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(i have a STEM degree and work for a catering company lmao)
Personal anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt.
Friend A, very handy and skilled individual, took Thermodynamics in UNI for 2 years, then dropped out. Found job at electronics production facility. Managed to get to a Head Technician position.
Friend B, went to programming 3 years to UNI. Barely managed to finish. Retried math exam multiple times. Though friend A, managed to get a job at the same place as a lower tier machinery operator. Got promoted to technician position after 2 years. Now works as web QC for the same guy who is boss of electronic production facility.
Moral of the story: education, finished or not, existing or not, wont get you far unless you are outgoing and have connections. Also, you either have ability to learn new skills or have said skills and know how to use them. Doesn’t matter how you got them.
College: You get as much as you put in to it.
If one plans on going to college to check a box by getting a bachelor’s, degree, then that person should probably spend their time and money doing something else.
For someone who sees college as an opportunity to stress their ability to learn at levels much higher than what High School or even Trade School may do, then it will do wonderful things for you. The most useful skill academia teaches is the ability to learn complex ideas through abstraction.
As someone who has learned how to create a complex AI system with both long and short term memory, one thing I learned is that AI cannot teach AI. I apply my ability to learn by extending it to my AI agent to help it learn new patterns.
Apprenticeships can be the best of both worlds, but again they need to have the checks in place.
You don’t need a formal education to be great in your field, but it will help ypu grow immensely.
It depends per case, my friend kept studying while I dropped out (due to private circumstances).
My friend ended up at the same employer for the same pay only years later, he wasn’t a good fit for his field.
A few years later I jumped ship to try and develop myself into a better paid job, I am now an actual crane operator with a beefy wage. My friend is still there making the same low wage.
But he got lucky on a different matter, due to him living at home until 33 he did manage to buy a house with massive savings. I haven’t yet.
This is life, there aren’t any given certainties. Only people who claim their experience will be the same for you.
Who the fuck studies until he’s 33 and earn less than a crane operator
He didn’t study until he was 33, he lived with his parents until he was 33.
It opens doors. Once I finished mine it got me into the rooms for the interviews. It’s nothing more than an additional bonus qualification. I definitely use my knowledge from college in a variety of scenarios whereas my colleagues have experience.
When I had to hire people, I was much more interested in seeing a portfolio than a degree.
It depends on what the job is though. I definitely want my doctor to have a degree
The carrot thing isn’t totally untrue, but it’s a bit more complex. If you’re skilled in a trade, you probably have more of a chance of not being financially uprooted than someone with a white collar degree whose job will be AI’d in the next 5 years. That said, to make decent money in a trade, it helps a lot to have a degree from a trade school.
If you want a job as a radiology tech, what hospital is giving them out with no degree?
Either will land you a job lol
Neither *
Sadly some jobs are not available without the paper. That credentialism for ya
well i grow actual carrots and what you actually get is both
My wife once tried to grow potatoes and got what felt like a mile of potato greens while the slips barely grew at all.
Then she went back to her job as a lawyer and made enough money to buy a truck full of potatoes
Why didn’t she just sue the potatoes?
Maybe she’s a hesi-tater
Better than a master-tater.
She did. Took them for all they were worth
Havings skills and a degree are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In my experience the degree was the gateway to gaining skills, not the method of doing so.
I think the degree is really more like evidence that you can get things done on your own. Parental involvement in the day to day is near zero for most people getting a degree. They also learn valuable social skills. But a degree isn’t the only way to get that. So it shouldn’t be a requirement. Yet attempting to determine if someone without a degree has that is costly and time consuming. Companies just want to take the easy path.
Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.
Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.
In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.
Can be legit. I once got turned down for a job because i didn’t have an mcse despite having over 20 years experience administering windows server and AD (and i’m talking laaaaaarge scale…universities and citrix farms).
That’s what happens when the people doing the hiring don’t know anything about any of the skills required for the role
The amount of people who make it through HR hell and interview for my team, that have a some experience but it’s all bounce around 1y and then have an insane amount of certs, that don’t know what they’re doing is way to high in tech. I’ll take a green horn that wants to learn and has a good foundation before I’ll take someone with bounce around experience and a shit load of certs. Almost all certs are how well can you take tests.
I have literally worked in environs where having certifications and nothing else was grounds for disqualification because it meant you’d been taught dogma, not functionality. My personal fave was the tech who put in a request for graphite dust to clean a power button on workstation because it was sticking. Why was it sticking? Some jackass had spilled coke.
I cleaned it with a chux and closed the ticket.
I just finished my CS Bachelors and overall most of it felt like a massive fucking waste of time, especially since I suck at learning from lectures and also the content was like 15 years out of date. For the few classes that actually seemed worthwhile and interesting, I’m trying to figure out who the fuck is hiring for these skills that’s not military-adjacent. I did end up earning some Masters credits through a fast track program, but I don’t think it’s worth continuing at this point.
All I can add is that I worked IT for 9 years getting shit pay. Despite the fact that I spent most of my day writing code, nobody willing to hire me as a developer with an appropriate salary.
I got my degree by going to school at night after my day job. Within 3 months, I had doubled my salary with a ‘real’ developer job. I made more progress in 3 months than I did in 9 years at being able to support myself.
And no I don’t use anything I learned at UNI. I knew how to write code.
You can generally use CS as a springboard into most tech related fields. Where its most helpful is probably research and academia.
If programming is even remotely interesting for you, getting a low paying junior dev job will probably teach you more and you can use that as a springboard into more software dev, data, AI, cybersecurity, networking… As long as you are willing to learn on the job and push yourself forward.I’m legit interested, not trying to be rude – where I can I find a low paying junior dev job??
It seems like the only places hiring are looking for Senor devs or Project leads, AI evaporated all the entry level positions.
Smaller companies usually. They may call it something else than junior developer.
Field Technician, Software Engineer, Field Engineer are all titles at my job and 75% of their work is coding, scripting, or configuration but we have few quality applicants because of bad titles.
In the US, the only places I’ve seen that are both interviewing and hiring entry level are the new grad rotational programs at the bigger companies in finance, healthcare, and logistics. Fair warning, the tech stack is a hit or a miss in those kinds of industries, heavily team dependent
I do have programming skills. Most of the job postings I’ve seen were shitty JavaScript/Dotnet app development or Windows-centric IT slopjobs that pay as much as McDonald’s and is probably getting taken over by AI at this point anyways. For lower-level programming like C++/Rust which is what I’m more interested in, I’ve barely found anything outside of MIC companies and the one that wasn’t was Israeli-based. I do spend most of my free time working on Nix-based projects and tinkering with Linux, so I wonder what’s related to that. I’m also considering a PhD, but I just learned that even the research at my university closest to my interests is heavily tied to military/MIC funding. If it’s actually true that the only organizations that give a shit about quality code are the ones that commit genocides, that would really fucking suck.
To the originator of that meme, not OP: tell me you’re a boomer, without telling me you’re a boomer.
No matter what the Wall St. Journal says, social science says level of education is still the second most important determinant of quality of life. First of course is the socioeconomic status of your parents. I, personally, wouldn’t trade my master’s degree for a plumbing certificate.
I on the other hand wouldn’t trade my 7 years of software development experience for a master’s degree in the same field. I’d be unemployable in the current market.
Trick is not to do fucking nothing while you get that master’s…if you do? Then that’s on you. I did programing jobs while studying, it’s how i paid for my degree.
If you can’t get something going? Maybe the field isn’t going to work for you to begin with… there’s no silver bullet. Different fields will do different things, but if you do spend 7 years and you truly come out of uni with nothing? You failed or you got ripped off but equally failed to notice for 7 years.
Life is tough. too many go to uni before they’re ready.
Today that’s next to impossible. Comp Sci students are struggling to even find internships. I was listening to a podcast interviewing a student that applied to over 90 internships, only got 2 interviews, and no callbacks. It’s probably the worst time to try to get into tech right now.
The job market is tough these days and uni gives you little to no practical skills.
A lot of people don’t have the bandwidth to work full time AND study full time. That’s 80 hours a week… And most companies hiring entry levels want them to be at the office at the same time as lectures are happening.
If I’d started university instead of work when I did start work, I would probably be getting rejections to job applications at McDonald’s right now.
I got work just fine by not working while studying (still working on said studies of course). Now the market is fucked and there’s not much I can do about it
I don’t see the post as disagreeing with you.
The graphic alone is pointing out what you are saying. Skills alone doesn’t get noticed. So you need a degree to be seen, which gets you a job, which reduces stress, which makes you happy.
But it is sad that it is true. I favor getting a degree, not for the education, but for the 4 years of experience living on ones own and having to handle life that it gives most people. It is also often an important social education. But I don’t like the idea of excluding those who don’t have a degree just because they don’t.
As someone who spent the better part of a decade in recruitment. You honestly never know what you get. So you have to take into count as many factors as you can. Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate. Experience is also great, as its more proven skill. Unfortunately both have pit falls in their own ways. The example that pops to mind is i hired two people;one with alot of experience and one with alot of education. The educated one lacked critical problem solving and when a curve ball hit or something that was outside of normalcy she stumbled. The experienced one, always knee what to do on a practical level but lacked detailed workmanship, as she had done jobs so similar for so long instead of following protocol or contacting her supervisor. She would do what she thought was right and stumbled. Experience and education compliment eachother and neither should be undervalued.
Education is a commitment, it means you had to go to school, study and prove your knowledge to graduate.
While it’s the exception, some of the people I’ve met in the field really make me put that into question. I feel like there are institutions that will wave you through provided you pay enough money.
