What is the best degree for IT?
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Someone who hasn't done at the VERY least an internship, I wouldn't look twice at.
Every applicant is asked about past job experience. I have hired young kids who have never worked in IT but who have had all kinds of jobs from picking berries to working at a fast food restaurant. You have to show initiative.
Even those with years of IT experience, they Must talk about their home lab and what they do on their own. I also want to see online contributions either in a community, personal blog or just writing in general about IT. I want to hear about the worst IT disaster they have dealt with, or the craziest. I want to hear about their troubleshooting steps.
If someone has an IT degree I question why and what they actually got out of it. I really am confused as to why someone would go for an IT degree. If they have no job experience at all in any area, my interest stops there. I have people on my team with college degrees neither of their degrees are in IT.
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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.
Keep in mind that while working is important (learning how people work, putting food on the table, etc.) that when we talk about learning outside of university it is not on the job learning that we are talking about. I did the bulk of my learning while managing a hotel over a period of two years. I worked my butt off studying IT on my own. I read voraciously, I build an epic home lab, I build anything and everything that you could imagine. I got certs but they were useless.
At the end of two years I had spent almost no money, built a good work history, paid all my bills, built up no debt and was hired right into being a corporate director with over a hundred reports.
But the most important thing, I had learned everything soup to nuts, from the best people in the industry (through books), built up a critical library and taught myself not just the tech, but how to teach myself which is the skill that I would need always.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Even those with years of IT experience, they Must talk about their home lab and what they do on their own.
Same here. When I'm interviewing people, talking about their past jobs is small talk. What I want to know is what are their projects at home. Where is their passion. What are they learning when it is not required.
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@scottalanmiller that is great for you. but I don't want to be anything that high level. being a boss is not my thing. I honestly have fun being a system admin. It is really cool playing with all the new stuff that we get. I get to figure out all the new types of thin clients that we get, I have learned a lot about messing with routers, and my boss put me in charge of our trend micro server so I dig through that and learn how to use that properly. Only thing right now that I want to try is server side. I think being a server tech might be really cool as well.
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@Draco8573 said:
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.
And you are 21, not a big deal. Few people know much IT at your age. You are doing fine. There is plenty of time to figure out what you want to do and how. You are already interning so you have your career clock ticking, which is important.
The bad thing is.... you know 10x what you did last year. But could you have known 20x or 100x? If so, yes, throwing money into the fire because you have been learning less than you should have been. I know no college that teaches at the rate you need to be learning or should be just teaching yourself, for basically free.
Everyone starts somewhere. That's perfectly fine. But what do you do now, that's the question. You are four years away from a degree. You'll be 25 before you are ready to face the field. Is university going to prepare you for the IT landscape half a decade from now? Will you be prepared to go out and find the work that you want? Will you be as far along in your career then as you could be if you buckled down for one year, right now, and taught yourself the IT skills that you need to be truly useful right away in a job?
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@WingCreative said:
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.
I ended up getting no psych in college but have studied a bit on my own since then, quite a lot. But I did get some good sociology classes in engineering school that helped a lot.
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@Draco8573 said:
and like I have said it is actually helping me to learn some things, I enjoy the field but I am a moron. And earlier I mentioned that I was going to start playing around and seeing if I can make a beowulf cluster. and you shot it down because it was old and isn't widely used anymore.
I think "shot it down" is strong. It's a neat project, but if your goal is to build a career in IT, it's not a place to start. Much like university - doing it for its own sake because you think it is fun is great, have at it. Doing it instead of learning stuff that you need for your career will hold you back (compared to where you should be.)
You have pointed out that there are tons of gaps and things that you don't know. Totally expected at your point in the field. But why not spend the time learning those things instead?
Why not learn how to run logging servers, monitoring services, VDI, several virtualization platforms, several operating systems, scripting, databases and other skills you would need for 99% of careers first? Save the fun Beowulf cluster for a time when you don't feel the pressure of getting into a solid, stable career?
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We have one member of our team that has put what @scottalanmiller is talking about into practice.
We have just hired @Mike-Ralston, who has been an Intern with our company for 3 years. He is 18, and is now a full time employee on my PBX team as a junior PBX engineer. He is still learning and working with SAM and others on my team to fill in any gaps he may have. But at 18 he will not have any college debt over his head. Will have had a full time job for 7 years by the time of his counterparts have graduated college, and will be making more than most of them will coming out of college with a degree, just based on his job experience in the next year.
He spends hours playing on our servers, because he wants to. He has built out some very cool stuff and has learned how to troubleshoot and does a great job diving in and researching on issues he hasn't seen before. College will not teach you any of this.
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Not that doing a Beowulf cluster won't teach you some things, but as a starting point it seems very "hobby." Exactly the kinds of things I would expect professors, who are completely out of touch with IT as a field, to point you. Remember, professors don't work in IT, they work in academia. Typically they have little idea what IT as a field is doing and often are unemployable themselves. They teach at a fraction of the income of normal IT pros because it is what they can get, not because they are passionate about IT. They tend to see IT as a very "geeky" and "hobby" activity and lack the business context essential to making IT make sense.
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@coliver said:
One of the biggest things I can't recommend enough... Look into getting some older servers or used equipment and setting up a home lab. It doesn't have to run 24/7 but getting hands on with enterprise gear and operating systems is generally a huge benefit.
This cannot be overstated. The value of this is huge. Even when I was well into my career and making six figures, my home lab remained a critical part of my resume and something discussed heavily in any interview.
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@Draco8573 said:
@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?
I have always been a technically minded guy - the main way my friends and I hung out in high school was through LAN parties, which meant I already had some network troubleshooting experience by the time I graduated
I was interested in making my career something else because I associated IT help with people saying, "Hey by the way, while you're here can you fix this for free?" I always thought I could probably make it work if needed, and after a few fruitless interviews for other on-campus employment I picked up a help desk job without too much trouble.
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@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller that is great for you. but I don't want to be anything that high level. being a boss is not my thing. I honestly have fun being a system admin. It is really cool playing with all the new stuff that we get. I get to figure out all the new types of thin clients that we get, I have learned a lot about messing with routers, and my boss put me in charge of our trend micro server so I dig through that and learn how to use that properly.
I'm not a boss either. I'm a tech, but one that talks to management. I do IT because I love IT. It is an amazing field and gives me a lot of flexibility to be creative and technical. Sure I'm at a high level and that's not for everyone. But the things that got me to being ranked the top IT pro on Wall Street by 38 apply to people looking to get to any spot in the field and successful in it. Whatever it is you want to do in IT, getting there quickly and standing out as being above average helps you to get jobs, keep jobs and be paid more. All things that, in the end, contribute to stability and career safety.
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@Draco8573 said:
I think being a server tech might be really cool as well.
Some terminology that will be critical for you in job hunting:
- Server Tech: This is a high end bench (not IT) career where you rack servers physically, replace failed drives, do cabling, put labels on things, replace memory, etc. It's the high end data center equivalent to "building a PC at home." If you worked in Manhattan you might cap out at $50K. In most regions, $35K. It's not an IT job. CompTIA has a Server+ cert for this. Only enormous companies hire this position.
- System Admin: These are the people who run the actual the operating systems on servers. A system admin would rarely, if ever, physically see a server. These people are sometimes referred to as "ops" people. They are the famously "always on call" jobs and can easily earn above $200K. Their jobs are very high stress and are widely being replaced with DevOps.
- System Engineer: These are the people who design the systems that Admins run. They are not on call normally and have much lower stress. I know very few who earn over $175K because they lack the stress of admin jobs.
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@Minion-Queen mentioned me earlier in this thread, and I just wanted to pop in and confirm what she had to say; I worked with NTG as an intern for three years, training on PBX Engineering, and the use of several other systems, and I cannot stress enough how valuable interning can be. The day I turned 18, they brought me on board as a full-time employee, and have given me the resources to continue growing in experience and IT related knowledge. I'm able to get senior-level certifications if I work towards them, and I never paid a dime for a college education.
I'd say college isn't entirely necessary for IT, unless, as @scottalanmiller has said, you want to go for any sort of Business Management degree. The people who have gone for that tend to get jobs in this field pretty quick, so far as I've seen in my few years experience.
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@scottalanmiller I understand that I will be 25, but the thing is while I want to learn and want to get better. And you are right schools are a little behind the time. And while I can figure things out my brain doesn't work like the rest of yalls. I don't learn like everyone else. Sometimes I just have to have things explained to me a certain way or it just goes right over my head and if I was all by myself I would probably be lost. For example I had a calc class where the professor was decent but I just wasn't understanding what he was saying so i went through like 8 professors that put their lectures on youtube till I found one that made sense to me. I have a pretty bad strain of ADD, because of it i have very bad short term memory and so like I said it helps when I am able to walk up to someone and ask questions.
and as for the Terminology. what about a server administrator?
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@scottalanmiller said:
- Server Tech: This is a high end bench (not IT) career where you rack servers physically, replace failed drives, do cabling, put labels on things, replace memory, etc. It's the high end data center equivalent to "building a PC at home." If you worked in Manhattan you might cap out at $50K. In most regions, $35K. It's not an IT job. CompTIA has a Server+ cert for this. Only enormous companies hire this position.
My dream job, gotta find a way to make it pay.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
- Server Tech: This is a high end bench (not IT) career where you rack servers physically, replace failed drives, do cabling, put labels on things, replace memory, etc. It's the high end data center equivalent to "building a PC at home." If you worked in Manhattan you might cap out at $50K. In most regions, $35K. It's not an IT job. CompTIA has a Server+ cert for this. Only enormous companies hire this position.
My dream job, gotta find a way to make it pay.
Ha ha. Now that it's all about just swapping parts, it just never will.
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@scottalanmiller sigh... if I'm being honest I'd probably take it with the low pay anyway just to be super freaking stoked to show up for work every day at a job I love
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@Draco8573 said:
and as for the Terminology. what about a server administrator?
Not really used. Generally same as system admin. There are only the three roles that I mention. Names could vary, but they really don't. Anything with the word "server" it is is likely to conjure up visions of touching the hardware. And anyone that touches hardware is either very junior or not even in IT. IT is the "tech" side, not the "plugging things in" side.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller sigh... if I'm being honest I'd probably take it with the low pay anyway just to be super freaking stoked to show up for work every day at a job I love
You really like physically racking servers? You can do this in most cities. Every datacenter hires these roles.
