What is the best degree for IT?
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
if they have a degree in IT that it would show that at least know something
That shows nothing, and is an SMB way of thinking. We tend to hire people without degrees or only associates degrees/vocational. Our Director of IT has Masters degrees for business management and business information systems.
I have degrees but don't put them on my resume because I don't want to work for anyone who would care that I had one. I want to filter out people who put stock in them, because I don't consider them viable managers for someone at the level I would want my coworkers to be at.
I've rarely worked with top people who had degrees. And those that did normally got them late in their careers (one of the tricks that the pro-college crowd uses to make college sound more valuable than it is.)
Given equal candidates, I would always prefer the one with the fewer academic creds because it implies that they had to work harder teaching themselves and overcoming irrational market stigmas to get to the same level as someone with a degree.
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@Dashrender said:
I completely agree that it proves nothing, but disagree that it's a SMB way of thinking.
Most HR departments put this requirement on their job postings. The HR filters the incoming resumes by those requirements before sending them onto a hiring manager.Now maybe you have a better system, and you get ALL the resumes directly, but if a company has a real legit HR department, that's unlikely. I say this from my own experience, which is small and limited, so it's biased by my own experience.
That's not true. Only in small companies does HR get involved (in the way of) the hiring process. HR's job is not to select the candidate it's to help the Hiring manager with what they are looking for. Sure they scan for potential legal issues but they don't add degrees. I've seen that in SMBs but, we are a fortune 500 and do not run that way. HR only helps the hiring manager get what they want, the hiring manager has the ultimate say.
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@scottalanmiller I understand it and I am evaluating my options but i want to finish school so I am not going to just give up.
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@Dashrender said:
What I don't know is of the great places to work, how many of them discount you when you don't have a degree.
I would say, by definition, none. How could a place be a great place to work (if we consider the quality of people to define a great place to work) if they care about discriminating in order to artificially support their own educational decisions instead of hiring the person best for the job? If you are intentionally hiring someone who isn't the best suited, you are a crappy company in my book. I've never seen a good job that did that.
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@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller I understand it and I am evaluating my options but i want to finish school so I am not going to just give up.
That's the sunk cost fallacy exactly. You want to continue investing because you've started investing, right? Do you want to go to school or do you want to finish what you've started? The latter, the way that you stated it, is the sunk cost fallacy itself. And, one would hope, that sunk cost decision making would be something that any even really bad college would be teaching early on. If they don't teach that stuff, what good are they?
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@Dashrender said:
Once you have around 10 years of experience, you're now being compared to the guy who is 4 years older than you with the same level of experience (10 years) and they look at you compared to him.. everything is the same except he has a degree. Now what?
I've never seen a serious job that cared about a degree except in lieu of experience.
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
I completely agree that it proves nothing, but disagree that it's a SMB way of thinking.
Most HR departments put this requirement on their job postings. The HR filters the incoming resumes by those requirements before sending them onto a hiring manager.Now maybe you have a better system, and you get ALL the resumes directly, but if a company has a real legit HR department, that's unlikely. I say this from my own experience, which is small and limited, so it's biased by my own experience.
That's not true. Only in small companies does HR get involved (in the way of) the hiring process. HR's job is not to select the candidate it's to help the Hiring manager with what they are looking for. Sure they scan for potential legal issues but they don't add degrees. I've seen that in SMBs but, we are a fortune 500 and do not run that way. HR only helps the hiring manager get what they want, the hiring manager has the ultimate say.
@jason is completely correct. Good companies would never allow HR to be a part of that process. Why would HR be allowed to actively sabotage the company? That's not how great or healthy companies behave or could behave.
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@Draco8573 said:
...but I heard of a beowulf cluster and it sounds fun to try.
Wow, the 1990s coming back again? Have not heard of one of those in forever!
in 2006 I ran a 10,000 host cluster on Wall St. Didn't use Beowulf but a commercial product. Same type of thing, though.
While this kind of stuff is fun, I would put in on the back burner and focus on building IT career skills that are practical and likely to get you work. HPC clusters are neat, but not something that people actually get hired to do.
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@Draco8573 said:
but the reason i am in college was because I was going to go for mechanical engineering but that didn't work out.
I started in engineering too. Manufacturing Systems (basically Industrial Eng but with a specific focus on big manufacturing) for me, not mechanical. I dropped out after two years, best decision ever. I have had such a wildly better career than my classmates, most of whom went on to Masters and PhD degrees. Their careers are much shorter than mine with much lower earnings and flexibility.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Draco8573 said:
...but I heard of a beowulf cluster and it sounds fun to try.
Wow, the 1990s coming back again? Have not heard of one of those in forever!
Never heard it called beowulf before.. I guess college is teaching the old terms haha.
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@scottalanmiller I hate school, who doesn't. But from what I have seen from my parents and cousins going through it is a necessary evil because they can't find jobs that easily because they don't have that degree. I want to do it so that I have it, because the majority of job listings in my area what a college degree and some years of experience.
It is unlikely that I am going to be able to move to a place where you don't need a degree because I don't have the money but I have done my research. So I know that I need a degree to compete with other applicants around here. But I also know that I need experience which is why I am working while in school.
I am just trying to find out what is the right path for me to take in school so that it will be beneficial to me and so I know that I will be able to handle the classes because school is not based on what you know how to do or that you can figure it out, school is about standardized testing and making sure that you are capable of passing a test.
so yes there is some emotion in this decision but I am also trying to be smart about it which is why I have been thinking about this for a couple weeks and have not done anything yet because I want to be very thorough before I reach a conclusion -
@scottalanmiller said:
@Draco8573 said:
but the reason i am in college was because I was going to go for mechanical engineering but that didn't work out.
I started in engineering too. Manufacturing Systems (basically Industrial Eng but with a specific focus on big manufacturing) for me, not mechanical. I dropped out after two years, best decision ever. I have had such a wildly better career than my classmates, most of whom went on to Masters and PhD degrees. Their careers are much shorter than mine with much lower earnings and flexibility.
I was an electrical engineering student for a while. Still love it but, heck I get paid a lot more than an EE would.
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@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller I hate school, who doesn't.
Actually I really enjoy it. I like writing papers and academic discussions. I like teaching too and sitting on college boards and overseeing programs. I really enjoy academia, I just know that it isn't helping students try to build their careers in IT.
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@Jason said:
Never heard it called beowulf before.. I guess college is teaching the old terms haha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster
It's still used I think, but the concept doesn't have the legs that it did fifteen years ago.
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@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmillerBut from what I have seen from my parents and cousins going through it is a necessary evil because they can't find jobs that easily because they don't have that degree.
How do you know that that is why? Are they highly skilled IT professionals but unable to find work? Are they flexible and willing to move anywhere for jobs like IT pros need to do to keep their careers moving? What makes you feel that their lack of degrees has an impact on their careers and if their careers are not IT, why would their experience matter for you?
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@Draco8573 said:
I want to do it so that I have it, because the majority of job listings in my area what a college degree and some years of experience.
Sure, the job listings have it. No self respecting IT pro would ever actually require it and no good company would even think of actually having such a barrier. It's listed because it's just something that people say. But those of us without degrees know that that is just something that it said and doesn't actually prevent a barrier to good jobs.
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@Draco8573 said:
It is unlikely that I am going to be able to move to a place where you don't need a degree because I don't have the money but I have done my research.
IT requires that you move. It's just part of the job. Degree or not, if you can't move constantly, your career will become mired. Moving job to job and location to location comes with the territory. Staying in one location is theoretically possible, mostly in NYC or London, but you will almost certainly pay an enormous price for it.
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@scottalanmiller there is a very long answer for that but it is not that they can't find work but they are stuck where they are because they manage to go anywhere else because they don't have that piece of paper. And the system admin that I work alongside even went back to school to get his degree.
but it has been said that you need a degree to get past HR in a lot of cases -
@Draco8573 said:
So I know that I need a degree to compete with other applicants around here.
You keep saying things with certainty that have no logical foundation leading you to them. Are you saying that if you had skills and experience that they would get the jobs over you if they only had a degree? Two questions...
- Is that true?
- If it is true, why would you want to work with incompetent people for incompetent people?
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@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller there is a very long answer for that but it is not that they can't find work but they are stuck where they are because they manage to go anywhere else because they don't have that piece of paper. And the system admin that I work alongside even went back to school to get his degree.
but it has been said that you need a degree to get past HR in a lot of casesThen why doesn't this affect everyone else? You keep saying that without paper they can't move on. That is not true. It just isn't. Most successful IT pros I know, and I know thousands, don't have degrees. The top ones almost never have degrees. I never hear IT people without degrees complaining that they can't find work, only people with degrees saying that - and then saying that they have to have degrees for the obviously incorrect reasons that you are stating.
This community, and Spiceworks, and the professional world are full of people without degrees on average outperforming their degreed counterparts. That's just math. Even the colleges admit that (they don't say it, they release the numbers and try to hide the results, but it is there.)
Degrees don't get you jobs. Some crappy job, sure. It happens. Degrees are often better for finding "a" job, if your goal is to never be out of work, degrees help. If your goal is to have a long, successful career, degrees will hurt.
Why the people you know can't find work... we can't say. What we can say, without a doubt, is that their lack of degrees can only be, at most, a minor factor.
