@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get

The Integrated post secondary Education Data System is pretty damn comprehensive.

One metric, Default rates for a school are a HELL of a good proxy for expected outcome.
Laurus College has a 20% default rate. I can't tell you that someone who didn't go to SUNY would not have made MORE than the 895K 20 Year Net ROI (compared to 24 years, less the cost of school), but that's still a damn impressive number above average.

The Department of Education actually has income by major stats for schools.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?380438-Provo-College

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

We don't really have good stats yet due to the FIELD being too young to have produced full career lengths yet, but IT is likely to operate in the same way with people working in the field until they drop. IT might be more demanding than most fields, but it also requires far less physical demands and has a tendency to keep the mind sharp and moving from things like administration to planning and design can make staying in the field right up till you drop very plausible.

I've never seen anyone work in IT at 80 besides Ross (He's in management still at the Godplex last I heard, although I'm not sure if he's still around after the sale to NTT). Someone willing to hire mercenaries and violate international law is the kind of guy I'd rather work for....

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

You are lumping in people with Church Recreation Majors (Yes this is a major, and oddly the only person I know who has it, makes over 100K, although not doing anything related to the major).

Right, on the college side church rec majors are included. On the non-college side, people intending to never do anything but be a cashier at Mcdonald's are included. This "lumping" favours the college system in the stats.

It wouldn't surprise me if Baylor graduates a hell of a lot more family consumer sciences degree's (home Ec) than it does pre-med (It's a top program but not a lot of graduates). The person who doesn't want to do anything but be a cashier at McDonald's is going to have a VERY small ven diagram with Economics degree seekers accepted to the University of Chicago.

I agree it should be considered more strongly, but I think some VERY simple rules could be established for people seeking college.

Have a plan for graduating with less than xxx debt, or expense.
If you are going to be out of work xxx number of years and incur xxx cost, you need to make sure the program at the university is going to generate yyy impact.

Avoid Tier 3 schools, for profits, degree's in animal husbandry and philosophy.
Seek out: Tier 1 schools below xxx cost, majors [top 10] at schools that are a [top 10] for that degree.

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

Good or bad, this is just career questions, though. And physicians are very skewing to the numbers because they stay in school for forever, then make a huge income once they are out, for a very short career. So they make the income sound great, but often don't earn that much.

I wouldn't say their careers are short, just delayed and highly variable on hours in the later years. My wife has attendings in her program in 70's and one in 80's (they work part time). Infectious disease lends itself to working as long as the mind still can remember things and spot patterns.

"Red" Duke was still in the OR in his 70's and 80's (although I don't think he was doing much more than directing residents in the later years), Guy technically lived in the memorial Herman hospital with his dogs.

Also, a lot of doctors don't break 200K (and many barely make over 100K). Pediatric Infectious disease somehow actually makes less than general pediatrics....

Doctors used to not have the higher levels of debt (My cousin had like 20K in the 90's, my wife had well over 100K and that's low by today's standards). Doctors also used to get higher reimbursements from Medicare/Medicaid. Massive fraud in the 70's and 80's have led to a wildly different situation. Those assholes burned a lot of good will....

The other thing with these stats is that they include all majors. We have data that shows WIDE discrepancies between degrees.

You are lumping in people with Church Recreation Majors (Yes this is a major, and oddly the only person I know who has it, makes over 100K, although not doing anything related to the major).

Did I know people who were religion majors with 60K in private loans? Did I know people with creative dance masters who had 120K in debt? Sure!

If you narrow to the top 100 schools, the top 5 programs for income at each, and control for people with a SAT score under 1350 (or whatever the new damn scale is, but a top 20% score) and from a family who is middle class or lower, what is the outcome of college vs. non-college. I suspect you'll see a slightly different outcome with the numbers.

Am I cherry picking? Absolutely.

But my hypothesis is that there are wildly statistically different outcomes for dumb, rich, getting non-profitable degrees, at tier 3 schools, vs. non-rich, tier 1, top degree's who are intelligent.

Even throwing out the two that are more subjective (Dumb, and rich) I still suspect you'll see statistical significance that will overcome your gap.

Do I agree with your premise that too many people are going to college who shouldn't? Sure.

Do I agree with generalizations that it should be avoided? That may be a bit too harsh.

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

party with it. But nothing makes them do that. If the question is "University vs. throwing money away" then clearly

You're ignoring that at some schools you could pretty much drink for free if you just made friends with that rich kid who would pay for the keg (or had a few friends in a frat but managed to avoid joining). You can party and go to college without incurring the burn rate for said parting.

On a more serious note, I've found an issue with your generalization based on averages. You are taking the national average. There is a massive difference in the economic outcome for the University of Chicago vs. for profit diploma mills.

Also at Tier 1 universities cost models get more weird in that if you are smart and poor you will often pay nothing (Baylor gives free tuition to national merit scholars and aggressive scholarships based on SAT scores) while if you are dumb and rich you get to pay "list" as well as have to take remedial courses to get rid of your provisional acceptance.

If you are poor, hard working, and go to a tier 1 university, your cost model is WILDLY different than if you are rich going to a tier 1, or middle income but dumb and going to a for profit diploma mill.

I can properly assess your argument, and find it's weakness because I took rhetoric, from a place that wasn't spelled kollege

@jmoore said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:

@storageninja I went to Baylor and thought they had a good program. It was mostly business with a bit of programming mixed in. I often "had" to help the girls figure out visual c++

I didn't say Baylor's CS was a bad program, just for working in IT infrastructure management, the MIS program was a bitter better rounded. If I wanted to do software engineering obviously MIS is a crap degree compared to CS. My personal issue with Baylor's CS program was that they had a lot of brilliant CS people, but beyond Bill Booth (Who had a master on the side in education) very few were good teachers. This isn't unique to Baylor and is a common issue in an engineering discipline at research universities where it is graduate students who do most of the actual education. Ultimately I wandered out of CS wasn't grades (made A's in my intro classes) it was because I watched office space, and visited a development office that seemed terribly similar and realized I didn't want to do that with my life.

I ended up with a really broad/rounded education (International Studies, minor business, Honors College (Baylor Interdisciplinary Core) that has served me well for my pursuits.

If I had my way, it would be impossible to graduate college without taking ancient and modern rhetoric. So many people in IT (and everywhere) make awful arguments.

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

Equity owners in SMB's often expect everyone to work like they have equity even when they don't is a common issue I see. the "We view our company like family" I often find translated to "We wish we could claim the labor exemptions for overtime and wages that farmers can for their 13 yr old kids!"

I totally saw where you were going with this as I was reading it, and while I've never really thought about it this way, you're absolutely right! They think everyone should work as hard as they do, likely completely forgetting that no one else gets bonuses/profit sharing in most SMB cases, so why would they ever care about your SMB as much as the owners do?

Youtube Video

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

However, I will say that the acting as a partner versus a vendor, service provider, or a supplier has been very noticeable in the MSPs I've talked with, as most of the MSPs I've talked with seem to be all about what they can do for us instead of what we actually need or want them to do for instance. You know, marketing BS instead of just trying to do their jobs and sell us what we want/need, lol. It all sounded impressive to the others in management, as they didn't know enough to know why the marketing was just BS

To be fair, many in house IT staff don't get what the business needs are. (It's fairly common). I've seen many times where internal IT thought their goal was to cut costs (buying desktops or cheap heavy laptops for sales people) and missed out on what the business need was (Sales people who could work from anywhere and would benefit from SaaS Mobile apps, and high battery low weight ultrabooks). Don't conflate a recommendation to spend money on things you don't see value in, without things that DON"T actually have value to the business. Looking back to my time working in house at a SMB Dunning–Kruger effect was common in our department.

Yeah, this is one I have to remind myself of often.

In consulting I would always invite the software developers, and a few random users and the operations management at customers to lunch and leave the Sysadmins behind. You learned what the REAL value of performance, uptime, and a given application was talking to them. It was comical how out of touch in house sysadmins get (Hey, I used to be one too). Oddly enterprises tend to do a better job at this because they have dedicated non-technical IT management functions (CIO's, Directors) who's jobs are to bridge with other BU's and departments.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

However, I will say that the acting as a partner versus a vendor, service provider, or a supplier has been very noticeable in the MSPs I've talked with, as most of the MSPs I've talked with seem to be all about what they can do for us instead of what we actually need or want them to do for instance.

Well keep in mind that an MSP by definition means that you adapt to them. If you are choosing the MSP subset of the ITSP market, that's an up front expectation. ITSPs might be more flexible and be there to do whatever you need, rather than having a pre-packaged product that you conform to.

Lets say you think Juniper or Checkpoint is a better firewall for what you do. Fine. But if you pick MSP A, and they exclusively use Palo Alto firewalls, you are getting a Palo Alto. The "benefits" of the checkpoint will likely be offset by the fact that they have 3-4 people on staff who are certified in Palo Alto, and can do anything you need in seconds vs. someone who knows 3-4 vendors costs them more to staff and is slower on all platforms.

Now if the MSP is standardized on technology that will not work for you (You have windows apps and they are a Mac OS only, or Linux Virtual Desktop only MSP) then maybe they are the wrong MSP. Maybe they focus on Accounting only clients, and you want a MSP that will do full stack support for some Sage ERP system. That's another example of a bad fit.

90% of the time I see people complain about the products a MSP will bring in they may be technically right (Brocade VDX, or Dell Servers is a better product than say Meraki, or HPE Procurve, or Cisco UCS servers) but if you can fit within their bubble of supported products you get to enjoy crazy cost savings by piggybacking on their procurement scale, their support scale, and their training/experience being focused.

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@scottalanmiller Ironically, we're actually non-profit and he works from home. Only one director is allowed to work from home simply due to sheer workload requirements negating any other way to make all the things that need to happen, happen at times. I'm certain it's far more likely an emotional decision than a business one, because there's really no practical reason that for instance, I cannot work remotely as often as not.

Non-profit IT is kinda a mess in how they do staffing. It tends to fall into....

1. I'm going to hire my friends or people who know donors.
2. People who will work for less and believe in the mission (which is strange, because they should just go work somewhere else and then volunteer on the side)
3. People who were desperate to get that position/title and are underqualified to the point that they will work for the 30% less.
4. The sadly rarer than they should non-profits who run like a corporation, pay market rates, and do the objective skill based hiring.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

My one big gripe with our current Executive is that the he is very anti-remote access for some reason.

Emotions. SMBs will often punish their workers simply because they dislike people more than they like profits. Willing to sabotage the organization for some personal emotional benefit.

That's not to say that working remotely is best in all cases. But being against it emotionally instead of considering it as a business decision is actively not doing his job as an executive and exactly the kind of problem I see in the SMB - either hurting the company through incompetence or outright overt corruption.

had a hilarious meeting with a VP who was over an IT department at a SMB. He was explaining why he wanted to fire the department manager.

"Some days he comes in late and works from home. He sets an awful example for the younger staff! How can they ever expect to have any work ethic like that!"

Had to calmly explain that work from home and flex time is common in our industry, and if they wanted to make people work 8-5 always be on call and only have 1 week of vacation they needed to double their staff to absorb the on call, risk higher attrition or give everyone a 40% pay raise they wanted to keep. Being a consultant was fun some days.

Equity owners in SMB's often expect everyone to work like they have equity even when they don't is a common issue I see. the "We view our company like family" I often find translated to "We wish we could claim the labor exemptions for overtime and wages that farmers can for their 13 yr old kids!"

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

However, I will say that the acting as a partner versus a vendor, service provider, or a supplier has been very noticeable in the MSPs I've talked with, as most of the MSPs I've talked with seem to be all about what they can do for us instead of what we actually need or want them to do for instance. You know, marketing BS instead of just trying to do their jobs and sell us what we want/need, lol. It all sounded impressive to the others in management, as they didn't know enough to know why the marketing was just BS

To be fair, many in house IT staff don't get what the business needs are. (It's fairly common). I've seen many times where internal IT thought their goal was to cut costs (buying desktops or cheap heavy laptops for sales people) and missed out on what the business need was (Sales people who could work from anywhere and would benefit from SaaS Mobile apps, and high battery low weight ultrabooks). Don't conflate a recommendation to spend money on things you don't see value in, without things that DON"T actually have value to the business. Looking back to my time working in house at a SMB Dunning–Kruger effect was common in our department.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot.

This is true to some degree. SMBs settle because they want to, however. SMBs have access to the MSP/ITSP market that Enterprises realistically do not. There are more resources available to the SMB market than the SMB market is willing to utilize - sure if all SMBs decided to hire well they'd be screwed, but they just don't bother leaving loads of good talent wasted whether individual or *SP oriented.

Enterprises rarely leave the good people on the market, someone snaps them up quickly. But SMBs decide to forego good hiring the majority of the time. Any SMB that wants good people can get them pretty easily. So while they might decide to settle, it's not because they have to.

I assume that Scott specifically means to terms of compensation - if the SMB wanted a good highly qualified person, they'd simply have to offer the compensation to make someone want to work there.

Well maybe, but also soft benefits. Lots of SMBs struggle because of location. I know people making amazing salaries that will likely quit their jobs almost exclusively because of the location. Company is great, people are great, vacation plan is good, health benefits are good, money is great... but the location is... drab.

SMBs often struggle to offer desired locations and tend to fail to offer vacation, health and work from home benefits that enterprises often offer. And travel is nearly unheard of.

SMBs could do all these kinds of things and get anyone that they wanted out of the enterprise (almost). The one big barrier that they can't overcome is that they rarely offer interesting problems. SMBs tend to be extremely "cookie cutter" through no fault of their own and this can make them less enticing for people seeking a challenge.

Here's my thoughts on the location, travel, problem scale...

Working for a SMB I had to drive to a part of town where you needed a gun to go to lunch. I know a MSP who actually made anyone who visited several SMB clients have CHL's for liability concerns. Meanwhile, enterprises in the area allow work from home, nice downtown offices with tunnel network access so you don't get sweaty going to lunch, and 30 floor window views for the IT staff. The MSP I worked for had a nice view lunch onsite, and tons of places to eat/drink after work.

Working for a SMB I had to take off work to go to Spiceworld, and the one conference I went to was tiny, in Florida, and I had to share a room with my boss. Working for a MSP I was encouraged to go and it was paid for with my own room. Working for an enterprise I can go to as many conferences as I want, including international ones, and I can book at the Shangrai La and no one makes a fuss.

On the problem front, I went from dealing with how to "scale" a system from 30 users to 50, at a SMB to a MSP where I had to migrate 35 file servers and 25K users from Novel to Active Directory and new workstations in 2 weeks. At an enterprise, I have conversations with sizing a 5PB storage solution and think "this isn't that big really".

@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:

I think moving IT programs from CS/SE schools into being under a business school makes a lot of sense. IT is 80% business, 20% tech. Of course you need both, but universities are experts at teaching business and liberal arts, this is what they've done for hundreds and years and done well. Teaching tech is not in their traditional mandate and is something they have no historical track record for and little current capacity. Not only is the non-tech stuff dramatically more important, it's where universities have the most skill. Teaching too much tech makes universities almost certainly set up to fail while teaching something that isn't even very useful.

At Baylor it was in the business school (Under management information systems). Gave a much more rounded degree than the stuff I've seen put in CS schools.

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before

I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.

your quote is broken again, I didn't say that.

This better?

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before

I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

As far as job sharing, that's precisely why I said that SMBs require generalists. There will likely never be a time or place where SMBs don't need generalists (not just in IT), and an IT generalist is a cost-saving factor that no one who has posted here has seemed to enter into their calculations. If you try and consider SMBs in Enterprise terms, you're quite likely doing it wrong, because SMBs aren't generally like that until they reach a certain size. They're entirely different types of entities whose similarities largely end at the point where you acknowledge that they are businesses of different scale. You can't run an SMB like an Enterprise, because SMBs don't possess the scale to staff like an Enterprise. It's extremely rare in most fields that it is cheaper to hire a contractor than it is to utilize your own staff. The cost-savings only ever comes when expertise is required, or regulation requires typically. The on-staff IT in an SMB is probably not only doing IT, you're correct. That is precisely why the MSP saves money argument is wonky, because it fails to account for the other tasks that that in-house IT staff does in addition to the basic management and maintenance of the environment. Sure, one can make the argument that the IT staff may not be adequately managing the environment... but it's a may, not a will or a must. It's also entirely possible that they're bringing lots of added value over an MSP by doing other tasks that an MSP won't do at all, or will only do for added, cumulative costs that simply don't exist with on-site staff.

Of course this is true - but it's now likely that you are over or under paying that person for these other non IT jobs. It's extremely unlikely that a person is clocking out when done with IT work at wage X and then clocking in at wage y when they are doing non IT things.
This is where the company can either come out ahead or behind.
So we have two situations, the over and the under paid - there's always the potential for parity pay, but that really seems pretty unlikely based on skill sets.

You either end up with someone who's bad at IT and the right price for taking apart printers or mopping the floors, or you get someone who's amazing at IT and completely over priced.

In reality, you get the former until they leave, get replaced by the latter, suffer from thisuntil they become the former, they leave and the cycle starts all over again.

@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

One of the things here is not to simply look at cost savings, but cost parity. If the company gets all the same work done at a higher quality at the same cost, that's a win.

When I worked for a MSP, no one came to us to save money. (and I mean no one).

They came to us over money but it boiled down to...

1. They wanted to get more value for the same spend.
2. They wanted to spend more, but know where it was going.

I'd argue SaaS business have the same model. I can keep using my 12-year-old copy of ACT for CRM, and it's a TON cheaper than SalesForce (Sunk cost) but I see a hell of a lot of companies going to SalesForce.

If you think your primary job in IT is to control cost (and not to increase agility for the business, or mitigate risk) then at best you're going to be stuck at 30% below market rate for someone with your number of years in IT, and at worse you'll get pushed out by further automation, SaaS/Cloud/Simplification.

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

For me, benefits don't cost us anywhere remotely close to 25K/yr, it's more like 15K/yr.

There's a lot of costs to carrying an employee. Unemployment insurance/tax, the other 1/2 of FICA, corporate insurance and liability often is a per head charge and then others that could be sunk costs, or not (Real estate for office, air con/power for employee, parking spots that can be anything from a free dirt pad, to a $150 a month contract garage). Throw in software licensing (CAL's, 365/office) and general software licensing for IT specific tools (License for Fusion, a Secret server for password management) and the stuff adds up. MSP's get to amortize this stuff across multiple customers and their RMM and other tools get to take advantage of licensing at scale. We paid maybe $2 per device per month we were doing log analytics against, where a comparable onsite license for the same product was $250 per device. (We didn't even have much scale).