Re: University Reccomendations

On 04/26/2012 11:18 AM, Andrew Henderson wrote:
> These days, I don't think that is such a wise approach to a career in 
> IT. I'm sure there are IT shops out there with some need for the new 
> tech of the month, but the majority are interested in the basic 
> infrastructure expansion and maintenance.  Backups.  Mail-server 
> maintenance. Troubleshooting.  Account creation/deletion.  Security.  
> IT is usually not the core competency of a company.  It is a cost 
> center, like secretarial and janitorial services.  It is necessary, 
> but it doesn't directly generate profit for the company.  IT costs the 
> company money, so a company is going to minimize the amount spent on IT.

You honestly think that in 5-10 years that basic infrastructure, 
maintenance, backups, mail server maintenance, and account management 
are going to be the staple of businesses IT departments?!?

* Basic infrastructure & maintenance:  Everything is moving to the 
cloud...  Where the cloud service providers will handle this.  
Eliminating thousands of IT jobs performing such work in IT shops 
everywhere.  It's a dead-end.
* Backups:  If you're using a cloud service for nearly everything that 
will be their responsibility.  Not only that but "Joe in Accounting" can 
handle downloading the export file or the occasional sync with the 
storage provider.  Besides, "Backup Administrator" was never a great job 
to begin with.  Might as well have been called, "tape media jockey" at 
many shops.
* Mail server administration:  Come on.  This job is rapidly dying a 
Gmail death.  Good riddance too...  I mean, who likes to be constantly 
tweaking their anti-spam relay?
* Account management:  Even at enormous organizations that keep their 
own ID infrastructure they're outsourcing this to low-paid folks in the 
cheapest-country-of-the-moment.  Smaller organizations will just use 
services like Google Apps where they give you an easy enough interface 
that the receptionist could handle it.  It's a dead end.

Security, on the other hand...  Yikes!  Every business is rapidly 
becoming an IT business and without security expertise they're just 
asking for trouble.  Security consulting, services, and software will 
grow and grow.

You're right about businesses considering IT a cost center though.  For 
many this will be the case for time immemorial but for *most* this is 
changing.  Even something as simple as a flower shop can completely 
overtake their competition with a well-designed and regularly-updated 
web presence that spans social networks and "conversation services" 
(e.g. forums, twitter, etc).  The trouble with trying to take advantage 
of this though is that it is just as easy to hire a really great 
designer/company or marketing person/company in India as it is to hire 
one locally.

> IT professionals are never happy about this characterization.  After 
> all, if the infrastructure fails, the business grinds to a halt.  But, 
> much like the phone company, nobody thinks much about them until 
> service fails. This a the major downfall of being in the IT industry.

If you work for a tech company this isn't always the case.  For everyone 
else, yeah :D

> Back in the 90s, IT WAS a profit center for many companies.  ISPs were 
> popping up all over.  Large companies were developing infrastructures 
> for web business and customer interaction.  The service being sold WAS 
> IT. There was a shortage of good people to fill in the niche with 
> newer technologies, so anyone good enough could potentially slip in 
> and begin building a career.  These days, IT services are a 
> commodity.  If you've got people with bachelors and masters degrees 
> trying for these same IT jobs that you are, companies are going to go 
> with them if the cost to them is the same or only marginally higher.

That's not how it works. THIS is how it works:  You need to hire someone 
in IT...  You post a job (often via the HR department) and they get 250 
resumes.  In your job description to HR you wrote something like, 
"Experience with object oriented development" so 200 resumes immediately 
get ignored because they don't have "object oriented" anywhere.  40 of 
the remaining are immediately thrown away because you also put 
"Experienced software developer" and those resumes only listed things 
like, "Architect", "Development Lead", or "Programmer".

In the best-case scenario you get 10 resumes to look at (in my 
experience they usually whittle it down to 3-5).  If you're lucky HR 
actually contacted these people and determined that they really do 
exist, are looking for a job, and live within a reasonable distance of 
wherever it is they'll be working (i.e. "Sorry, we're not going to pay 
to relocate you from the middle of nowhere").  At this point you can 
pick & choose which folks to interview over the phone.  Unless something 
is horrifically bad in the resume (grammar/spelling usually do it for me 
=) you'll probably at least talk to them on the phone.

Then once you've spoken to a few of these people you'll lose hope for 
humanity and go back to HR with something like, "Is this all you 
got?!?"  Later you may get interviewed by the media and you'll be likely 
to say something along the lines of, "We have a really hard time finding 
qualified IT people!"

The point I'm making here is that it is EXCEEDINGLY RARE that you'll 
ever have two (or more) candidates that did equally well (at a "good 
enough" level) in your technical interview.  There will pretty much 
always be "the guy that did the best" and "everyone else".  At that 
point in the hiring process education is absolutely 100% meaningless.  
No one is going to say, "Well, this guy answered all of our questions 
very competently but he doesn't have a degree...  Let's go with the guy 
that answered half the questions correctly instead."

At smaller companies things work differently.  Anything can happen!

> Another thing that has bothered me for years is how people without 
> degrees rail about how worthless they are and a waste of money.  I 
> think they protest a bit too much.  I understand that some may have 
> made a career for themselves without a degree, and that's great!  But, 
> I think that requires a bit of luck in addition to talent.

Degree or no degree, you still need a bit of luck in addition to 
talent.  Careers and degrees are orthogonal concepts for all but 
doctors, lawyers, and a few other professions that have legal credential 
requirements.

> I've actually been a hiring manager at a few different companies, one 
> of which was in Jacksonville.  I have hired a few developers from the 
> Jacksonville area that did not have degrees.  They were a little rough 
> around the edges, but I spent time working with them and helping them 
> to fill out their skills a little.  I've also interviewed plenty of 
> people without degrees that were just plain awful.  Seriously.  Many 
> had a know-it-all attitude with half a dozen unfinished personal 
> projects and the "a degree is a waste of time... I'm a self-starter!"  
> attitude.  I did my best to look beyond the personality and judge 
> their merit based solely upon technical ability.  They just didn't 
> stack up very well.  They talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk.  
> And I wasted dozens of productive hours conducting interviews.
>
> For those that I did hire, I spent my own time working with them and 
> providing training.  I was investing my own time into their personal 
> growth.  I believe that that sort of investment into a company's 
> employees is very much the exception, rather than the rule.
This sounds like hiring... Anybody!  No matter who you hire they're 
going to be a little rough around the edges.  Every organization is 
different.  Not only that but these are just anecdotes.  I'm sure you've 
encountered plenty of people with degrees that were astoundingly 
unknowledgeable or with know-it-all attitudes with half a dozen 
unfinished personal projects.

Let me ask you this:  Did the type of a degree make a difference?  If it 
wasn't Yale or Harvard did the school matter?

> What my anecdotes boil down to is that there are people out there 
> without degrees that are VERY good at what they do.  But, they are 
> buried among the large number of applicants with mediocre talent and 
> an inflated sense of their own ability.  From an HR perspective, why 
> waste all the resources sifting through all that when you can just use 
> an associates/bachelors degree or "five to ten years experience" as a 
> filter?

HR doesn't look at degrees.  They look at keywords and when it comes to 
IT they have no knowledge of equivalents so they pass on anyone without 
the very specific criteria they're looking for.  Unless you put "degree" 
on your job description it isn't going in the keywords.

> But, if you'd like to stack the odds in our favor a little bit and 
> make the process of developing a career a bit easier, consider getting 
> a degree.  To any naysayers that believe that a worthless $40k piece 
> of paper to bypass HR is a tremendous waste, please remember that that 
> piece of paper has a non-trivial education that kinda comes along with 
> it.  And if you are a self-starter that is capable of so much without 
> a degree, then certainly you're taking advantage of the facilities and 
> faculty at a university or college to learn lots of current market 
> skills on the side while you're there, right?

If the point is to get yourself educated what the hell is the point of 
the degree?  Just go learn stuff!  The resources available for this are 
better (and cheaper) than at any other point in history.  If degrees 
didn't create such crippling debt with no guarantee of a job we wouldn't 
be having this conversation.

> Please understand that I am not a degree snob.  I'm just providing 
> anecdotes based upon my experience in the tech industry in markets in 
> Florida, New York, and California.  There are a lot of crap people out 
> there looking for jobs.  I've seen talented people without degrees, 
> and I've seen awful people with degrees.  Based upon my observation of 
> hundreds of IT and engineering employees, the biggest indicator of 
> future success in their jobs was the following:
>
> Those that had a degree, enjoyed what they were doing, and had made 
> the most of their time at college (side projects, internships, 
> research projects, networking with others, etc.) were the most likely 
> to be flexible, quick to understand new technologies, and successful 
> in the long-run.

Here's another way to state that:  Those that went out and got 
real-world experience while getting their degree were the most likely to 
be competent.  What a surprise!  My argument is that they'd still be 
competent without a piece of paper and $40,000+ in debt.  A Github 
account costs nothing and can be a lot more useful at proving competence.

-- 
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"


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