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When I had to hire people, I was much more interested in seeing a portfolio than a degree.
It depends on what the job is though. I definitely want my doctor to have a degree
Reminds me of what the guys in construction driving around in lifted trucks with blue lives matter and we the people stickers who’s dads got them a six figure job right out of high school in a union that is run like a white supremisist gang would say
I have only recently became aware of how shitty a lot of construction /plumbing/ electric/ etc union members are as people.
As they all promoted a giant data center in my city that will pollute and harm everyone (even them).
But they think 5 years of work on it is worth selling out their entire community and future generations for.
They spoke at our town hall meeting.
“Me me me, I want I need I deserve”.
What a bunch of tools.
I told another friend of mine about the experience, he’s a mechanic and shares my general values but he deals with a lot of those types due to his occupation.
He said that’s how they all are. They’ve always been like that.
I was surprised because I thought union people understand why there are unions.
Surely they would be against “the man”.
But they are not. And seem incredibly gullible and selfish. If they turn a profit, fuck everyone else.
Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.
Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.
Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.
Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn’t matter how you got them.
Either will land you a job lol
Neither *
Sadly some jobs are not available without the paper. That credentialism for ya
Most jobs that require degrees rarely require skills/knowledge learned in college/uni aside from sci/tech/engineering because the benefit there is that colleges have millions of dollars of instruments/equipment to fuck around with …
What I see as the value of a degree is that it’s a piece of paper that says that youre likely able to learn and play whatever game a job entails, communicate formally and effectively, be self sufficient, understand/accomplish specified goals with deadlines, and work effectively in a team.
Can someone without a degree have those skills? Totally. Does someone with a degree have all those skills? Not specifically, but they’ve likely been through the ringer for ~4 years and seen a lot of shit they had to face on their own and be accountable for it.
Can someone cheat their way through and be useless, sure, but they frequently found out…or just become managers unfortunately.
Deleted my original reply because I was just splitting hairs. I mostly agree with you, I just don’t like the framing
I understand both sides here. I’m a technician who worked as an engineer in the past. Working on getting my degree. The plant’s electrical engineer wanted nothing to do with our 24VDC power supply problems. Isn’t that her JOB. Us three technicians have probably 100 years of experience, combined. We figured it out
Conflict on the model? Add a bit where the contractor is responsible for resolving issues and then draw the tray overlapping with the pipes AND the vents. On walkdown complain that its not built as drawn.
I had to do install drawings/instructions at my last job. The number of times I just wanted to put “install according to all local codes”. I’m looking at 15 year old architectural drawings, never seen the building, don’t know shit about where anything actually is. They’re big boys and will figure it out. I was in aerospace before that and was like we did less documentation. I hate MEP.
It’s pretty funny reading the comments because honestly I would generally agree with the meme. But I’m coming at this from the perspective of a systems administrator and when it comes to dealing with networking and security most of the people I see coming out of college with degrees don’t know a goddamn thing. Their courses are like 10 years out of date and not even remotely relevant to the real world but because they spent so much money on getting it they are very inflexible about changing how they were taught.
Meanwhile when I find somebody out on the street who just has had a passion for computers since they were like five they tend to be extremely on top of current security and networking needs and more than willing to be flexible and change how things are done when the situation calls for it.
Idk where you are but my experience but my lectures were always about the last trends and updated every summer. My experience is the opposite : you learn the latest tech doing your degree learning git-ops workflow and containerisation to work on VMs and Jenkins
I kinda agree, but mostly because western universities are being run like businesses first and educational institutions a distant second or third, and this is the inevitable outcome. Idk if other cultures have the same problem with their universities.
It’s more lucrative to sell degrees as status symbols and career checkboxes, than to sell education. This changes both their target market demographics, and their funding priorities.
elites love to paywall access to the upper middle class
Hey it’s not just the west. India’s degree farms are comedic legends.
Yeah I don’t wanna exclude other places for having shit universities for whatever reason - I just wanna comment on why it sucks in “the west” (by which I largely mean USA, Canada, western Europe).
It seems to me that, at least in IT, a degree matters for your first job, and even that is very slowly fading.
After the first job experience is what matters.Saying it is slowly fading is wrong and misleading. A degree proves you can commit to learning something. It gives a basis for me, an engineer, to talk to you, an engineer. It tells me we have a common knowledge ground.
The era of bootcamps is over. For one person getting a job without a degree a hundred get rejected.
I have the degree and think this whole thing is a bit silly. I work at Google as a senior SWE, and have been focused on machine learning for the last 10 years. The degree taught me a few interesting things that I would have picked up on my own, and way more uninteresting things that I don’t need for my job. Despite the degree, getting a new job at a high level requires leetcode, which is similar in principle-- a toll booth that most people can pass if they pay the fee (studying).
Many things make this problematic, including basic respect for time, but especially equity. We get a largely homogenous neurotype and background because only a narrow slice of people have the ability and will to meet these requirements, and they are only very loosely correlated to job performance.
It’s a positive too though-- without these entry requirements, companies could not justify high salaries. I say this knowing it is to my detriment-- we do not need this.
IT is a super broad field. Many IT jobs just want you to have some certification level to get into (no degree required) or some number of years in similar work. My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license. Some IT positions want you to have bachelor’s or higher in a specific IT niche.
I like to tell some of my clients, that I’m like a general physician, I can tell you what’s wrong, fix quite a few things, prescribe fixes for the bigger issues, and refer you to specialists for things I have no business touching.
My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license.
Please do elaborate.
I had a forklift certification and got a job at an ewaste recycling facility moving pallets of equipment meant for refurbishment and resale. That job had a lot of down time so when I wasn’t moving the equipment I took up working on the computers, then the laptops, then the servers. I got so good at it that they gave me an ITAD client to handle. It was military servers that had been decommissioned. My job was to identify and sanitize/destroy any data storage before refurbishing the equipment to be resold at a profit share with the organizations I was working with.
They always present them as mutually exclusive, instead of related or reinforcing.
Kinda shit a PhD writes who can’t find a job with his or her exotic qualifications…
Can be legit. I once got turned down for a job because i didn’t have an mcse despite having over 20 years experience administering windows server and AD (and i’m talking laaaaaarge scale…universities and citrix farms).
That’s what happens when the people doing the hiring don’t know anything about any of the skills required for the role
The amount of people who make it through HR hell and interview for my team, that have a some experience but it’s all bounce around 1y and then have an insane amount of certs, that don’t know what they’re doing is way to high in tech. I’ll take a green horn that wants to learn and has a good foundation before I’ll take someone with bounce around experience and a shit load of certs. Almost all certs are how well can you take tests.
I have literally worked in environs where having certifications and nothing else was grounds for disqualification because it meant you’d been taught dogma, not functionality. My personal fave was the tech who put in a request for graphite dust to clean a power button on workstation because it was sticking. Why was it sticking? Some jackass had spilled coke.
I cleaned it with a chux and closed the ticket.
I just finished my CS Bachelors and overall most of it felt like a massive fucking waste of time, especially since I suck at learning from lectures and also the content was like 15 years out of date. For the few classes that actually seemed worthwhile and interesting, I’m trying to figure out who the fuck is hiring for these skills that’s not military-adjacent. I did end up earning some Masters credits through a fast track program, but I don’t think it’s worth continuing at this point.
You can generally use CS as a springboard into most tech related fields. Where its most helpful is probably research and academia.
If programming is even remotely interesting for you, getting a low paying junior dev job will probably teach you more and you can use that as a springboard into more software dev, data, AI, cybersecurity, networking… As long as you are willing to learn on the job and push yourself forward.I’m legit interested, not trying to be rude – where I can I find a low paying junior dev job??
It seems like the only places hiring are looking for Senor devs or Project leads, AI evaporated all the entry level positions.
In the US, the only places I’ve seen that are both interviewing and hiring entry level are the new grad rotational programs at the bigger companies in finance, healthcare, and logistics. Fair warning, the tech stack is a hit or a miss in those kinds of industries, heavily team dependent
All I can add is that I worked IT for 9 years getting shit pay. Despite the fact that I spent most of my day writing code, nobody willing to hire me as a developer with an appropriate salary.
I got my degree by going to school at night after my day job. Within 3 months, I had doubled my salary with a ‘real’ developer job. I made more progress in 3 months than I did in 9 years at being able to support myself.
And no I don’t use anything I learned at UNI. I knew how to write code.
You don’t need a formal education to be great in your field, but it will help ypu grow immensely.
It depends per case, my friend kept studying while I dropped out (due to private circumstances).
My friend ended up at the same employer for the same pay only years later, he wasn’t a good fit for his field.
A few years later I jumped ship to try and develop myself into a better paid job, I am now an actual crane operator with a beefy wage. My friend is still there making the same low wage.
But he got lucky on a different matter, due to him living at home until 33 he did manage to buy a house with massive savings. I haven’t yet.
This is life, there aren’t any given certainties. Only people who claim their experience will be the same for you.
Who the fuck studies until he’s 33 and earn less than a crane operator
He didn’t study until he was 33, he lived with his parents until he was 33.
well i grow actual carrots and what you actually get is both
My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.
Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes
Why didn’t she just sue the potatoes?
Maybe she’s a hesi-tater
Better than a master-tater.
She did. Took them for all they were worth
