compared to 2000 or any other time in US history. A degree in the right area, plus and I mean a big emphasis on plus internships + work experience. Even if you only work sorting files in a cabinet for HR one summer that means a letter of recommendation.
These 2 separate the student
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"Yes years of experience is what counts yada yada, but how do you get them?"
Apprenticeship and trades. Stop trying to take a short cut. your lazy 16 year old ass should have been in an apprenticeship program and you would have came out at age 21 with 5 years of experience as an electrician and making a LOT more than the dolts with a BA just graduating with $80K of debt.
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"Yes years of experience is what counts yada yada, but how do you get them?"
Apprenticeship and trades. Stop trying to take a short cut. your lazy 16 year old ass should have been in an apprenticeship program and you would have came out at age 21 with 5 years of experience as an electrician and making a LOT more than the dolts with a BA just graduating with $80K of debt.
FYI for the record I am not lazy and do make ok money thank you very much.
But my point was apprentice ships seem to be only for college kids. Not for Joe's working at 7-11 trying to better himself to a new life. So the point is if you go to school TAKE them.
Yes I would not be in the IT field if I did not have a degree as my 1st consulting gig. FYI they didn't care if it was IT the client demanded just a bachelors.
Re:Undergrad doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Go read Fareed Zakarias' book ("In Defense of a Liberal Education") and learn how to THINK, to see behind appearances, to adapt and survive. Coding, Systems Analysis, SysAdmin are skills you can acquire. Unless you remain curious (Remember Grace Murray Hopper's slogan, "Born with Curiosity." If you don't know who GMH was, you're grossly undereducated.) you're stuck doing it the way you learned in a text book...which was obsolete by the time you got it.
The other most valuable thing you can do is select your mentors well. Mine are all gone, but Eli Hellerman (at C-E-I-R) was a godsend to me; he not only helped me learn about my chosen profession (at the time of the IBM 1401 and IBM 709), but he gave me a great kickstart on becoming a thinker, and an adult.
Re:Undergrad doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you average? Or below average? Because otherwise your anecdote is just noise in the data.
You failed to graduate a long time ago, where your experience is not relevant to the automated resume filtering in place today. Learn to think is not the lesson.
Learn how the game is played, and play it. Unless you are well above average. Are you average?
Re:Undergrad doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
any degree any college.
Nonsense. Someone with a psychology degree earns a third what someone with a chemical engineering degree earns, and if four times as likely to be unemployed.
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there is something to be said for doing what you "enjoy"
Sure, but what engineering majors end up doing (engineering) is a lot more interesting than what psychology majors end up doing (working at Starbucks).
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Back in the 90s i worked at a company that required a degree in anything to be eligible for any jobs paying salaries instead of hourly. There were liberal arts majors, a couple physical education majors, one elementary education major, and a couple useless for the job degrees i don't remember working in positions not even close to being related to their degrees. It was like the degree was the equivalent of a HS diploma.
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It was like the degree was the equivalent of a HS diploma.
A HS diploma shows that you can get up in the morning and get to class on time. Many employers want your transcripts to see your attendance rather than your grades. Likewise, a degree in psychology, sociology, PE, etc. shows that you got up and went to class for four additional years. But just because they are next to worthless, doesn't mean all degrees are. If you get a degree in hard science, or engineering you have economically useful knowledge and tangible hard skills.
Simple advice (Score:2)
Do what you like and what you are good at.
When i started studying physics, we were tolde that we would be all unemployed. So few people studied that we never have problems in finding a Job....
in the 80's... (Score:4, Insightful)
...the push was to get us high achool blank slates into engineering, at least in Washington state. The driver for this was Boeing, but it was also a national thing too. Most of the noise was about the wages. Of course, what i noticed then, by '91 or so, was that area was getting filled back in, and those jobs were getting harder to find out of college.
Microsoft, Aldus, Visio, Wizards of the Coast, etc, were starting to get on a roll, and my peers in CompSci were the ones on the front of the wave... as well as Silicon Valley too. Good times then.
So, the moral of the story is... if you follow things, the winners will be the ones already well into that pipeline. People just getting into it will most likely lose. The catch is those who already got going weren't prescient when they did.
You want a relatively good gig (in the US)? Go welding, diesel mechanic, electrician. Oh crap, all those gigs require actual work, though...hard work in crappy conditions, though. I'm posting this in the wrong forum.
Classic irony (Score:2)
College professor without specific skills says you don't need to know specific skills while standing on the backs of adjunct professors with no skills.
Go to college to actually learn something (Score:4, Informative)
While you shouldn't necessary pick a major based on the hottest job, you definitely need to pick something in consideration with how you will use it. And you sure as heck should go to college to learn and make yourself better--not just to receive a piece of paper. Racking up 5 or 6 figures of debt without learning anything of value is a terrible idea. Unfortunately, we haven't given students the tools or perspectives to understand the consequences of the decisions they are making. Everyone is always warning athletes coming into college "the chances of you making it as a pro are extremely rare". And yet, the chances of someone making it as a tenured history professor at a major university are probably just as rare. At least the athletes aren't going into massive debt.
Add onto the fact that we have massively watered down many majors to the point of uselessness. The reason liberal arts majors get a bad rap isn't that it is a useless subject. If people came out as hard working critical thinkers they would be valuable contributors. Unfortunately, it is filled with people who just want a piece of papers and do the minimum to get by. This is a generalization, of course, but I believe is backed up by stats on plagiarism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]). And the courses are watered down to be worthless. For example you can graduate from Yale with an English without having a Shakespeare course (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/23/skipping-shakespeare-yes-english-majors-can-often-bypass-the-bard/). So in 4 years of education in English, you don't have to actually take a course in the most influential English writer in history. But, you know, he is challenging to read and understand. As an alternative you can take a course in Literature for Young People http://english.yale.edu/course... [yale.edu] which includes J. K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss.
At least with Engineering/Math/Hard Science you have to demonstrate via projects and tests that you have actually learned something.
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At least with Engineering/Math/Hard Science you have to demonstrate via projects and tests that you have actually learned something.
That "something" is the ability to solve problems.
There is a simple formula: To be employable (in a free society) you need to solve more problems than you create.
Every employee creates problems - most notably they expected to be paid. Some individuals create additional problems by being high-drama, which makes them less employable, but that is another story.
If "getting an education" means the same as "learning to solve more and harder problems", then it is easy to see why getting an education leads t
Yes, CS degrees are useful (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who has managed a dozen dev teams with nearly a hundred different programmers, yes a person with a CS degree is typically a superior nuts and bolts developer -- that is stronger in development related skills, but not necessarily overall.
Some of the best devs I've worked with or managed were english or biology majors. While typically less well versed (all else being equal) in the hard skills, thier 'soft' skills were much better and often compensated. For example, they weren't the best algorithm designers, but they were better able to communicate with each other and with clients. Combine those learned 'soft' skills with decent self taught 'hard' skills and you generally have a better overall dev.
And that's the crux of the matter. University is not a vocational training program. University is where a person goes to learn about a broad range of subjects. And, most importantly, where a person goes to learn how to think and learn.
If you want a code monkey (and only a code monkey), look for someone with a vocational/technical education background. If you want more than a cog in the machine, look for a university grad.
The corollary is that, yes, those general ed and elective requirements DO serve a purpose. Chosen well, they help expand your horizons and teach you a little something about the world. So, when whatever major you did pick becomes unmarketable (and many do), you aren't left with nothing but useless knowledge.
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The corollary is that, yes, those general ed and elective requirements DO serve a purpose. Chosen well, they help expand your horizons and teach you a little something about the world. So, when whatever major you did pick becomes unmarketable (and many do), you aren't left with nothing but useless knowledge.
It seems to me that when going through the Engineering program that we had to take about 90% of the classes that the typical Liberal Arts students took, plus about 50% more classes going further into physics and math. I know for a fact that the number of hours required to graduate was 20% higher for Engineering than for Liberal Arts students. And just to complete my major required much more than the minimum number of hours. Most Liberal Arts students were taking 12 to 15 hours per semester. I was taking a
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What school did you go to that required more or less than the standard 120 credit hours for a bachelor's?
The minimum number of hours required to graduate with a BSEE from University of Illinois at Chicago is 128.
However, the number of hours of classes you end up taking with prerequisites and getting all courses in for your major ends up being much higher than that. It's been a long time since I graduated, but it seems like I had something like 143 or more credit hours when I graduated.
Apprenticeship gap (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the issue boils down to a gap between college and "career" for the first 2-3 years after college. Employers know that hiring a guy with a physics degree to do an engineering or programming job job will be a money loser for at least a couple years, even if they are pretty darn sure he'll come up to speed and be a major contributor. It is safer to either hire someone who is already trained (and grill them about their possible lack of loyalty), or to get someone with just the right set of skills to minimize the training. After a new guy/gal has some experience there is no assurance that they will stick around. Often you can't get a decent raise, no matter how well you are performing, without jumping ship to another company (a dose of bureaucratic stupidity worth ranting about all by itself).
At-will employment has made this entry level dance crappy for both sides. Everyone knows that they can be let go at any time with nothing guaranteed beyond a cashout of their meager vacation accrual. Employers know that if they sink a large amount into an employee to bring them up on a new or in-demand skill it increases the likelihood that the person can get headhunted away. Stock options and other incentives try to patch this broken relationship by putting some carrots out there, but the young guys usually get very few of those until after they have proven themselves (and a lot of companies has dispensed with them for peons entirely). Other companies know they most incentive plans are crappy and they matching the loss with a hiring bonus and/or sign-on options and still be cheaper and easier than training one of their own (and outsiders are smarter, obviously, than the whiners already sucking at the payroll teat).
It is all pretty perverse. I work in the states for a foreign company, and having a counterpart doing the same job with a very different employment setup regularly makes me question the US system. My counterpart is part of a union, has many more holidays, more vacation, has his hours strictly limited, is not allowed to work at all from home, and cannot be easily laid off (and his college was tuition free).
Oh I can think of one thing in CS (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's pretty interesting, I have usually used linear in place of O(n) just because more people can understand it... but I can't imaging how someone could use the term "linear" when it's obviously not. At least he didn't say constant...
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
I then got an entry level IT job on the basis of (I believe) 20 hours of formal java and maybe 10 of formal Oracle (plus maybe double that in labs) - and threw away all my biochemistry.
Company that employed me had just left their startup phase - but mainly seemed to employ anybody they liked and had an interesting chat with in the interview. I never quite worked out if this was deliberate, or just a consequence of HR being pretty non-existent
Initially I thought I'd "chanced it" - but then eventually the scales were lifted from my eyes as I found out what everybody else had done prior. Plenty of arts doctorates. Maybe it was a mass experiment, but I wasn't an exception.
Bit I look back fondly on was that we all mucked in and I learnt so much from those around me and the liberal pile of O'Reilly books scattered around. I thought I was catching up on my formal IT education - but again, looking back, I wasn't - was just a continuation of what I'd done before. Stumbling my way through with plenty of swearing, beer, with the odd moment of breakthrough and inspiration.
Without the rose-tinted glasses, there was an awful lot of knowing what I wanted to do, needed to do, and blindly running around screaming for help from my colleagues (which was given - and I loved giving to anybody who needed it in turn).
Then we got bought by big-scarey-international-market-behemoth, and I had a few years of misery. Again, looking back, I can see why I hated it. Everybody was told to sit in their little silo and stay there. I loathed that. But again, looking back, it's really really useful to learn what you hate.
I'm still with them, as I got dropped into a pilot project with a bunch of smart and lovely people (including the customer).
Notionally I'm a "solution architect" now - which I'd always used to think meant I should be leading from the front with my unequalled vision and expertise (maybe it does, and I'm just a shit SA). My view is that it's simply to sketch out what we collectively need to do, and let those with real ability drift in to have a go, whilst covering them from above. I'll probably look back in another few year though, and realize I'm massively deluded, again.
Back to the points of the story and what I've learnt in 15 years of chancing it in an environment I don't officially belong
1) You're not the best at anything. You might, if you're lucky, be the best at most of what you need to do - but mainly you're going to be relying on others. Both to do the work, and to learn from. Accept this, be open - *never* tell anybody their thought is unimportant. Worst you can do is teach why it won't work - Best is that you realize you're wrong and you get better.
2) Follow-on: Don't micro-manage. You don't like it happening to you, you don't do it to others. More importantly, people try different approaches - if they feel they're on the right path, they'll stick to it. But, if they decide they want to try another tack, for god's sake let them - rather than making them justify themselves (they've already have to convince themselves).
3) "Science" is a method. It gives you a great big pile of tools/understanding to build on - but no reason it can't be improved. No. That's not right. Everything you have is an improvement on what went before - and it's your job to improve it more. You're not going to win a Nobel, but you should make things better - and nothing, nothing feels better than solving a problem with that feeling of 'elegance'.
Actually, I'll finish on 'elegance' - I've been subjected to all manner of methodologies and management techniques - but 'elegance' is what makes me happy and usually gets completely ignored (with exception of bland terms like 're-use')
I'd always taken science to be true, over the arts. The answer lay with
The correct way to pick your major.. (Score:4, Insightful)
..is to look at your passion and talent. Of course, you can't ignore the job market, but it should be a secondary consideration
For example..when programming is the HOT market..
The talented, passionate people do very well because of their talent and passion..and are rewarded handsomely (like me)
The not-so-talented or passionate may get a job during the boom, it may even pay well, but when the bust comes, they are the first ones "staff reduced"
NEVER pick a career based on the job market unless you have (at least a little) talent and passion for it
Liberal Arts - still a skill. (Score:5, Interesting)
I find this most refreshing. I've always been confused by corporations insisting on hires based on knowing the job already. What? You, Mr. Corporation aren't innovating and training your crack staff to forge the new world you keep telling us the 'free market' slides on like ice? Guess not. Considering the news that in fact, even Silicon Valley has used collage grads, who are dragging massive depts just to get the 'specialized skills' corporations have been screaming about for frickin' years, were actually paid crap and worked like dogs while, Oh, these companies colluded to do just fucking that. Free market seems to mean "we get labour free". Well, cheap, at least.
Even the much maligned Liberal Arts Degree should be enough for any employer to see that this young person can, you know, LEARN THINGS.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, get a BA in gen studies or gen liberal arts or gen science or whatever. Then if you still want a tech job, get an AS degree from a community college - all you'll probably need are the actual tech classes. Pick up a cert or two. Or just build a portfolio and show you know your stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a lotta years of study and money. My point is, and this is how things used to be done in industry, it was the company who trained you in those skills. They can afford it, after all. Can you? Considering student dept, and the dept level of everyone in North America, is dumped all this educational dept onto the individuals shoulders fair? Just to get a job at all???
Re: (Score:3)
"Liberal arts" historically meant everything from Greek and history to science to math. If that's the kind of "liberal arts degree" you get, yes, it does show indeed that you can learn things. However, few if any universities still have those kinds of liberal arts programs.
If you get a "liberal arts degree" in the modern sense, namely "anything but science and math", you dem
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Good point. It's the point Brian_Ellenberger made a few posts above, and very well. And it's a shame so many colleges and universities, even the great ones, have degraded the courses. I feel it's a determent to our future.
Indeed (Score:3)
A university degree or any high degree for what it matters , should show to potential employer two things : 1) that you are at least have the smart to get to that level 2) that once you "bite" into something you do not let go and continue for long period of time.
2) is especially important if you train somebody for a job.
In my experience firms which expect their new employee to be immediately productive are either new start up not having learned the rope, and they will or they will die, or old fir
Re: (Score:2)
Translation is poor friend. Sorry.... As for: "2) is especially important if you train somebody for a job." ... then yes, I'm saying the company should do that!!! After all, if a company has such employees and expertise, and experience, then they could create a new thing! A new market! We've seen that happen with the Internet, eh? Whatever that is! I reckon capitalism is just that, instead of just sitting on all markets like some fat dragon and controlling everything. Right?
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure that's Political Science. And to get ahead in DC you'd need actual connections, I reckon.
There are tradeoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Switching to the "career of your dreams" is usually a bad idea I know several reasonably competent engineers and scientists who bankrupted themselves, and crippled their family finances, "pursuing a dream" of being a stay at home parent, pursing an artistic career and lost their engineering edge while they did it. They now regret the decision, but have no chance of recovering their engineering edge sufficiently to return to their original, much better paid fields. They'd have to start over as a 40 or 50 year old intern with obsolete skills, and there's no market for them.
If your dream is so important to you, fund it yourself as a hobby or a pasttime. I know too many reasonably competent engineers who blamed their lack of focus on their "lack of inspiration" on their lack of interest. They switched careers, and turned out to be as unfocused in their new "inspired" career. But because they were "unfocused" in a poorly funded career, they've either gone hideously broke or drained their family's finances finances supporting their career. I've known several who are literally a million dollars poorer between the loss of engineering income and with the educational costs of the career switch, for jobs they can't get because they're competing with much, much cheaper kids who are also dependent on family support to keep them fed. They spent their retirement funds and their kids' college funds on their "dream" careers, and they're pretty unhappy about it now.
Frankly, I see the same thing played out regularly for people who have doubts about their lovers or their spouses. They abandon decent, workable relationships in favor of their "soul mate" or someone else tempting who is "the one". If the alternative pastime, or alternative partner, is so ideally suited to you, let them work for it. Don't abandon your current working life or your current working relationship in favor of an unlikely dream. There are far too many broken careers, and broken hearts, from such switches.
Most simply put, I'll offer the advice that so many agents and editors give to their dreaming clients. "Don't quit your day job". If you turn out to be that good at your hobby, you'll find the opportunity to turn to it later as a full-time career. It's much less heart and wallet braking to work at your primary job and your primary relatonships. Just don't _lie_ about it, and over commit.
"...and they would retrain them..." (Score:2)
"...and they would retrain them..."
Yeah. Mostly for blue collar jobs which no longer exist.
On the job training works great, if you are going to be bending pipe or running a lathe.
It kind of doesn't work worth crap for bioinformatics or machine learning.
Re: (Score:2)
What's so special about a college classroom that you can't learn bioinformatics or machine learning anywhere else?
Re: (Score:3)
What's so special about a college classroom that you can't learn bioinformatics or machine learning anywhere else?
I suppose, if you were a high IQ person with a good memory and access to a university library normally restricted to registered students of the university, you could learn it on your own in about 3X the amount of time that you'd learn it in a classroom + lab setting, with other students and a number of PhD's to bounce your ideas off of, and to correct any misconceptions you arrived at on your own, before you ended up going down an already studied dead end.
So, in order:
(1) A college classroom will be faster
(
Just become a drone pilot (Score:2)
Colleges are stating to create drone piloting programs. There is going to be a huge demand for them over the next 5 to 10 years.
still need to start early (Score:2)
Well, a lot of people are self-taught and started coding very eary.
Follow your passion (Score:5, Interesting)
My kids are all grown up now, and some are married with little ones of their own now... but this is the advice that I gave them. There's no promise of great wealth in it, certainly I am not overwhelmingly successful by most wordly standards, and unless you are very very very lucky, you will have to settle sometimes or maybe even a lot of times on doing jobs that you dislike just to survive, but you get only one chance at living... and by gosh, if you don't do everything in your own ability to try and make that life as happy as you possibly can, then there will always be some part of you that resents the compromises that you made to get to wherever it is that you are.
Do what you love.
Period.
*EVERYTHING* else is secondary to that. I won't sugar-coat it... society doesn't owe you any fortune or any success, but you *do* owe yourself the chance to be as happy as you can... and you will have nobody to blame but yourself if you don't do everything you can to achieve that end.
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Rubbish. I do hope it's true for your kids. And you. But most of us struggle, and are beaten down because of corruption, the de-regulation of employment law, and have no recourse when things go wrong. Lawyers and "rights" are for the rich, or at least the middle class. Then you get old. Think about it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why, somehow, do you think I didn't struggle, or that I enjoyed a life that was particularly well off?
When things go wrong, and you fall short of your goals, and unfortunately, we all experience failures then you take whatever it is that you *DO* have, and you do what you can with it.. That should *NEVER* mean giving up on what you love to do... it might mean you can't do it for a living right now... but that doesn't mean it's permanent, and one should not ever settle on striving for less than what they
Because colleges and universities have forgotten (Score:2)
... what their role is.
Higher education is there to train people to - get this - FILL JOBS! But these days, universities believe that their job is to just 'educate students' in whatever curriculum they (the universities) see fit.
They forgot that the curriculum itself is not the ultimate goal. Gaining the skills necessary to be able to successfully fulfill the job role is the actual goal.
Re: (Score:2)
They are there to fund themselves, usually by writing grants and getting their indentured grad students to do the work.
Learning how to learn (Score:5, Interesting)
I graduated with an engineering degree in 1970 and am now 68 years old and "retired." I retired as a network/security engineer back in 2007. Any idea as to how much of that was taught in college in the late 1960's? Well, actually NOTHING I worked on for the last 10 and very little of what I worked on for the 10 years before that even existed when I was in college.
An example of what I mean by learning how to learn is when our upper management decided in the late 1990's that their entire infrastructure based on Token Ring was not going anywhere and I was given the job of converting everything to eithernet. I was told we had a vendor conference in about two weeks to begin picking a vendor and the equipment that would best fit our needs. I knew very little about ethernet at that time, but was able to learn enough in just two weeks to be able to filter the BS and FUD out in the meetings and ask the right questions that needed answering. I did this on my own in my "spare" time by reading everything I could find about eithernet and all the vendors products we would be looking at. I had enough "education" to know how to learn this on my own very quickly. A background in electronics, knowledge of Boolean Algebra (yea, that is REALLY how a net mask works) helped, but were background to understanding how the new "stuff" worked.
There is a difference between education and training. With education you can learn on your own, sometimes with training your your "learning" becomes obsolete with the next change in technology. It is easy to remember the difference. Which would you prefer for your teen age daughter to attend -- a sex education class or a sex training class.
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lol! YOU sir, are talented and full of esoteric knowledge. How much were you paid? Were you promised a full position, at least?
It's a crapshoot (Score:2)
I did this. I spent 10 years in IT (network admin), and when the bubble burst, I took my savings and went back to college.
In 2005, according to government data, the top paying jobs, in order, were lawyer, 11 kinds of doctor, and then physicist, so I majored in physics.
Anyone see where this is going?
When I graduated in late 2010, NASA was already shedding employees, and just a few months later, laid off 3,500 physicists (a good chunk of the total number of working physicists in the country). The two jobs I h
Length of time doing a degree (Score:2)
Re:HR departments (Score:5, Funny)
HR guy: "We need people who are 22 years old with an M.Sc. and 20 years of specific experience, and we can't find any."
C-level exec: "See, I told you we can't find qualified domestic hires and we need to ramp up the H-1B visas."
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HR guy: "We need people who are 22 years old with an M.Sc. and 20 years of specific experience, and we can't find any."
C-level exec: "See, I told you we can't find qualified domestic hires and we need to ramp up the H-1B visas."
I know you meant this as silly but it really is hard to find people with specific skillsets in certain areas. A degree in CS won't give someome knowledge of a particular framework used by the company as an example. They need someone to come right in and work the 1st day and have a proven track record of holding onto a job for more than a year etc.
Re: HR departments (Score:3, Insightful)
And they won't get it because nobody wants to train newcomers and they don't want to pay for somebody that has the experience.
If people think millenials are spoiled, just look at the people running companies.
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he is not being silly. In CS the requirements from HR are RETARDED. I have seen the " 10 years experience in Java" when Java was less than 5 years old.
Re:HR departments (Score:5, Interesting)
HR guy: "We need people who are 22 years old with an M.Sc. and 20 years of specific experience, and we can't find any."
C-level exec: "See, I told you we can't find qualified domestic hires and we need to ramp up the H-1B visas."
Well, you are partially right. If you look for a 22 year old H1B with an MS, you probably will find one. They all seem to have MS from some Indian university or another. I wouldn't vouch for how that university compares to education in the U.S.
Also, you can usually find H1Bs who will happily put down vast quantities of experience in technologies that they don't really have. The same thing happens in the U.S. as well, but it always seems more grossly exaggerated in the H1B resumes. Probably because they are desperate. And because the companies are desperate to pay less, they will accept the lies and hire the person who lied and said they had 5 year when they have zero or the person who told the truth that they only have 4 years. Paying 70% of a salary for zero productivity is better than paying 100% salary for 80% productivity, right?
Not quite a counterpoint (Score:2)
I get *very* pissy when people start disparaging my colleagues, solely because of where they came from and their visa status.
However - there is some truth in the complaints - the level of bullshit on CVs (not internally, but on prospective hires) is quite incredible - but I can see why. Entry level pays like shit, and more importantly you seem to get treated like shit - the goal set is to get o
Re:Not quite a counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
I was hired by an Indian outsourced (I am local) and they brought in a consultant who would like for references and made a fake resume for me. I quit in disgust!
The problem is when people do this shit HR will simply demand more on a resume and look for keywords in Taleo and rank them by score and filter out all the good people. Resume inflation was also an issue but it really did start in outsourcing companies.
You put an unrealistic demand and a million headhunters from Bangalore say my guys have 10 years of experience in HTML 5 and what are you going to do?
Not saying your guys did this per say? But it hurts natives too as management gets the impression $45,000 a year is the average for a senior developer who has 8 years experience in 5 dozen languages and will now consider no less.
THe worst is Taleo that HR uses. It was never designed to do HR's job but the salespeople mentioned hey do your HR stuff while my website does the recruiting for you etc. So it scans for keywords and only the top 5 ranks get emailed to the secretary for the interview ... all the ones from Bangalore with 10 years experience in HTML 5.
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Maybe if your colleagues would grow some goddam integrity, the hires as a whole would get some goddam respect. What you're describing results in the hiring process basically being a complete game of chance. Can you believe, even for a second, that some people might not like that? Really shitty of them ain't it?
This is the same problem we have with sales. As soon as one salesman lied about his product, everybody else has to either lie about theirs, or hope that they can survive long enough for the lie to be found out. In the job market, people get pretty desperate and there is a never ending supply of new people willing to lie to get their resume seen while your honest one gets overlooked. Still, I choose to be honest, and hopefully others do too. Dishonesty of a few marks everybody as suspicious.
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Thats the way Adobe thought :) - I had a manager who was enthusiastically telling me how the 15 people they were hiring in Noida were going to be so much more cost effective (15 people - to replace me).
I got laid off, and they managed to lose every account I had - I still don't see the cost savings and that C level director still works there and last I heard everyone really loves him.
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How can you have a profession before you have a degree? Maybe you'll find out that electrical engineering, for example, is 95% rote work, meetings, make-work, more meetings, socializing, meetings, and maybe 5% electronics.
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In other words, the employers are idiots, and there's very little that a student can do about it.
Well, yes, exactly. Because apparently the employer never went to college so they don't realize that college is not for vocational training but for making a person well-rounded, teachable and educated, but with a particular focus on an area of study. Instead, the employer wants a seat filler that comes to the job already knowing a trade, meaning that they either came from a vocational school or from another job, but since they are wanting to pay only entry level wages, nobody is going to come from another
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What it's *for* and what it *does* are two very different things.
Because people who haven't dumped massive amounts of money on a degree can't learn after they start working? Hardly. The effects of college are greatly exaggerated.
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Because people who haven't dumped massive amounts of money on a degree can't learn after they start working? Hardly. The effects of college are greatly exaggerated.
Perhaps different people get different things out of a college education. I for one got quite a lot out of it. You can certainly go to college and not get a college education, but you sure can't skip college and get a college education.
Re:We're screwed (Score:4, Insightful)
The full text should have read:
They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. And they'll dump them back on the street whenever their skills don't match what the employer "needs" this quarter.
Seriously. What went wrong? Employers used to not think they were entitled to perfectly-shaped disposable cogs. They not only brought new hires' skills in line with their needs, they imbued them with the corporate culture and philosophy, ensured that they were kept trained or retrained, and in exchange avoided the continual expenses that come from bringing a new, untried person who doesn't even know where the paper clips are kept. And, as an added bonus, the employee might feel loyal enough to put a little more of themself into the company's ongoing fortunes.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
I made the same mistake. I decided that I needed a "general" degree; so I got an MBA, there really isn't much more general than that. The result is that I do have a job, but a terrible one. I teach Computer applications at a middle school.
The only real advice I can give is to be tall and good looking.
Re: (Score:3)
Silicon valley was built 60 years ago. What was true then is not necessarily true today, despite what the article claims.
Tell you what, try to get a job as a developer in Google and Microsoft without a CS degree or 10 years experience and then get back to me.