Ask Slashdot: Best Degree For a Late Career Boost? 234
Qbertino writes "I'm in my early 40s, and after a little more than 10 years of web, scripting and software development as a freelancer and some gigs as a regular, full-time employee, I'm seriously considering giving my IT career a boost by getting a degree. I'm your regular 1980s computer kid and made a career switch to IT during the dot-bomb days. I have quite a bit of programming and project experience, but no degree. I find myself hitting somewhat of a glass ceiling (with maybe a little age discrimination thrown in there). Since I'm in Germany, degrees count for a lot (70% of IT staff have a degree) so getting one seems fitting and a nice addition to my portfolio. However, I'm pondering wether I should go for Computer Science or Business Informatics. I'd like to move into Project Management or Technical Account Management, which causes my dilemma: CS gives me the pro credibility and proves my knowledge with low-level and technical stuff, and I'd be honing my C/C++ and *nix skills. Business Informatics would teach me some bean-counting skills; I'd be doing modelling, ERP with Java or .NET all day. It would give me some BA cred, but I'd lose karma with the T-shirt wearing crew and the decision-makers in that camp. I'm leaning toward Business Informatics because I suspect that's where the money is, but I'm not quite sure wether a classic CS degree wouldn't still be better — even if I'm wearing a suit. Any suggestions?"
Any suggestions? (Score:1, Insightful)
Go into management, or switch careers. America allows age discrimination so long as it's not against people near retirement age. In this industry, age discrimination is common knowledge, and several groups have tried to get laws passed to eliminate it, to no effect.
At the risk of being perfectly and completely crass, you're facing the same level of discrimination that black people did in the South prior to the civil rights movement: And unlike them, nobody gives a shit. Sorry. :(
MBA might be a good choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait.. wait.. hear me out. The MBA will give you insight into how those who are MBAs think (and therefore, most of management). Also, your experience will say "I can do IT/CS", while the degree will say "I can do business". Which means you're more likely to be able to make a jump to management if you find your career options topping out on the IT/CS end.
And you'd be following in the footsteps of Alan Cox.
Business Informatics (Score:4, Insightful)
Seconded. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that any limits are really ageism and not related to whether you have a degree or not. It's all about how many hours-per-week they can get out of you for $X per month. The older you are the fewer those hours are.
Even if the hours you do provide are really worth more in terms of productivity because your experience means that you do not go off on unproductive tangents.
But just in case the limit really is the degree .... get the fastest cheapest degree you can. It does NOT matter what the subject is. As long as it is fast and cheap. It is just the first step and at this point you really aren't concerned about making the correct relationships with the other kids in the frats.
THEN start working on an advanced degree in the subject that you really want. Such as computer science. Or whatever.
Get an MBA if you want a boost (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know how it is in Germany, but here in the USA (especially in the Silicon Valley) if you want a late career boost, go get an MBA. Having an MBA isn't a four-letter word around here, especially if you get one from a good program. MIT has an excellent executive MBA program that can be done remotely, and everyone I've encountered with one has been top-notch. Same goes for an MBA from Stanford or even the other colleges local to the area.
Having an MBA opens a lot more doors for you. If you already have a good amount of experience in IT and Software Development, go get a degree in something outside of those fields to help expand your options.
You could also get a degree in something you enjoy personally but won't directly get you a job. Education doesn't just have to be for professional development.
Is any degree late in life a good decision? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything you go for will take time and put you into debt. What are the odds you will make enough money so that the degree pays for itself? It's something I've thought of myself. I'd rather plug along and slowly build or maintain what I have rather than incur a great deal of debt. Maybe a cert here and there, but that's it.
Long view (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is any degree late in life a good decision? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a little loath to reply to this on the basis that the vast majority of posts from the Slashdot crowd on anything to do with university tend to view education as all about money. I suspect that's a heavy cultural bias from the US... anyway.
As someone who is a 40-something about to finish a degree this year, I have some experience of this but for me, at least, your question loads the dice. I was earning plenty of money doing what I was doing before, I just didn't like it. I'd be happy to earn a living, doing something I love and that is what, in my experience, most mature students are doing back at university.
Granted that might be a little skewed because useless public services like healthcare and universities cost more in the US than anywhere else in the world, and maybe you do feel some pressure to get a career result to pay back the debt. That said, there are cheap or even free ways to get educated if you're willing to move beyond the top-tier universities.
Finally, I'd add this: It's easy to make the decision to go to university to study something based on some sort of future goal. What universally happens is that by the end of the degree, you have a different idea about what that goal is. It's also quite hard to motivate yourself, do well, and even benefit particularly well from a degree if you aren't really interested in the subject.
So my advice is this: do a degree in something you're really interested in and when faced with choices, go for the flexible choices. There is every chance that you'll run into some niche off of something you're interested in which will turn out to be a gold mine. It happened to me. I found a field that blended my previous skills with what I was learning and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
No Degree. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop working for Faceless Corps and switch to a smaller company where you rub elbows with the Owners daily. They are not stupid and do the "only youngsters here" stupidity. They realize the older worker is a pro in the field they have been in for the past 20 years and use them to compete with the morons that have MBA's
I'll never work for another Fortune 500 company again. I prefer having beers at the end of the day with the guys that own the business.
Re:Glass Ceiling @40s (Score:5, Insightful)
At that young it's not as much age discrimination in the US as it is $$ discrimination. They are saying that because you are older you expect more pay and therefore if we can find someone fresh out of school who can do the same job we'll hire them because we can pay them peanuts.
Honestly, in person, the only people I have run into complaining about age discrimination before showing lots of grey hair haven't put forth the effort to keep their skills fresh and are completely surprised why no one will just hand them a job. Interviewing for a high paying, higher level position when unfortunately they are only qualified for the entry level / junior positions still. This is probably true in all trades to some extent but in the computer field I think more than others if you are not constantly learning new things, adding new capabilities to your repertoire then you are moving in reverse. There are too many people resting on their laurels and I will hire a young kid a couple years out of school long before I'll hire someone who has demonstrably become stagnant.
If anything, for the OP's OQ, reverse age, or at least experience, discrimination helps him. If I'm hiring someone fresh or recently out of school then their schooling will play heavily into whether I bring them into an interview or not. Once someone has 5-10 years of experience under their belt, as he says he has, I rarely even look at that part of the resume as, frankly, it's not relevant anymore.
Re:Any suggestions? (Score:4, Insightful)
Try telling any libertarian that logical and realistic piece of common sense.
Re:Informatics is more likely to be useful (Score:3, Insightful)
If you haven't had a good course in algorithms and data structures, you'll benefit from that
Having taught at the undergraduate level and currently working on a PhD in CS, I disagree with this advice. If you have 10 years experience, you've probably already figured out what a linked list, red-black tree, graph data structure, etc. are. You probably know how to implement various sorts, graph searches, spanning trees. The things you will likely run into in a CS degree that you haven't had to deal with in the past are the theoretical side. Turing Machines, paradigms (depending on how the course is taught), formal languages (as in regular languages, context free languages, context sensitive languages, not formal programming languages), operating systems, maybe some AI, networking, discrete math. Outside of the CS-based courses, you'll have all the standard gen-eds. Depending on how curious you've been since high school, you might already have covered large swaths of this, or maybe you would do well to take those.
In short, view a CS degree as a way of broadening your world, but don't for a second think you are going to "hone your C/C++ and *nix skills". As most employers complain, CS isn't really about programming so much as it is about the theory that underlies why programming works (or doesn't). It will inform your programming a great deal, but it really won't make you much of a better programmer/designer/software engineer than simple working experience can do.
Re:MBA might be a good choice. (Score:2, Insightful)
Under your logic, if most CEOs are MBA's, and most MBA's destroy their companies at their own benefit, most companies shouldn't exist.
So then, as for "MBAs being a bad idea", can we stop making stupid generalizations and understand that good or bad management is about the person, not the degree?
Re:Any suggestions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Libertarians are perfectly aware that people have prejudices and do not recognize the need to do anything about it.
If a "prejudiced" employer only hires young people and an "enlightened" employer only hires experienced people, and the "prejudiced" employer outperforms the "enlightened" employer, then he has proven that his "prejudice" is a correct reflection of reality. Results speak for themselves. If the "enlightened" employer wins, than kudos to him.
You don't get magical treatment just because you are old. Why don't we force the NBA to hire 50 year old to play basketball?
Re:Any suggestions? (Score:2, Insightful)
We know people are prejudiced but we just don't care because people have a right to their own biases and to their by voluntarily associate with whom they choose.
What is illogical is that you lot think you can change people by just making it illegal to think how you don't want them to think, only by letting people do as they wish (they does not include acts of force) then talking about it will you see any real change.
Re:MBA might be a good choice. (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to be an asshole about it.
If he wanted a German-only opinion on it he should have asked a German site, not one where the vast majority of users are not German. The topics of career change and continuing education are relevant everywhere, and slashdot is a site for discussion where I would HOPE answers are supposed to be relevant to more than one person. I'm sure he's smart enough to pick and choose the pieces relevant to him.
And in the US, "college' and "university" are used interchangeably in everyday discussion.
Your elitist attitude towards education in general really demonstrates why there is so little true entrepeneurship in Germany. It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas. Luckily there are enough people who are more impressed by ideas and hard work than your pile of Bologna.
re: constantly learning new things (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with much of what you said here. But the problem I've always had with the idea that a "good" I.T. worker being one who is constantly learning new things and adding items to a resume is, it's not that realistic when one works for a small to mid-sized company. (Even more unrealistic given a slow economy.)
I've been pretty much self-taught and self-motivated to try out new technologies and computer solutions since I got into this stuff in the mid 1980's, but I've never been the type to hop around from job to job. Most of my job changes actually came about only because the place I worked for closed up. (I started out working for several "mom and pop" type computer stores, for example, all of whom eventually went out of business.)
The problem is, my peers in I.T. who were basically "in it for themselves" without much regard for their employers racked up more impressive resumes than me, especially in the dot com boom days, when it was possible to accept a position, stay JUST long enough to claim you were responsible for X,Y and Z (cool new technologies of whatever type the place happened to be using), and then jump ship in the middle of a project for better pay at the next place needing someone who used those same technologies before. Lots of burnt bridges behind them? Sure -- but there are plenty of companies out there, especially for the young and single who can move from city to city if and when it's needed.
I, on the other hand, honestly hated the stress and uncertainty of job interviews ... and just wanted a stable job doing what I enjoy.
So where did that get me? Well, I was able to ride out much of the commotion from all the failed start-ups when the dot com era went bust, so that was a plus I guess. But the places I've worked for 5+ years in a row always stuck with the same "tried and true" technology. Sure, we'd do incremental upgrades on such things as Microsoft Office, or migrate Windows Server to newer versions eventually. But there's really only so much "resume building" one can do by staying at the same company, when their budget doesn't allow for buying lots of new software or hardware -- and they're (rightly, IMO!) trying to avoid high costs of re-training people on all new ways of doing things, once they've got something in place that's effective.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is -- it's not necessarily "resting on one's laurels", just because one hasn't added all sorts of new products to a resume. But I really do think recruiters and hiring managers look at it that way, most of the time. If a business paid me for 5-6 years to take care of the same set of technologies for them, that likely means those were good, solid choices that really got them their money's worth. There's no negative in having a deep familiarity with such solutions, vs. the next guy who can list of 5x as many technologies -- most of which were failures, so got removed after money was WASTED on them.
Re:MBA might be a good choice. (Score:4, Insightful)
... so little true entrepeneurship in Germany. It's striking how many of the biggest tech companies around today (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and I could go on) were founded by innovators who dropped out of college/university/whatever to pursue their ideas. Luckily there are enough people who are more impressed by ideas and hard work than your pile of Bologna.
All excellent points. I'd like to add a couple of my own that are from the same vein...
When I encounter people old enough to start facing age discrimination in their line of work (age 40+, seems like), I notice that all the ones with really successful and lucrative careers have one common trait: they don't need to look to other people for job openings; job openings look for THEM. If you are playing your career right, by the time you're getting old you'll have made as many casual friendships with former co-workers and bosses in as many different businesses/universities/whatever as humanly possible. Even if you're not looking for a new job, hopefully old co-workers from a few years back are calling you out of the blue and offering you interviews for positions. I mean, some of your favorite old co-workers are definitely managers now. When people are starting a new company or a new project and they're looking for people to add to the team, they're asking each other "Who's good? If we could pick anybody we wanted, who would it be?" Even if you're not the most brilliant person they've ever worked with, all people have a favorable bias for someone they've met, unless you were a total dick to them or something. But if they have an opening, I'm sure they would much rather interview you than a bunch of random strangers.
Notice that the words "diploma", "degree", and "title" are missing from the last paragraph? That's because smart, adaptive, practical people (the exact kind of people who will NOT be prejudiced against you if you are old) aren't interested in the "right" degree or the "right" certificate from the "right" institution, they're interested in people who get results, no more, no less. Considering that the entire American system of giant research universities with heavily layered bureaucracy and titles like "PhD" was imported straight from Germany in the early 20th century, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Germany suffers from the same cancer of worship for meaningless titles that you see in so many Fortune 500 and public sector workplaces.
TLDR: A nice diploma from a nice university is useful for gaining access to anti-meritocratic institutions like large corporations that cannot accurately judge employee worth. Practical knowledge, experience, and professional contacts are more valuable if you want to work in a place that doesn't resemble a Dilbert cartoon.
Re:Seconded. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that any limits are really ageism and not related to whether you have a degree or not. It's all about how many hours-per-week they can get out of you for $X per month. The older you are the fewer those hours are.
Even if the hours you do provide are really worth more in terms of productivity because your experience means that you do not go off on unproductive tangents.
I see the same ageism (Australia), and definitely the same need for paper qualifications.
But I took the need for paper qualifications to be a reflection of today's reluctance to make judgement calls. If two candidates walk in and one has a degree and the other hasn't then the HR drone is immediately biased to take the one with the degree regardless of experience (because graduates are better than non-graduates right?). Taking the non-graduate requires a judgement call on the relative worth of their experience, and judgement calls expose you to liability.
As the entire software industry knows, experience trumps any formal education for productivity in coding. Yet there's still a lot ageism around, an impression that somehow good coders are in their 20's and work 12+ hours a day (when every single formal study done has shown that a project staffed by inexperienced coders working long hours is pretty much a guaranteed fail).
I have a partly-formed theory that it's because the young inexperienced candidate reacts to the PHB's ideas with 'wow great idea I'll get working on it immediately' while the older hand responds with 'yeah we tried that five years ago and it failed because...'
But just in case the limit really is the degree .... get the fastest cheapest degree you can. It does NOT matter what the subject is. As long as it is fast and cheap. It is just the first step and at this point you really aren't concerned about making the correct relationships with the other kids in the frats.
THEN start working on an advanced degree in the subject that you really want. Such as computer science. Or whatever.
To a certain extent this is true, in my experience, but why bother getting the bachelor's degree? Most uni's will accept your experience instead of a bachelor's and you can go straight to the interesting bit.
I'm in very much the same situation as the OP, and I've done two things:
1. Started an MBA, which has been useful and interesting, and provides all the credibility I need for the paper-brained. I'd massively recommend this over starting a bachelor's degree because you'll be mixing with people in their 30's and 40's and not sitting there in a class full of kids wondering wtf you're doing there.
2. Refocused on consulting/coding for small companies and startups. They really value the experience and what works rather than what looks good on paper, and they're not afraid of judgement calls. Also, no HR drones - you get interviewed by the founder, usually in a pub.
good luck
Re:Glass Ceiling @40s (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no ceiling that I'm aware of, but there is a major reluctance to pay wages above the initial 3-5 years. Especially when most of those 5 year folks churn out almost the same quality code as brand new grads.
Except that they don't. All the studies done have shown that experience really counts for code quality and productivity.
Of course, that's assuming the rest of the development chain is working. If the management have poorly-conceived ideas and don't listen to their techies about what's feasible in the first place, then they might as well employ actual monkeys in the coding role because the project's going to fail regardless.
Re:Seconded. (Score:4, Insightful)
A forty-something wanting a degree to boost their career in IT, is akin to a chimp that wants to learn to smoke cigarettes because it'll make them more like a person. If you're still shuffling code at forty your career has gone so far off the rails that a degree won't save it. If you're a smart, accomplished, hard worker, you should be looking to retire by the time you're in your mid-fifties. If that isn't likely right now with ten years to go, then the cost of a degree isn't going to help you achieve it.
OP is making the classic mistake of thinking that his lack of opportunities can be fixed by a magic bullet. A degree course is not that magic bullet. Work harder, work better doing what you do and everything else will fall into place. At your age you shouldn't need qualifications to characterize who you are. You should have a body of work, and a trail of satisfied clients, employers and work-mates reinforcing it. You should be able to name names and call upon personal endorsements. You should be beyond this.
Re:Glass Ceiling @40s (Score:4, Insightful)
At that young it's not as much age discrimination in the US as it is $$ discrimination. They are saying that because you are older you expect more pay and therefore if we can find someone fresh out of school who can do the same job we'll hire them because we can pay them peanuts.
I doubt it's wage discrimination simply because who's paying the older workers that extra money, if they aren't employing them? I think it's simply that young workers can and will put up with more crap than older workers. They have more time (less commitments and more ability to maintain weird hours) and they're less experienced in the ways of business (that is, more gullible, less cynical). If you want someone to dump 80 hours a week into a salary job for a projects that's probably going nowhere, it's not going to be a 40 year old with a couple of kids.