Blue-Collar Workers Make the Leap To Tech Jobs, No College Degree Necessary (wsj.com) 139
As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to "new collar" roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules. From a report: More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions made such a switch during the past two years, according to new research from Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm that surveyed 80,000 workers world-wide between August 2020 and March 2022. Many of the new jobs are in software and information technology, as well as tech-related roles in logistics, finance and healthcare. New data from the Current Population Survey and LinkedIn also suggest the pandemic has helped catapult more workers into more upwardly mobile careers.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree. Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree. Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.
Not surprising (Score:3)
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Certainly not everyone can love/survive a job doing nothing but coding
It's a lot easier to do so after having survived a job doing nothing but back-breaking, mindless, low-paid manual labor. At that point the coding tedium is not so bad.
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No it doesn't.
It generally exercises the same specific muscles over and over giving the worker a false sense of health while actually leaving the rest of the body under-utilized and out of shape.
Then the repetitive motion injuries kick in.
Not to mention exposure to chemicals, accidents, inhaled dust, the deafening effects of long term exposure to loud noise...
Both kinds of work kill you. They just do it in different ways.
Re: Not surprising (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on the job.
Turning the same wrench the same way all day every day? Maybe.
Scrambling up a ladder and bounding up a roof with two 40 lb bags of shingles over your shoulders for 8 hours straight? I'd say that's pretty good for all muscle groups.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar experience with electronics designers. One guy in particular stood out, no degree but extremely diligent. Most of his designs were nearly flawless, even when it was something new to him like power electronics. He put in the effort to review the literature.
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I just did a data boot camp and got a job offer 3 business days after I was done.
A pretty good offer too.
Of the other 5 students all got job offers within a month (some better than mine).
We were simultaneous to anjava group (10 students) and they all got offers real fast too.
The results were far superior than expected, the job market was hot, with good pay relative to cost of living here.
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I wonder how much of that is older guys remembering how the labor market was in the 80s or 90s, and assuming their difficulty finding a job today must be due to some kind of discrimination, rather than the world having changed around them.
Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
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The article talks about "tech skills", but that doens't mean programming. Do you use a computer, even if it's just to send PR tweets? That's a tech job!
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Wait, there are jobs where you do nothing but coding???
What about documentation, testing, requirements gathering, demoing, troubleshooting, deploying updates, code reviews, and peer reviews to management? Every place I have worked, developers were responsible for all of this.
There are plenty of degreed folks doing low skills (Score:3)
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As evidenced by the employment rate and average salary, the main issue with hiring them is they all get jobs already.
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Since you put didn't use the subject line properly, I have to quote you like this:
Reply to: There are plenty of degreed folks doing low skills
There are plenty of degreed folks doing low skills (Score:2)
by iamnotx0r ( 7683968 ) Alter Relationship on 2022-04-12 17:08 (#62439758)
I wonder whats the issue hiring them?
Looks ugly, but it works. Thanks for misusing the subject line.
But anyways, to actually respond to what you said, the reason is that one black mark ends your career forever. You only get one chance in this world. Once you have a mark, you are no longer eligible for any good jobs unless you are extremely lucky or extremely well connected. There are no second chances. You just die. What a lovely world we have created. :)
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Coming out of school...you really shouldn't be thinking of new cars or home ownership.
You gotta get your foot in the door and start, at the bottom and work your way up with experience, etc.
Re: There are plenty of degreed folks doing low sk (Score:2)
$12 an hour? I mean, that's around minimum wage here....
Not trying to be a snob, it just surprises me that developers could or would be paid so poorly in the US.
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They're not. He's being an idiot.
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You are acting like the only choice is a $12/hour job. You can work fast food and get more than that at some places.
Don't be absurd. You can get a junior engineer position for $70k/year without breaking a sweat if you actually know what the hell you're doing, and can prove it. Take some time to think of a neat project that you enjoy, and write some quality code samples and put them on GitHub; and then be prepared to walk through them with prospective employers - showing you can do the job already is the
Re: There are plenty of degreed folks doing low sk (Score:2)
What real-world employer is going to invest the hours you describe, reviewing your personal projects on Git, to decide if they want to offer an inexperienced coder ("engineer"?) a $70K job?
No one. It's a fantasy projection of how you want the world to work, nothing more.
That's almost as bad as going out and accumulating a bunch of beginner certifications in random technology...
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If you go for that you might as well work at Walmart.
Re: There are plenty of degreed folks doing low sk (Score:2)
A high school diploma isn't a credential.
Many unemployed gender studies majors will likely take warehouse jobs so they can attempt to pay off their student loans, buy some food, and maybe put a roof over their heads.
Being 'credentialed' isn't considered the major accomplishment it was 40 years ago... AOC has an Economics degree and worked as a bartender, what was her hourly pay rate?
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Re:There are plenty of degreed folks doing low ski (Score:5, Insightful)
And what's the problem with working for it? I sure didn't start out at a director position fresh out of school, and neither did anyone else unless they have an uncle CEO or something.
Everyone gets out of school and learns to make it on their own. That means having a shitty car or riding the bus. That means having a roommate. That means having a entry-level position, because you are entering. I don't understand why people think they should just instantly get a 6-figure salary, a 2000+ square foot home, and a Tesla because they graduated from college. So did literally hundreds of thousands of other people, THIS YEAR.
If you want that shit, work for it like just about every other person out there. If you're 18 you should already know if your parents are filthy rich or not, and if they're going to buy you all that shit or not. If they aren't, get to work because that's the only way any of it will happen.
Also, these things are very important, but not in any particular order:
- start saving for retirement wherever you can, unless you want to work for your entire life. Participate in your 401(k) or pension if you have one on offer.
- don't blow your money on going out all the time, or taking extravagant international trips. You'll have time for that when you can afford to do it right - Europe, Japan, Fiji, etc. will still be there in 10 years and it costs a LOT of money to travel.
- don't walk into a new job acting like you know how shit should be done, unless you're being hired into a position of authority. The people already doing the job are going to think you're an arrogant ass. Instead, show them you know your shit by doing what is asked of you as good as you can.
- it's okay to have suggestions if you think something can be done better. Make it a conversation and get some feedback. Any more, IT work is collaborative work.
- do not go buy a flashy car as soon as you think you can afford it. Whatever you end up buying, it will immediately lose about 25% of it's value. Get something lightly used that you can depend on for at least 6 years, and stay on top of the maintenance so it could go 12 years if required. Not having that $600+ car payment every month will take you a lot farther than a fancy car in your early 20s.
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Re: There are plenty of degreed folks doing low sk (Score:2)
Have you seen the cost of housing and new cars lately?
FFS, does every high school graduate need an apartment and new car three weeks after graduating? They are hiring high school graduates to work in warehouse while they figure out their next move. I'm surprised you didn't ask "how are they going to support a family of four on that pay rate!"
Sounds reasonable (Score:2)
All of the skills, and none of the attitude. Sounds like a win!
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Worse, this may encourage employers to start treating formerly "white collar" positions more like blue collar jobs, which always seem to have a ton of draconian work rules and worse management/labor friction.
Technology has always been semi-marginal in terms of its white collar status and larger corporate acceptance, I don't think it will take much encouragement to kick it further down the totem pole into a fully blue collar job.
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That's the point of all the hammering on "STEM education". Notice it's always pushed by titans of the tech industry (or their upstream funding sources like the DoD.) They feel tech workers have too much say in their organizations and need to be knocked down a rung.
The goal is to be able to treat tech workers the same way they treat truck drivers.
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I think there's just a lot of frustration that they have not been able to organize and scale the labor side of information technology the same way they do factories or other mass production. It's kind of ironic, but I think a lot of factories which have altered their top-down models to involve line production workers in decisions (however limited it really is) tend to improve productivity and worker engagement, yet I think most corporations think the opposite about technology work.
It's kind of funny how we
And people wonder why wages have increased (Score:4, Interesting)
The labor participation rate has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded as a higher than expected number of people took early retirement.
Immigration was restricted during Covid.
There were 1,000,000 "excess" (higher than normal) deaths over the last two years with an additional unknown amount disabled due to long haul Covid and lingering effects.
All these factors and more have combined to put immense supply pressure on the labor market. Yet suddenly the libertarian bros don't believe in economics anymore. Fancy that.
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There were / are restrictions on work visas issued. During the timeframe it appears they greatly curtailed processing student visas. There were well publicized restrictions on asylum applications. And others.
This is a site tracking what all was done and is still in effect:
https://www.nafsa.org/regulato... [nafsa.org]
Now whether these were bonafide temporary restrictions or Covid provided a convenient mechanism to do what some wanted to do anyway, you'd have to ask the prior administration.
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https://www.gavinpublishers.co... [gavinpublishers.com]
https://www.cambridgeindepende... [cambridgei...dent.co.uk]
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Why don't you do the math yourself and then reply with that along with what your question has to do with anything the above posted about?
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*Citation needed
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When you take that away population falls and a worker shortage results.
And working conditions improve for everyone. When bosses realize that there is one person for every three jobs (I made up the number, but the principle stands), that one person gets treated a whole lot better than when there are three (or more) people for every one job. We are in a rare circumstance where employees have real market power.
If we can attribute that to Trump's immigration policies, then immigration policy is working for America's benefit for a change.
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Actually about 730,000 of recorded Covid deaths [statista.com] were people 65 or older. Don't know how many of those were retired, and don't know what the ages of excess deaths not recorded as Covid were.
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Retired people have a strong impact on the economy. Many work part-time to supplement their income. All buy food, shelter, and medicine in some form. Many travel and enjoy their retirement spending money in the local communities they visit. Retirement isn't always sitting in a nursing home waiting to die.
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Yes, but you did not say that. You said "people whose death impacts neither the economy nor the population". The death of the retired impacts the economy as you yourself just suggested.
Sticktoitivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Bootcamps may teach you how to code but they do not give an employer assurance that you have the gumption to stay around when the going gets tough. So you may also need to have a 3-4 year stretch at one company on your resume to assure employers you can be depended upon. Of course if the project is a 6 month or 3 month project employers will hire bootcamp trainees.
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If they're spoonfeeding you knowledge, you're not getting an education from that college.
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A college degree is proof you know how to learn....
A college degree is proof that you're a good test taker. I got A's in many college classes that I remember little to nothing about, but I was good at taking the tests. Everything of consequence to my software development career I either learned between the ages of 15-20 before stepping foot into a college, or I learned on the job after getting the job. The vast majority, though, I learned before hitting 20. Everything since then has just been filling in the gaps, and learning new stuff I found to be interes
Re:Sticktoitivity (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst performers have the best degrees (Score:3)
A college degree is mainly proof that you have the sticktoitivity to power through and finish even when the going gets tough. Knowledge is always updating in todays world so you have to keep learning. You cant depend on only wht you learned in college. A college degree is proof you know how to learn and techniques for learning are different in different fields so a computer related college degree shows you know how to learn in the computer field. Bootcamps may teach you how to code but they do not give an employer assurance that you have the gumption to stay around when the going gets tough. So you may also need to have a 3-4 year stretch at one company on your resume to assure employers you can be depended upon. Of course if the project is a 6 month or 3 month project employers will hire bootcamp trainees.
College is a reflection of who you were in high school, not today. At any job, the better educated you are, the worse you are at your job, unless you're at the VERY VERY top of the job market.
Get a degree from MIT? Doors open people give you easier interviews and see the best in you. They want to think you're the genius who will bring them to the next level. It's an inherent bias. The person with a community college degree or bootcamp certificate had to fight a lot harder. The elite-degreed engin
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A college degree is proof
A college degree doesn't prove anything other than that you were able to have an organization willing to give you a "degree". All other implications come from the organization that granted you the degree. If you trust Harvard to be selective about attendees and vigorous in ensuring the attendees understand the material, then you might have some sort of evidence that the person can do something. Might.
Tough To Swallow (Score:2)
I'm struggling to buy this story. Most of the job listings I see, beyond major high cost of living cities, are wanting masters degrees for everything. Bachelors + years experience for entry level. Rafts of requirements for various different languages and then the salary is just stupidly low for the requirements.
Re:Tough To Swallow (Score:4, Informative)
"...masters degrees for everything. Bachelors + years experience for entry level. Rafts of requirements for various different languages and then the salary is just stupidly low for the requirements."
They all say that. It's boilerplate. Ignore it. Apply anyway if you think your resume and skills can support the stated goals.
Just make sure the "soft" section communicates your value. Hire a CV coach if needed.
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What the hell jobs are you looking at?
Taken directly from a job posting we have up right now:
We are looking for someone who:
Has fun with programming, loves learning new technologies
Enjoys working with Product / Design to launch the killer features
Articulates ideas and is passionate about finding the right solution to a problem
Is honest and engaged... and leaves the ego at the door
Undergrad degree or solid work experience
Experience working in an agile development lifecycle
Fantastic verbal and written communication skills
Projects and/or tools you can point to and brag about
Languages and technologies we use:
Java / Neo4j
Python
Vue / Nuxt
AWS
Apollo / GraphQL
I emphasized the "undergrad degree or solid work experience" because you'll see that line or something similar in just about every job posting from an organization worth working for - we all know that a college degree in software engineering or the like is nice, but if you've already been doing the job, it's not required unless some PHB just says it is because reasons.
Sure, there's a few "languages" listed there, bu
Paywall, paywall (Score:2)
TFA is behind a paywall, so I have no information on just what these tech jobs are. I'm betting that a lot of them are call-center support, and that kind of thing.
Mind, I am all for people changing careers, but any real change generally requires additional education. Change from electrician to network engineer - a few classes, and you're golden. Change from photographer to web designer? A course or two on UI design, plus some practice with a framework or two, and you can get an entry level job. Change fro
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How do you know that Pothole Patch Patrick didn't already have a side hobby of Python development?
Just because a guy is working road construction doesn't mean that he doesn't know other things, and making that assumption is part of the problem.
I did it before it was cool. (Score:3)
Graduated in 1986. No university or college.
Retail computer tech -> Manager -> Help Desk Rep contracted to industrial company -> (Briefly) Novell guy / MCSE -> critical operations team -> team lead -> manager -> project manager -> today.
i guess my point is that a degree doesn't make you useful. And no degree doesn't bar you from entry. Show your talent enough, and people will notice. Valuable people will bring you along with them.
You'd be surprised how loud quiet competence can be.
And damn... ran with the thought prematurely. (Score:2)
I guess my collar has never been blue...
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I'm not that far off from what you've shown. I have a 2-year community college degree. My career path:
Call center -> QA engineer -> IT engineer -> Senior IT engineer / architect -> DevOps Engineer -> Site Reliability Engineer -> Senior DevOps Engineer -> Director of DevOps Engineering.
I was also invited to apply for an IT Director job at my last company because the CSO thought I'd be a good fit, but I don't enjoy doing traditional IT anymore.
Inquire within; no brain required (Score:2, Interesting)
Competence is being outlawed by sex and racial quotas, so why bother with demanding fake degrees for fake achievement from fake colleges?
So, management got desparate (Score:2)
and told HR where to shove their additional degree/certificate requirements that the hiring manager didn't ask for?
They did this in 2000 (Score:2)
I'm sure on a large enough scale some of them don't. The goal here is to lower tech wages by bringing in more labor after all. But this isn't a solution to the problems blue collar guys face.
Instead we should be investing a ton of government money into bringing new wind and solar online. California s
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"If private industry won't do it - that should tell you all you need to know. Its evidently not worth doing."
You mean like cleaning up the sources of air and water pollution? Ya, I can see that's not worth doing. . .evidently.
In other news, up and down the East Coast sewage systems are being flooded by excess ocean. Septic systems are being ruined and draining into the underground water used for drinking. Nope, evidently it is not worth coming up with fixes. If you are in a car driving towards a cliff, do y
They should be hired as managers (Score:2)
Need Management Boot Camp too (Score:2)
So... (Score:2)
They learned to code, good for them!
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you should see some of the new hires around here
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I too wonder about this. No company I've ever worked for would even return phone calls without a degree.
The stuff I work on isn't bootcamp-level programming. Highly multi-threaded, soft real-time, five-nines reliability. I recently ported some legacy embedded software to a new compiler and build environment. Would a bootcamp graduate even know where to start?
My boss and I have discussed a DSP project I'd love to sink my teeth in to...
...laura
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Technical expertise does not require a college education. I was already a senior-level engineer by the time I decided to pursue my education. I was lucky enough to get my start at a time where promotion was a norm and worked my way from help desk to engineer with nothing but mentors, books, and a lot of free time at night learning to program and manage systems. I 'proved' myself with industry certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and others.
I really feel that IT is no different than being a mechanic. You learn through trial and error, research, and effort. In the end, managing a server isn't much different than rebuilding a carburetor.
College is not without its value though. Classes on law, business, writing, speech, and other communication skills are invaluable in my career. In addition, I was exposed to technology concepts and theory that was not presented in my self-education.
I think there is a path for both kinds of learners in this field.
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IT and auto mechanics (Score:2)
Both fields have their similarities.
I got into I.T. about 30 years ago, back when the colleges didn't even really know how to prepare a person for an I.T. career. I'd already been coding and playing around on 8-bit computers like my TRS-80 long before going to college, and knew it was the field I wanted to get into. But my college could only offer me courses in really specific programs like "dBase III+", or a typing class they said was required if I wanted to follow their Data Entry track for a computing ty
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The call center at the company where I work has historically been an "onramp" for techs. It had a high staff turnover compared to other departments but if a good person came in that could pick up the skills and progress on their own (maybe crack a book or take some networking classes, the company would pay for entry-level certifications and even training) the opportunities were there and many progressed to higher positions.
People with tech aptitude but perhaps not qualifications seem to be plentiful
Re:Yep (Score:4, Interesting)
The trick is to find a company with a CIO that has a clue, that understands that ability and experience are more important than being willing to go into serious debt for a piece of paper saying you were willing to go into serious debt for a piece of paper.
They also tend to accept a lower starting pay because they lack said debt.
Considering the pace at which technology changes, I seriously question the value of a lot of these 4 and 6 year degrees. Just how much of that education you got is outdated before you walk down the aisle?
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Job training gets outdated pretty quickly, especially for tech jobs.
Education, not so much.
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Agreed. Learn to think and you've got a solid career skill. You don't necessarily need a great education for that. I knew someone who only went to a tech school who became CTO and was one of the few CTOs I ever met who understood technology and knew how to design and test a circuit. He knew how to think and got out of the rut most technicians end up in. But a good education helps you get there better, as it is teaching you to think, and giving you a broader based education. So you were just assembling
Re: Yep (Score:3, Insightful)
That piece of paper shows you understand CS concepts such as normalisation, caching, b-trees, hash tables, graphics concepts, cpu architecture, networking topology and theory. Etc etc etc. Any fucking idiot can bang together mickey mouse code built on top of APIs that do all the heavy lifting and are written by the real talent. Sounds like you're a shoo in for a webdev role.
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The CIOs will hire clones, they don't care about skills, just certificates. Can you install a server, can you re-imagine a drive? Hired! Can you think? Don't care that's not a part of the job, if you want to think go to R&D, product development, tech support, anywhere else but IT.
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Considering the pace at which technology changes, I seriously question the value of a lot of these 4 and 6 year degrees. Just how much of that education you got is outdated before you walk down the aisle?
You are learning the wrong things in school bro. The things you should be learning in school are things that do not change or change slower than what normally occurs in a lifetime. If you are learning ephemeral data in your colleges then you are at a trade school, not a college.
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My major courses were computer languages. I learned things like Pascal, because that's what was being used at the time. I didn't learn Java because it didn't exist at the time. They can't teach what hasn't been invented yet.
That's what happens when you take a major that isn't like Humanities or Art. Most technical fields evolve
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Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why, is because you understand what you are doing. The best software engineers I've worked with have had liberal arts degrees - one in media design, one in English, one in political science. And the absolute best engineer / architect I ever worked with had 1 year of art school.
If you know your shit, nobody cares where you learned it. College definitely helps to give you foundational skills and learn how to learn, but in an industry that reinvents itself every 10 years, spending 4 of those years learning about the last 10 doesn't always help to create the next 10.
Re: Yep (Score:2, Flamebait)
So where did these liberal arts types learn about the best sorting algorithms for different scenarios, b-trees vs hash tables, various types of normalisation, key value vs relational etc? Or by "software engineer" do you mean some gimp who can bang together some javascript and produce a half working web page?
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From information. It's not like these topics are not covered in plenty of publicly available information. Books, talks, papers, etc. There are some people (read: some, not many, not most, not least, not .. any number implied, because that's not the point I'm making) who're perfectly capable of figuring out what to learn, how to learn it and where to find it.
Re: Yep (Score:2)
Right. And someone can become a doctor just by reading some manuals too, who needs to be taught? Well done on proving you're just another arrogant ass without a clue. Stick to writing your toy code and let the adults do the hard stuff.
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Spoiler alert: it's not 1994 any more. We have the internet, with a shitload of sources for such things. Moreover, why rewrite your own sort when there's tons of optimized libraries for doing that readily available, or loads of tutorials that explain and dissect various sorting algorithms.
Quite frankly, if I'm interviewing someone, I'm not asking them about sorting hash tables. I'm looking for someone who is willing to tell me that they may not know the answer now, but they'll find it and get back to me.
Re: Yep (Score:2)
If you think you can self teach yourself a CS degree you obviously havent done one, but that's fine, you polish that chip on your shoulder. IT needs seat warmers such as yourself to do the mundane coding jobs that anyone with a few months training could manage just as vehicle engineering needs the guy with the oily rag and wrench who changes the plugs and adjusts replaces broken parts. But he wont be designing suspension geometry or analysing piston flame front physics anytime soon. Enjoy your life doing t
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Often it does help. Theory is always applicable. Maybe I don't use a Fourier transform every day, but I do know highly paid people who use that regularly. How do you do the layout of your board to reduce interference without being a dummy and adding tons of ferrites? You get promoted and now have to write up documents that customers will see, so you need to rely on your college writing classes so you don't sound like an idiot. And the theory gives you a leg up reading the newer literature for the newer s
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Right, so when that team put together a customer billing system which is still in use by a major company from scratch that still handles a couple billion dollars a year worth of invoicing and account accruals, modeling the very complex business logic necessary including state-by-state contractual terms required, that was exactly the same as using "Javascript to make a text box blink."
Someone seems salty that other people are able to do the same job as good or better, without the expense of college.
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That's some great use of stereotypes there. I'm not saying there isn't a bunch of that, but just like with all things where talent is an unequal force among the players, certain people rise above. One of those "liberal arts engineers" as you put it wrote three different banking integrations that is still being used to move over a billion dollars a year through ACH bill payments. Another was the team lead and head engineer on an investment platform. They were full-stack engineers writing full application
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"They were full-stack engineers "
IOW webdevs. Thanks for playing.
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Yes, surprisingly when you're creating a web-frontended application, you would have web components being built. That doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing, or that there wasn't other services running underneath in order to deliver data to that web application.
Your posts reek of salty desperation. Why don't you try having an open mind for once - you might find that you're just being an egotistical jerk who's afraid that they are about to be replaced by someone younger and smarter. But you k
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Mate, I hate to break the news to you but webdevs are the bottom rung of the developer food chain. I realise that might prick your ego since you seem to think you're some kind of elite, but you'r really not. When you've found some liberal arts types who can write device drivers requiring comprehension of the hardware from dodgy chinese translation or some control systems involving real time solving of spacial equations (both of which I've done and more) then get back to me. In the meantime you keep on telli
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Oh man, are you projecting.
I don't think I'm some kind of elite. But you clearly do. Didn't even read the rest of what you wrote, because I don't feel like wasting my time. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. You don't know me, you don't know the team I worked on, and you don't know what we were doing. Therefore any opinion you have is coming from extreme ignorance, and isn't worth the voltage necessary to transmit it over the network.
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"Liberal arts" hires.
"Full stack"
Tells me and anyone else with 25 years experience in this industry all we need to know son.