Re: [SAGE] Computer Sciences degrees in IT

["Michael T. Halligan" <michael@halligan.org>]

On Mar 24, 2007, at 5:21 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:

> I found Michael's answer interesting...
>
> On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 10:15 -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
>> A very quick comment from the peanut gallery. As a hiring manager I
>> really give no weighting towards degrees at all.
>
> I think many people on this list (including myself) have stated that a
> college degree is not required for a sysadmin job, nor really for many
> jobs.  Nevertheless, all things being equal (and I mean ALL things  
> being
> equal), if I had two people standing in front of me and one had a
> college degree and the other did not, I would probably take the one  
> with
> the degree.
>
> But "all things being equal" seldom happens, and as time goes on the
> person's work experiences and work record take precedent over the
> degree. No hiring manager after my first job has ever asked anything
> about my university training other than one Dean who was hiring me to
> teach full time, and even that was many years ago.


"All things being equal" tends to be a loaded statement. I value real  
work experience
much more than I value traditional education. If you place two  
individuals in front of me,
one who is fresh out of college, and one who started working with  
systems the fall
after she left college, yet they're both the same age, I tend to  
think that the 4 years of
real world experience is worth a lot more than the 4 years of college  
education.

Having been in situations where hiring was out of my control, and  
fresh college grads
were wedged into my teams, I've found how hard it can be to manage  
them. I've dealt
with more than my share of "Well my professor always said ...." and  
"this is how we did it in
school..." gets really hard to cope with when running face first into  
the realities of business.

In the end, I only really hire the people who I know if I say "go  
blow up that bridge" will be
able to make the bridge disappear without any further instruction, no  
matter what their
background is.  I would never discriminate because of  education  
(that's just ridiculous),
but will always give more weight to real-world experience versus  
classroom experience.


>> The best sysadmins I
>> know either didn't go to college at all, or studied something besides
>> IT
>
> In 1983 when we started the Unix group at Digital, there were lots of
> engineers that came from math backgrounds, astronomy, meteorology,
> physics and other disciplines other than CS, and they were very fine
> software engineers.


>
>> and fell into systems work through more interesting paths.
>
> This is the part that really puzzles me.....if they were "more
> interesting paths", then why were these people systems administrators?
> Were they unsuccessful at those "more interesting paths", or were  
> they a
> lot like the engineers at Digital, pulled away by the Sirens of  
> computer
> science?

How many sysadmins said when they were 12 years old "I'm going to be  
a systems
administrator when I grow up?".  I know a couple personally, and as  
anecdotal
as this is, they're pretty unbalanced and hard to work with.  Most of  
the systems gurus I
really respect are ones who became systems gurus out of a combined  
knack for coping
with complexity well, and who sort of got tagged "you're it!" in  
their original professions
when the IT question came into play.

>
> I left electrical engineering and went the path of software for many
> reasons, but one of them was simply being fascinated by these machines
> that I could control by the simple use of "1s and 0s".  I found it  
> "more
> interesting" then, and I have found it "more interesting" each day of
> the thirty-eight years I have been in the business.  I have had a
> variety of jobs:
>
> 	o programmer
> 	o systems administrator
> 	o educator
> 	o quality control manager
> 	o product manager
> 	o technical marketing manager
>
> and lately "Free Software Evangelist" (whatever that means).
> Each one of those jobs required a different part of my training,  
> whether
> that training be the formal training I received back at the university
> or the informal training I picked up as I went along.  And while I  
> have
> an interest in many things (physics, electronics, music, mechanical
> clocks), I still find computers to be the "most interesting".  Of  
> course
> each to their own....
>
>>  If I had it to do over, I'd go to college for Finance or  
>> Business, both of
>> which I feel would be far more valuable to an IT career as it
>> progresses up the ladder.
>
> My own undergraduate degree was half business and half electrical
> engineering, with a minor in CS.  Later I went on to get a Master's in
> CS, but for the most part that was just taking the courses and passing
> the tests.  The real CS I learned at my job, working with the rest of
> the software developers.  But I was also very lucky and ended up in a
> "first job" that gave me exposure to a wide range of programming  
> issues,
> and was surrounded by a whole bunch of really bright people.
>
> As I passed through those other jobs that I mentioned, however, I did
> utilize a lot of the "business" side of the degree (I think I agreed
> with Ted on "Business Law", and "Industrial Psychology" was  
> definitely a
> big "plus"), but I also continued to rely on the engineering side  
> also.
>
> My own finding over the years is that it is typically much easier to
> teach a technical person business and finance than to take a person  
> who
> studied business and finance in college the depths of technology.
>
> In the end it still goes back to how well you can learn on your own  
> and
> apply what you have learned to your job.  You have the rest of your  
> life
> to pick up the knowledge you need, if you can do that on your own.   
> Some
> people never gain that ability.
>
> maddog

We're actually pretty much saying the same thing here, I'm just tired  
and short worded.


>
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