Ask Slashdot: Getting a Tech Job With Skills But No Formal Degree? 266
fmatthew5876 writes "I have a friend who graduated with a degree in philosophy and sociology. He has been spending a lot of his spare time for the last couple years learning system administration and web development. He has set up web servers, database servers, web proxies and more. He has taught himself PHP, MySQL, and how to use Linux and openBSD without any formal education. I believe that if given the chance with an entry level position somewhere and a good mentor he could really be a great Unix admin, but the problem is that he doesn't have a degree in computer science or any related field. He is doing stuff now that a lot of people I graduated with (I was a CS major) could not do when they had a bachelor's degree. Does Slashdot have any advice on what my friend could do to build up his resume and find a job? I know a lot of people think certifications are pretty useless or even harmful, but in his case do you think it would be a good idea?"
Whatever -- Smarts and Work Ethic Come First (Score:5, Informative)
I barely graduated high school and I hold a high level IT position.
Key plan: don't lie about your college degree!
Re:No formal degree? (Score:0, Informative)
Ah come on now, no one actually thinks that Philosophy is a real degree [/flamebait]
Re:CS is not IT (Score:5, Informative)
because CS is about science and doing actual science. Developing new hash functions if you want a relevant example for todays news. Being a programmer is one thing in the toolkit of being a scientist, it's not the entirety of it.
Different schools have different emphasis though, but some places, where CS grew out of math departments it's much more about things like complexity theory, formal theory of languages and theory of computation sort of stuff than learning to write code.
For places where CS grew out of physics departments it can be much more hardware based, (Wilfred Laurier, the closest school to waterloo is a mostly hardware based CS programme, where waterloo is much more theoretical), or software, depending on what sorts of problems the people who created the department wanted solved, and how much money they could get to start the department.
Lots of CS grads, probably most of them, are not coders. They're scientists, some of whom can write code, and some of whom are much more about problems that can be solved with computers, and how efficiently that can be solved. Teaching people to code in a particular language is relatively easy if they have the math skills. Teaching them the maths skills is hard. Lots of them can't even replace a video card on their own, which seems kind of sad, but that's the same as an electrical engineer is not an electrician. They are related fields, but one is not entirely inclusive of the other.
CS *is not IT*. As part of doing CS you may have to learn to do some IT, but IT isn't programming necessarily either. A 5 year old can get a LAMP or Windows IIS php mysql setup going. IT is about being familiar with how to use particular software packages someone else has written to support whatever your business is. Being a network programmer, and sometimes that's part of being a sys admin, is about writing tools to solve your own unique problems, but not at the level of the packages you can download usually. The CS students who wandered over to your information systems or information science or... whatever programme did so because they want to know how to write code, but they don't have to be hardcore coders to be computer scientists. It's certainly useful for some people, and at some schools being able to code well is definitely required, but that's not universal.
Re:Whatever -- Smarts and Work Ethic Come First (Score:5, Informative)
I barely graduated high school and I hold a high level IT position.
Key plan: don't lie about your college degree!
I didn't finish my degree and I'm an Engineer at a medical device company. The VP of R & D here says "Your degree will get you your first job out of school. It won't get you your second." Point is, if your friend has the skills and can demonstrate them, the lack of a degree shouldn't be a factor at most places. What he needs is a foot in the door; persistence enough to get face time, the ability to communicate/demonstrate his skill set, and a good credible reference. Maybe that's you?
All these stories come back to the same thing - once you're working, it's easy (ish) to find another job in the same field. Getting that first job is the problem - so start networking. Do some volunteer work. In your situation, you pretty much have to get into a position (in life) where someone will hire you based on your knowledge ... and they usually do that by knowing YOU.
So find something sort of tech-y, get to know a bunch of people, do a bunch of volunteer work, and make sure that everyone you know moderately well knows that you're looking for work. It'll get you the job, if you're not completed a-social. Don't complain that "Oh, I'm not a social person, but I have tech skills". Well, if that's the case, get a degree in Comp. Sci and be quiet. Otherwise, you'll have to get "in" using your soft skills.