What is the best degree for IT?
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@Draco8573 said:
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
Here is the breakdown, as there is a spectrum:
If you want the best option for the best possible IT career, school is out of the question. It will cripple your career options and is already holding you back.
If you want the absolute best flexibility and protection against being homeless and destitute then you want a liberal degree not in IT, but a general degree that makes it "easier" to get "a job", any job.
So you have to decide what you want. Are you serious about IT? Do you want the most IT options possible? College is in your way, it is a barrier, as are all of the people pushing you to do it without knowing its value.
Are you just really concerned about being able to live locally and keep working and are willing to sacrifice your IT career to do it? Then getting a degree that isn't IT likely is a good option, although I'd wager even then skipping the degree is probably best. I know no one getting enough benefit from a degree to offset its cost, it happens somewhere, but it is super rare.
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The reality is, not everyone can go into IT and most people who do can't have amazing careers. There just are not enough jobs out there for that. Nothing wrong with wanting to be in the middle and just do a normal job and go home at the end of the day. We are taught that that is not the right attitude, but then the same system that teaches us that we should all be special and excel pushes us to conform and go to college so that we are all the same when we come out. It can't be both ways.
So choosing the goal is critical. The best "degree for IT" is definitely none. No question there. But is the best degree "for IT" really what you seek?
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@Draco8573 said:
so yes there is some emotion in this decision but I am also trying to be smart about it
Those are opposing forces. You really need to separate the emotion from the logic here. Not only is this important for your degree decision right now, but emotional decision making is one of the things that separates people who can never advance in IT from those that do. Many people who enter IT from the "tech" side are not trained to look at the business cases, separate the emotion, remain logical and let emotion take over in their jobs and can't make useful business decisions around technology.
For IT to be a big career, this is a skill you need to master.
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@scottalanmiller I am only going off of what I have been told by multiple career counselors at school and even some of the companies that show up to our career fairs and obviously all the other things that i have previously mentioned.
we have established that the degrees don't get jobs. I have recognized that. Degrees are just there to open the door, then certs and experience get you the rest of the way.
and as far as "degrees will hurt" that sounds like a load of bull. If you love academia so much why are you against degrees? SO they don't teach what you can learn on the job but people are still learning. and I know a lot of people both working and going to school. I highly doubt that degrees hurt. The only people who have a degree and are unsucessfull are the little idiots whose parents pay for everything and they have never lifted a finger to do anything in their life.
and once again we have established that yes there is a bit of emotion in the descision but I am four years in I can't just drop out now, that would be a LOT of money wasted. You want the truth? I know a bunch of trivial knowledge and am more of a jack of all trades than anything I can do a little bit of everything but there is nothing that I excel at. I want a job and security. But I still want to get better with IT. I am doing that on the job and I am learning way more in school than what I knew, plus if I switch to IT there are a couple classes that look like they may be cool. Even though you say it can hurt it is still helping me figure this stuff out. To be honest IT is not my dream job. I am decent enough at it and I find it interesting. So I am not looking to be an IT manager or anything, I just want something that I can enjoy and live comfortably -
@Draco8573 said:
"degrees will hurt" that sounds like a load of bull. If you love academia so much why are you against degrees? SO they don't teach what you can learn on the job but people are still learning. and I know a lot of people both working and going to school. I highly doubt that degrees hurt.
I can honestly say that yes, degrees do more harm them good... at least past a certain level. I spent 6 years of my time working toward a bachelors and masters degree in systems administration. The same skill set I "learned" in that time I could have gained by working for two years at any company. So not only was I not making money and being productive, the exact opposite was true. I ended up spending a silly amount of money to get a job I could have easily gotten with just a year or two of experience. That is active harm... my potential lifetime earnings are actively being affected by both my educational debt and the time wasted in college.
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@coliver I undestand that but what do you think about someone who is going to school and working an IT job at the same time, so that they are learning on the job and in a classroom. Plus this person has about zero previous knowledge of IT stuff. The only thing that I did before i started CS was I built my pc, not hard to do so it is not like I know enough to drop out and get a job.
What I am trying to get at is that I know next to nothing about IT, but I am learning from two sources and I don't think that can really be as bad as Scott is making it sound. He makes it sound like I am throwing my money into a fire and not getting anything out of it. When I know at least 10 times more now than I did last year. -
@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller I am only going off of what I have been told by multiple career counselors at school
Specifically people I've pointed out time and again (it's in the article that went to "press" too) that career counselors are exactly the worst people to talk to. They generally have zero experience with or exposure to the business world and work in isolation so that they have zero knowledge of what is and isn't good. They work in education and work in jobs that require degrees, actually require by law, and so are actually part of an extended form of welfare system and have emotional and financial reasons to irrationally support the system that they work in.
You should never talk to them and you certainly can't trust them. They have ulterior motives to justify their own situation and the job that they have. They are not neutral parties and are not your agent. They represent the education system.
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@Draco8573 said:
we have established that the degrees don't get jobs. I have recognized that. Degrees are just there to open the door, then certs and experience get you the rest of the way.
They don't open good doors, though. And they come at a cost. If degrees were free in money and time, it would be one thing. But they are not. That they open "some" doors is misleading. Because they come at a cost of experience, they close as many doors, or more, than they open.
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You're going to want to figure out what college teaches well that will help you the most in IT, because IT can't really be taught well in a college setting.
With that said, in my opinion, if you're interacting with people for your job, taking psychology classes can help you interact with them more effectively.
This is especially true for IT: if you do any help desk stuff, you're going to be dealing with frustrated, anxious people who don't understand why they can't do the thing they need/want to do. You'll be asking these people questions about what led to the problem that they don't understand. Learning how to empathize and relieve this anxiety in the moment helps convert defensive users into helpful users. Learning how to frame questions so you avoid guiding users toward a certain response helps you get accurate answers to technical questions. This is all stuff I learned from my psych major, and it has already helped me support users countless times. So think about taking some psych classes!
Sincerely,
A guy who went to college thinking he wanted to go into counseling, noped outta that career track, and ended up in IT incredibly grateful for his psychology degree.
My Most Valuable Psych Classes:
- Cognitive Judgement & Decision-making: Helped me realize what sorts of errors people can make that can lead to tech issues.
- Statistical Analysis: Learning the format for non-leading questions on surveys helped me learn how to ask questions without letting my assumption on what the underlying issue affect the response I get.
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@WingCreative so my question to you is how much of the IT world did you know going into school? were you slightly above the average user? or did you get out into the world land an IT job and then learn all the stuff or did you teach yourself while in school for psych?
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@Draco8573 said:
@coliver I undestand that but what do you think about someone who is going to school and working an IT job at the same time, so that they are learning on the job and in a classroom. Plus this person has about zero previous knowledge of IT stuff. The only thing that I did before i started CS was I built my pc, not hard to do so it is not like I know enough to drop out and get a job.
What I am trying to get at is that I know next to nothing about IT, but I am learning from two sources and I don't think that can really be as bad as Scott is making it sound. He makes it sound like I am throwing my money into a fire and not getting anything out of it. When I know at least 10 times more now than I did last year.Aren't you throwing your money into a fire though? Think about how much you will end up paying for this degree and weigh it against potential benefits (for IT there are next to none or none) You already mentioned that IT isn't your dream job... which means you will be burned out in a few years if you do end up getting an IT job. This isn't something that you just get into for the money, which all things considered isn't that great, it is something you get into because you love technology. If you do end up working IT for a few years you will see that a lot of the things your professors in college taught you about technology is so out of date that it is laughable... if it isn't out of date it is most likely wrong. How is learning wrong or out of date material valuable to your career?
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@coliver said:
@Draco8573 said:
"degrees will hurt" that sounds like a load of bull. If you love academia so much why are you against degrees? SO they don't teach what you can learn on the job but people are still learning. and I know a lot of people both working and going to school. I highly doubt that degrees hurt.
I can honestly say that yes, degrees do more harm them good... at least past a certain level. I spent 6 years of my time working toward a bachelors and masters degree in systems administration. The same skill set I "learned" in that time I could have gained by working for two years at any company. So not only was I not making money and being productive, the exact opposite was true. I ended up spending a silly amount of money to get a job I could have easily gotten with just a year or two of experience. That is active harm... my potential lifetime earnings are actively being affected by both my educational debt and the time wasted in college.
This is a great example. It's hard to know the specifics for an individual. But this means that....
- You should take the money spent on college and calculate that in a standard Index Fund Rate to see how much retirement that money would have equaled had you just invested it rather than spending it on school. For most people it is enough to have retired on that money alone.
- Add four years to your career, tack it on at the end. Figure out not how much money you would earn now, but how much you would earn at your career peak. Then take four years of that peak, plus a little more as you would be more senior then than you will now ever be in your career. Likely that's a lot of money there.
It's more dramatic than that, but that gives you a quick idea of how much money is lost in going to school.
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@WingCreative said:
You're going to want to figure out what college teaches well that will help you the most in IT, because IT can't really be taught well in a college setting.
This is huge, and nearly the wording from one of my unpublished articles (I swear I'm not just saying that.) Skipping the classes that they can't teach and focusing on what they do teach well is critical to getting any value at all from school.
If you take only IT classes, you might actually come out with negative learning!
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@Draco8573 said:
and as far as "degrees will hurt" that sounds like a load of bull. If you love academia so much why are you against degrees?
Because they hurt real people. They destroy careers. I like academia for its own sake, not because it helped my career or could help my career.
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@Draco8573 said:
I highly doubt that degrees hurt.
Well both the industrial math says that they hurt, quite a bit. And just logically discussing it is very clear why they would hurt. So the real question is... why do you doubt it when professionals, corporate career counselors from your chosen field, the math even from the colleges themselves and just general logic suggest that they are very likely to hurt?
Instead of just doubting... what aspect of a degree do you feel makes it likely to overcome the cost that in incurs (primarily in time?)
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Academia is important... I'm not sure the American college system could be considered academia anymore.
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@Draco8573 said:
SO they don't teach what you can learn on the job but people are still learning. and I know a lot of people both working and going to school.
Who said learning on the job? You won't learn enough on the job to be any good. You have to learn how to teach yourself! That's something that jobs require but don't teach and the antithesis of the university systems.
You want to know why I don't like to hire college grads? They are helpless. They almost always lack the basic self motivation and self education skills that those that skip college have to have to have made it at all. The university system is a hand holding and coddling system. They tell you what classes to take. They tell you want to learn. And the worst ones even use tests to "see" what you know instead of having you produce results! It's terrible. It's nothing like how you need to be able to learn to handle the field and it is not training you do be good at it.
It's lazy compared to how people need to learn. IT is not a field like art history where you study the past for four years and talk about that same knowledge for forever. You have to know how to learn, on your own without someone to guide you and to tell you what you need to know. You have to be motivated and go out every day and learn new stuff.
Universities not only fail to teach you how to be a successful IT pro, they actively train you to be a bad one!
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@coliver said:
Academia is important... I'm not sure the American college system could be considered academia anymore.
And, and this is big, the university system was never designed to get people jobs. That's not its purpose. The things that make academia good (for some of us) is also what makes it bad for you if your career is the goal.
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@Draco8573 said:
The only people who have a degree and are unsucessfull are the little idiots whose parents pay for everything and they have never lifted a finger to do anything in their life.
One could say the same thing for anyone who skipped college and didn't excel, right? If someone puts in the effort without going to college they should not just do as well as college students but have a few years jump on them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
Academia is important... I'm not sure the American college system could be considered academia anymore.
And, and this is big, the university system was never designed to get people jobs. That's not its purpose. The things that make academia good (for some of us) is also what makes it bad for you if your career is the goal.
No arguments here. I had a few college professors (at the grad level) tell me the only career options for grad students is in academia.... so I better publish something before I leave school.
