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IT Job Without a Degree?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Dec 01, 2008 02:22 AM
from the killing-oneself-by-degrees dept.
from the killing-oneself-by-degrees dept.
adh0c writes "I have been lurking Slashdot for some time now without registering and I don't think this question has been answered yet. Is it possible to get a good IT job (assuming that there is such a thing), preferably a sysadmin position, without having a BS or other degree? From browsing the job postings on Monster and such, it would seem that everyone wants university papers. Is there hope for computer enthusiasts who didn't go to college?"
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Not in this economy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Since, there are lots of people who have the degree, I think that you will be in bad shape to compete against them.
My problem is the inverse one. I have a BSc and an MSc in Computer Science from a respectable scientific institute (app. 10% of our MSc graduates are recruited by Google each year), but I can't find a Software Developer position. Alas, nobody wants to take in someone without experience in this economy - nobody wants to invest in the shaky future. I've seen many job listings with "Bachelor's degree a plus", but the experience dominates.
Parent
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:5, Informative)
If you are smart you don't need the piece of paper to indicate such. It may take you a little longer to get moving upwards but experience is really what they want and you only get that by doing. If however you are not able to convince others you have a brain then get a piece of paper as this will help you.
I don't have a degree (in fact dropped out during my second year), but now work for the IT department of the university I went to, and I like to think my prospects for the future are good. But it did take a little while in a shitty job to get some experience to get this far.
Parent
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about who you know.
They call it "networking" but I dislike this term as it has a well defined technical meaning.
I got my first job because I knew a guy who recommended it to me and mentioned me to those who later interviewed me.
I got my next job because a co-worker from my first job told me about a position, handed over my resume and gave me a nice talking-up to the people doing the hiring.
He got his job there because someone he knew in school recommended him.
Do you see a pattern here? In an uncertain world it's hard to know what to believe. I've seen people with great resumes, claiming experience AND education, who couldn't do the jobs they were hired to do. I've seen people with no degrees and no experience excel. How do you tell the difference between the two when you're doing the hiring? You rely on the advice and recommendations of people you trust, i.e. people you've already worked with. In this down economy the tendency to go with the safe bet will be even higher.
Knowing people helps you get a job. It's not absolutely essential but it really, really helps.
Parent
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Experience goes a LONG way....and of course, the oldest, but most important factor I know of...who you know!!
My degree is BS in Biochem...although I never really used it (just missed med school admission a couple times). I fell into CS doing databases while doing medical research, while trying to get in med school...and taking grad courses in comp. sci to try to raise my GPA (I had a LOT of fun at LSU).
Anyway....ended up doing this, and now pretty successful at contracting. I find that just having SOME degree helps, but, experience...and knowing the importance of making lots and lots and lots of quality contacts in the business is what gets you in the door.
Having a personality, and a little ability to BS works too. I've beaten out people for jobs that were MUCH more qualified than I...due in large part to being able to talk to people and present myself well as a normally socially interactive person.
Also....when interviewing, DO NOT be afraid of asking for too much money!! Many people are just geared to think that if it costs more, it is worth more and better quality. Employers are consumers of a type....and you can always negotiate down if you wish. Also..try to get THEM to state what they want to pay...you don't do it first!
Parent
Re:Not in this economy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I come from (Holland), experience is valued much higher than education. I started out as a junior webdesigner about 10 years ago. Then I landed a job as a sysop for a large scale J2EE platform. Now I design and implement service oriented integration solutions.
You might think that all sounds a bit "enterprisy", and you'd be right. If I could have it my way I would be writing Haskell or Python for a living. But never the less, I get to work on big, complicated, mostly interesting engineering projects without any kind of degree, and I don't think the job well is going to dry up any time soon, despite economic unrest.
The bad economy might even give you a competitive edge since you don't have large student loans to pay back, and can afford to work for a slightly lower wage.
Parent
Experiance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Experiance (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly,
im still fairly young (mid 20's) and I'm a sysadmin. My tips for getting in to my situation are :-
-Apply for jobs in smaller companies
-Do the support roles in your early years
-Learn anout your job in your spare time
-Never stop learning.
In time you'll have the know how to go and command any job you want.
Its also controversial weather you actually need a degree or not. I worked with a degree student in my last job and all he knew was theory. WHen he started he knew what a partition was but didnt have a clue how to partition a hard disk or why you'd even do it in the first place.
Then again i am one of those "taught himeself how to program aged 6" people.
Parent
Re:Experiance (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually prefer non-university grads when I am hiring. I Got burned too many times with grads that tooks computers because of there is money in IT but they are not actually interested in computers (and therefore not interested in learning more )
Parent
Re:Experiance (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the "meeting cool people" is the most important part in pretty much any business-oriented degree.
You can teach yourself the stuff from a business or CIS degree in way less than 4 years, if you are actually interested in it. It's the contacts you make that matter. It's pretty much the entire purpose of Ivy League business programs, but even at lesser universities it's the biggest benefit of getting that paper.
If you've got family or friends or contacts from some other setting who can get you in to a corporation, though, you can probably skip the full-time-student thing and just let the corp pay for you to do night classes or something.
Parent
I wouldn't worry... (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things that has always appealed to me about computers is that people who deal with them are as often hired on ability as credentials. I don't know any IT guys who are respected for anything other than ability and how easy they are to work with. I hope that this isn't going to change. But I don't think it will, because some of us find these devices inherently fascinating, and spend endless amounts of time learning about them just because we enjoy it. It is very hard for someone just wanting to complete a degree and get a job to compete with that. I would say, based on my experience, that if you are good you will rise to your level regardless of credentials.
Augustus
start small (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:start small (Score:5, Insightful)
why should a system administrator need a degree? does a plumber or an electrician need a degree? an apprenticeship should be enough for this kind of work.
Parent
Re:start small (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think that 90+% of "IT" jobs (not even counting help desk) are more of a trade than a science.
I'm never, ever going to be writing deep, math-theory-heavy code. I just won't. I don't want to, and there are other people who would be better at it, even if I studied it pretty damn hard. "Computer Science" is a wasted concept on me and on the vast majority of coders.
What I do have is a feel for problems. I know what's broken before other people, and I know what do to (or, more often, where to find what to do) to fix it. I write clean code. I learn new systems quickly. These are the skills that are truly useful to most people in IT. I'll probably never have to do a do a Fourier transform, or implement my own sort algorithm. I do need to be able to grok new libraries, languages, and technologies quickly.
I'm not saying that there's not any overlap between what's taught in a CS program and these skills--I am saying that it's inefficient to put as many people as we do through that program, when we could do much more useful things with those 4 years.
That said, I take an interest in math and computer science. I read on those topics, and seek to make myself better at mathematical thinking. I do so, however, knowing that only a tiny fraction of what I read will ever be useful to me in a money-making sense, and none of it will ever go on a resumé. I treat it the same way as I do reading classical literature: valuable to me in a personal sense, but of little worth otherwise.
Parent
Re:start small (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. When something is wrong in an IT system, the cause for the problem very seldom is something that has to do with math or CS.
The main thing you need, in my opinion, (after the ability to read and understand plain-language error messages, which a lot of people seem to be lacking ), is the ability to "see" in your mind how different system interact and depend on each other.
Then you need to be able to figure out how to break a problem down and tackle one part after the other. Once you have located that $SYSTEM has $PROBLEM, then you can always Google if you don't know much about $SYSTEM or $PROBLEM.
I think much of *my* problem solving skills I acquired during my time as electrician, fixing industrial machines. Fixing them wasn't so different from fixing an IT system. See what works, see what doesn't work, isolate part with the problem, then dig into the documentation of that part if you don't know what's wrong.
Parent
Re:start small (Score:5, Insightful)
And the other 99% in charge of hiring who don't go to slashdot would disagree but they're not geeks so this site will never hear from them. Heck even those who do post of slashdot probably had the resumes they see first go through HR which falls into that other 99%.
Parent
Re:start small (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:start small (Score:4, Informative)
From what I've seen, and it might not be true everywhere, but people want to see your on-the-job experience. They basically want to see that what you did in your last job is the same as what you will be doing in the new job. And they mean last job, they want you to have experience and they want the experience to be current.
A degree or diploma or certificates are all probably enough - if you've got the experience. None are good enough on their own. The last interview I did the rest of the panel were really blown away by this chick who had no formal education at all, but plenty of experience.
Parent
Re:start small (Score:5, Insightful)
University degrees generally go far beyond mere syntactical and grammatical knowledge of a computer language or system. They generally try to instill in you, the capacity to learn.... [etc]
I've heard it all before. Those ideas are themselves ideals that have little to do with reality (for most people who end up going to university. That has been my experience at least).
Linus Torvald didn't learn about designing an operating system by taking certification courses, after all.
He learned (and did) much of this in his free time. Torvald's never needed to go to University. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never wanted to or needed to (they were autodidacts, and compulsive about it). Many a famous (and rich) geek are; Brahm Cohen, Kevin Mitnick, etc. These people would find school highly wasteful. Bram Cohen himself couldn't keep a job during the dot.com boom. I doubt if most of these people could have gotten decent jobs if they hadn't have started their own businesses. HR (the front line of the job market) seeks out the status quo which often doesn't accomplish much but mediocrity.
But that just proves that the way you are taught in a university is actually important.
I've argued this point in other discussions. I don't believe that "the way you are taught" in (most/all?) universities is good. I'm certainly not hyping certifications either (I've met many cert-qualified people who are also incompetent, or at least barely competent).
Knowledge and education (for me) are important, they are however not often directly related to either ability or aptitude.
Best regards,
UTW
Parent
Merit can meen as much as a degree (Score:4, Insightful)
but it's certainly going to be harder getting a foot in the door.
I've seen autodidact sysadmins do quite a lot better than ones with degrees, however the reverse is also true.
In general my experience is companies will prefer one with a degree over autodidact people, reason being someone with a degree has shown ability to sit down and learn - this is very important since pretty much no matter what job you end up getting there is going to be some learning to get familiar with the running systems.
Yes, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, very much so. (Score:5, Interesting)
I never finished my degree, yet I have been able to pursue a computing career without it being a roadblock.
My present role is as an engineer at Google.
My company explicitly does not care about degrees. (Score:5, Interesting)
We've had good results with simply giving out actual trial programming tasks and comparing the results of several programmers.
Degrees don't seem to be a strong predictor of usefulness.
Incidentally, we're hiring right now.
https://spideroak.com/blog/200810280100 [spideroak.com]
You won't get a job in the fortune 500, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fortune 500 typically have HR departments that roboticly follow a check-list and a college degree is almost always on that checklist. You won't even get to the point where an actual technical manager will see your resume without one.
But, smaller shops without an HR department to institutionalize stupidity may let you in to interview and if you are a hot-shot than no one gives a damn about a degree.
If you are a hot-shot, you can also work contract. Contractors often bypass the HR department completely, even at fortune500 companies. No one hires a contractor for their college degree. They do hire contractors for their experience and knowledge.
So, if don't have experience your only hope is a college degree. But if you do have experience and are good at it, then the world is your oyster.
Re:You won't get a job in the fortune 500, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
More or less how I see it too. When I'm interviewing, the last thing I care about is if they have a degree or what it's in/where it's from. It rarely comes up when I'm interviewed as well (though it seems to be a major focal point for recruiters -- I'd say 90% of them ask about it vs. maybe 25% of prospective employers).
But, like you said, if you have no experience, a degree is about all they can gauge you by on paper.
Parent
Everything is a lot easier with the degree (Score:5, Insightful)
I've known many people who were great sys admins or developers who did not have degrees so it is possible. However, it is much easier to get a job if you have the degree. Every time you do a job interview you will spend 5-10 minutes explaining why you don't have a degree - that is, if they even bother to call you in. That's 5-10 minutes that you're spending getting yourself up to the level of the other applicants that you could have spent putting yourself above the level of the other applicants.
Your pay level may suffer throughout your career as well. When I was in college, I had a job as a developer at a computer company. I switched from a full-time student, part-time developer to being a part-time student, full-time developer. They even asked me once to drop out to devote more time to the job. One day they hired a new developer, fresh out of college. She was quite sharp but had 0 experience. One day it came out over lunch how much she was making and it was more than me. I asked my boss why and he replied "She has her degree". Needless to say, I didn't entertain any more requests to drop out and work more.
It's a little harder but you can find a job. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are typically two reasons someone will employ you without a degree.
1). They want to get the best skills without paying for them.
2). You have sufficient experience that no-one reads your resume far enough to notice you've never been to college and wouldn't care either way, or you present extremely well at interviews.
I'd say work on (2) because companies that focus on (1) tend to be bad employers, although not always. Sometimes it's just employers who realise the value of the skills you have, not the paper you paid for that claims it.
GrpA
What else is on your CV (Score:5, Insightful)
A degree is one way of getting your first job. A basic BSc. won't really mean anything after the first 2 years in the industry, although some employers will pay more attention to a Masters, or a Doctorate especially.
If you can't show previous jobs, write your own software and publish it somewhere. Or contribute to open source projects. There are some people who can read code who also have the power to hire.
Get some industry certifications. Microsoft certification, (*ducks*) Java certification etc. are all worth something to some people. That's something you can get yourself for a lot less time and money than a degree although they're generally not worth as much.
All that aside, the current job market is not your friend right now - or anyone elses for that matter. :(
Yes... maybe. (Score:5, Interesting)
It all depends on a lot of things, of course! Do you have any experience? What is your work background? If all of your experience is customer service at Best Buy, then you're probably not going to have much luck, going in cold.
You've got several options, none of which are easy.
You've got plenty of options... good luck!
--brian
Without education, you'll be a poor computer tech (Score:4, Insightful)
Qualifications aren't just for show, they mean that you've extended your knowledge in the area and that someone has verified it.
There's a lot more to computing than writing a few programs that do something useful without crashing. That's important too, but it barely figures on the wider scale of merit of a computing professional.
What a CompSci education gives you is tons and tons of theory and context: theory so that you have a large portfolio of logically sound techniques upon which to draw instead of reinventing them and doing so badly, and context so that you understand why you're doing something, why you should not do something else, and how your solutions fit in with all the other methods and systems in the subject area.
Without an education in this field, you won't even know when you're making a mistake, owing to lack of theory and context. Your boss may like you because you'll always be saying "Yes" (until everything falls apart), but nobody else will appreciate it, not even you yourself in time. And you'll feel dumb every time that you come into contact with other computer people, as well as getting a bad rep because you can't hide ignorance in tech.
Just don't.
Take the time and make the effort to get yourself a proper CompSci education. You won't regret it.
Re:Without education, you'll be a poor computer te (Score:4, Informative)
I've had conversations with people that have a "proper CompSci education" and they couldn't hold an intelligent conversation about programming with a monkey.
Parent
Temp Jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Get temp jobs doing computer type jobs for small companies. Show that you shine and youll be the "Whizz Kid". Even if its data entry or something. Your first few jobs might be a bit boring but the cunning plan is how you write your CV/Resume. That data entry job suddenly becomes
"Worked in the IT Department assisting with data collection systems and acted as first point of call for members of staff requiring support".
That'll act as a stepping stone for your next career move and before you know it you will be away!
N.
IT doesnt need "degrees" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's required, but not necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I'm still working in IT 5+ years after that, and have been working in a variety of fields (with specific expertise that well exceeds any that can be gained in college). I went back and got an MBA as well, so whenever I get tired of working for a living, I can move into management (I've had management-level positions and supervised people, but have avoided taking the actual management positions because that's not my personal preference now). If that ever occurs, I will have worked my way up from the begining ($20k per year crap support job) through varying technical positions into management wihout ever having a degree in anything technical. So it isn't necessary to succeed. However, it is quite hard to take that path, because even now when I look at positions, people seem to expect a technical degree.
Sure but..... (Score:4, Insightful)
The first question would be what type of sysadmin do you want to be and do you have any good contacts? I did consulting for a number of years (small to mid size companies) and the lack of degree never hurt me.
But wait; now you are getting bored. You realize that you are lucky to roll out one server every two years and 80% of your time is patches/account maintenance/backups. The more you think about it, the more you realize that you could be replaced tomorrow because your boss/his boss thinks that all you do is push buttons. If you are wise you spent all that sysadmin free time (you have free time right? All good sysadmins should) learning about what interests you and getting certs as those are what it will take to "move up" if you don't have contacts and/or a degree.
Once you get to a higher level getting asked about what you need (ie: "The Budget") the ability to understand the relationship between IT and the business is critical to your continued growth within the organization. I had to do a business case/presentation for a data dedupe solution that I wanted and I can say without a doubt that the writing and research skills I gained during my bachelors (and now masters) courses helped me a more than just a bit when it came to getting the purchase approved.
At the bare minimum I would say that you need to start earning certs and building your business contacts. Join local user groups or even Infragard (if IT security interests you). Set up a Linked In profile and join a bunch of groups (on that site). A degree can always come later should you feel that it will help you further advance your career. I can tell you that when it comes to many larger companies a degree figures in what your pay will be. Fair or not it is just the way things are.
Re:dead. end. job. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:dead. end. job. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you would make more if you were in the workforce longer. If your only goal by getting a university degree is "to get a job" and "make money", it's quite obvious you can do it without that. Personally, I don't care how much I would make, I find network admin extremely unsatisfying and would dread waking up each morning to do that.
Parent
Re:Do you live in a van down by the river? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Do you live in a van down by the river? (Score:5, Informative)
Seconded. I dropped out of high school my junior year, got my GED, immediately started working for a web dev firm doing sysadmin work. 10 years later (Just turned 26) I own my own professional services/hosting firm. Don't let anyone lie to you and say you need a degree, for what you lack with paper you'll just need to make up for with effort.
Parent
Re:Do you live in a van down by the river? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seconded. I dropped out of high school my junior year, got my GED, immediately started working for a web dev firm doing sysadmin work. 10 years later (Just turned 26) I own my own professional services/hosting firm.
Unless my math is off, you started during the dotcom years when they were looking for talent under every rock they could find, and it was generally accepted that web developers could be very young as the web wasn't many years old. There's always ways for the entrepreneuring individual, but I think you'll agree the market looks very different today.
Parent
Re:Do you live in a van down by the river? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Do you live in a van down by the river? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but 10 years ago was right in the middle of the dot com boom, when if you could power on a computer, you could probably get an IT job.
Unfortunately, with the economy the way it is right now, nobody is hiring without a degree unless the person has significant "professional" experience. Lacking that experience, you're shit out of luck without a degree. Hell, even with a degree it's difficult to find a job without experience.
He could try going the startup route, but that's difficult without experience. "I don't have references, but I've networked my mom's basement" usually doesn't cut it.
I'm sure it's theoretically possible to start out without a degree right now, but he'd make his life 1000x easier by just getting the degree.
Parent
Re:Of Course.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on the country and how snobby the company is. There are plenty of smart companies hiring autodidact people, but they just have to prove their credentials through other means, and will be tested harder at interviews.
Personally I work as CDO without any degree, but that is because I've studied at the highest IT education in Denmark where it is common for students to quit before finishing the degree because they are offered 6 figured salaries (in dollars).
On the other hand, I turned down a job offer from Google, because their mentality there is such that you can't have a career there without a Ph.D.
So if you want to get hired as an autodidact, either work you way from the bottom, or get involved in open source and write some really awesome code that proves your proficiency.
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:5, Informative)
I think the big thing a lot of people seem to forget about college is that it forces you to jump through hoops. Lots of them, every day. Tons and tons of hoops. Hoops you wouldn't otherwise give a damn about, but you do it because you have to.
Proving you can do this, and do it well, is pretty much exactly what I need to know about you. Guess what? Most of any modern job is doing just that; jumping through hoops. Sometimes the hoops in question are complex, and it'd be nice knowing you were able to manage your way through those at some point at a University.
Basically: given two people of equal knowledge, one with a college degree and one without, barring any personality concerns, I'll pick the university degree over the person without one any day.
If you won't even go through the effort to prove to me that you are willing to go through a bunch of bullshit for something you want, then why should I trust you to go through the bullshit that will show up as a matter of course in any job for a paycheck? What is there to tell me that you won't just coast and accept said check and mail it in, day after day after day?
It's not fair to say that you're like that, because it's very possible you're not. However, when it comes down to it, I'm not willing to take that chance.
(Sidenote: I'm not actually a fan of bullshit and jumping through hoops, but to say they don't ever happen is a bit naive at best. Just saying...)
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:4, Insightful)
wow, that's the really crappiest reason to attend university I've heard in a long time and I'm very very glad you're not my employee.
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:5, Informative)
So you're under the misguided assumption that University actually teaches you important skills that are used in the pursued career?
Listen: college didn't teach me anything I didn't already know about software engineering. Mostly it just took up my time and my money. Showing a willingness to jump through those hoops for the end goal (a degree) was apparently enough to interest my employer, who hired me as an intern. I learned more working on the job in my first 2 months than I did the entire 4 years of University combined.
Add to this was our University president, who at commencement stated "Remember: an undergraduate degree does not mean you are educated. It simply means that you are educatable."
The whole point he was trying to get across was that we didn't go for an undergraduate degree to learn the subject matter so much as we obtained an undergraduate degree to learn how to learn.
The thought process is "teach a man to learn, and he will learn his entire life".
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:5, Insightful)
I donno about that. My father was a coal miner (and still is). My mother stayed at home.
Actually, turns out that I'm the first on either my mother or father's side of the family who completed college. Of the roughly 10 cousins older than I, 3 attended college at the same time or before I. One dropped out to work, another got hooked on smack, and the last just took a long-ass time to figure out what the hell she wanted to do.
Do I sound like your stereotypical child of an affluent white family? My father was making about 28k a year (which is why my FAFSA reaped such huge dividends for me), and at least 1/3 of my family is either addicted to heroin, crack, or cocaine, with one particularly colorful cousin the proud mother of 4 crackbabies.
Needless to say, I don't consort with most of my family any longer.
But, I guess that just because I'm white, it automatically means my family was mega rich and completely adjusted, eh?
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway - I'm a well payed CTO (33 years old) got and conditional offer to work at Google this year (very interesting terms). I studied Physics with the Philosophy of Scince Msci, but dropped out.
If you're bright, you have ideas, and you can make them a reality, then you will will do well. a degree, is only good for proving you can get a degree.
Parent
Re:Don't think so! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent