Blue-Collar Workers Make the Leap To Tech Jobs, No College Degree Necessary
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Blue-Collar Workers Make the Leap To Tech Jobs, No College Degree Necessary
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Blue-Collar Workers Make the Leap To Tech Jobs, No College Degree Necessary (wsj.com) 134
Posted by msmash
on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:00AM from the times,-they-are-a-changin' dept.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree. Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.
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I hire programmers who came through bootcamps at entry level positions all the time. It's not just US workers either. Certainly not everyone can love/survive a job doing nothing but coding, but, it's definitely more open to newcomers than your local colleges would have you believe. That being said, when I'm hiring staff or senior positions, I wouldn't even look at someone without at least 5 years of real on the job experience. Bootcamp ain't good enough for that (without a lot of time and practice afterward.)-
It's a lot easier to do so after having survived a job doing nothing but back-breaking, mindless, low-paid manual labor. At that point the coding tedium is not so bad.
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Physical labor makes you burn a lot of calories and keeps you fit. If these manual laborers sit at a desk 8 hours drinking coke and then go to pubs and drink and eat their 4000 calories like they used to when working hard labor, they will be dead of heart attacks and diabetes within a couple of years.
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No it doesn't.
It generally exercises the same specific muscles over and over giving the worker a false sense of health while actually leaving the rest of the body under-utilized and out of shape.
Then the repetitive motion injuries kick in.
Not to mention exposure to chemicals, accidents, inhaled dust, the deafening effects of long term exposure to loud noise...
Both kinds of work kill you. They just do it in different ways.
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Depends on the job.
Turning the same wrench the same way all day every day? Maybe.
Scrambling up a ladder and bounding up a roof with two 40 lb bags of shingles over your shoulders for 8 hours straight? I'd say that's pretty good for all muscle groups.
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I wonder what your industry is. If you're hiring people to use well-known and well-understood frameworks to put websites together, go for it. If your boot camp coders are writing backend code, or anything else sensitive, then I seriously hope that you don't mind your company being in the headlines for security breaches and other problems.
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Similar experience with electronics designers. One guy in particular stood out, no degree but extremely diligent. Most of his designs were nearly flawless, even when it was something new to him like power electronics. He put in the effort to review the literature.
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I just did a data boot camp and got a job offer 3 business days after I was done.
A pretty good offer too.
Of the other 5 students all got job offers within a month (some better than mine).
We were simultaneous to anjava group (10 students) and they all got offers real fast too.
The results were far superior than expected, the job market was hot, with good pay relative to cost of living here.
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the downside is that the tech industry is also one of the most age discriminating fields as well. Once you approach 40 you either become a longtimer for a company that can manage to stay around, or your seen as not cutting edge enough for startups. By the time you turn 50 its even harder. Unless you have been doing management, you are often overlooked.
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I wonder how much of that is older guys remembering how the labor market was in the 80s or 90s, and assuming their difficulty finding a job today must be due to some kind of discrimination, rather than the world having changed around them.
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No it happened around 2008/2010 actually. When the shift went to getting stupid teens hooked on social media. Before that, being heavily invested in WAN, BGP4, OSPF, MPLS, etc didnt care about age. Now startups will post positions for skills and not even make callbacks unless youre young. You could be linus torvald for all it mattered, using an alias name. Try it. Put two very similar applications into a company with different personal information. Make one 31 and the other 53. See how much faster the 31yo
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which having a business degree probably would be helpful. Lots of pitfalls in running a business can surface. At least for anything outside independent contractor. Once you start with w-2 or 1099 employees things get complicated for sure.
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The article talks about "tech skills", but that doens't mean programming. Do you use a computer, even if it's just to send PR tweets? That's a tech job!
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Wait, there are jobs where you do nothing but coding???
What about documentation, testing, requirements gathering, demoing, troubleshooting, deploying updates, code reviews, and peer reviews to management? Every place I have worked, developers were responsible for all of this.
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As evidenced by the employment rate and average salary, the main issue with hiring them is they all get jobs already.
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Since you put didn't use the subject line properly, I have to quote you like this:
Looks ugly, but it works. Thanks for misusing the subject line.
But anyways, to actually respond to what you said, the reason is that one black mark ends your career forever. You only get one chance in this world. Once you have a mark, you are no longer eligible for any good jobs unless you are extremely lucky or extremely well connected. There are no second chances. You just die. What a lovely world we have created.:)
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Have you seen the cost of housing and new cars lately?
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Have you seen the cost of housing and new cars lately?
Coming out of school...you really shouldn't be thinking of new cars or home ownership.
You gotta get your foot in the door and start, at the bottom and work your way up with experience, etc.
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$12 an hour? I mean, that's around minimum wage here....
Not trying to be a snob, it just surprises me that developers could or would be paid so poorly in the US.
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They're not. He's being an idiot.
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You are acting like the only choice is a $12/hour job. You can work fast food and get more than that at some places.
Don't be absurd. You can get a junior engineer position for $70k/year without breaking a sweat if you actually know what the hell you're doing, and can prove it. Take some time to think of a neat project that you enjoy, and write some quality code samples and put them on GitHub; and then be prepared to walk through them with prospective employers - showing you can do the job already is the
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What real-world employer is going to invest the hours you describe, reviewing your personal projects on Git, to decide if they want to offer an inexperienced coder ("engineer"?) a $70K job?
No one. It's a fantasy projection of how you want the world to work, nothing more.
That's almost as bad as going out and accumulating a bunch of beginner certifications in random technology...
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If you go for that you might as well work at Walmart.
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A high school diploma isn't a credential.
Many unemployed gender studies majors will likely take warehouse jobs so they can attempt to pay off their student loans, buy some food, and maybe put a roof over their heads.
Being 'credentialed' isn't considered the major accomplishment it was 40 years ago... AOC has an Economics degree and worked as a bartender, what was her hourly pay rate?
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Most low level IT folks around the world dont own houses and cars. They take the company bus to work and live in rented apartments shared with a few other bachelors. Low level IT work is not an American Dream job.
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And what's the problem with working for it? I sure didn't start out at a director position fresh out of school, and neither did anyone else unless they have an uncle CEO or something.
Everyone gets out of school and learns to make it on their own. That means having a shitty car or riding the bus. That means having a roommate. That means having a entry-level position, because you are entering. I don't understand why people think they should just instantly get a 6-figure salary, a 2000+ square foot home, and a Tesla because they graduated from college. So did literally hundreds of thousands of other people, THIS YEAR.
If you want that shit, work for it like just about every other person out there. If you're 18 you should already know if your parents are filthy rich or not, and if they're going to buy you all that shit or not. If they aren't, get to work because that's the only way any of it will happen.
Also, these things are very important, but not in any particular order:
- start saving for retirement wherever you can, unless you want to work for your entire life. Participate in your 401(k) or pension if you have one on offer.
- don't blow your money on going out all the time, or taking extravagant international trips. You'll have time for that when you can afford to do it right - Europe, Japan, Fiji, etc. will still be there in 10 years and it costs a LOT of money to travel.
- don't walk into a new job acting like you know how shit should be done, unless you're being hired into a position of authority. The people already doing the job are going to think you're an arrogant ass. Instead, show them you know your shit by doing what is asked of you as good as you can.
- it's okay to have suggestions if you think something can be done better. Make it a conversation and get some feedback. Any more, IT work is collaborative work.
- do not go buy a flashy car as soon as you think you can afford it. Whatever you end up buying, it will immediately lose about 25% of it's value. Get something lightly used that you can depend on for at least 6 years, and stay on top of the maintenance so it could go 12 years if required. Not having that $600+ car payment every month will take you a lot farther than a fancy car in your early 20s.-
Mostly great comments, one note for travel: do it while you can and while things are still around. From your examples, Japan is a timebomb (tsunami russian roulette) and Fiji corals are dying, and the world's climate is not getting any better. In a few year, who knows if some trips can't happen because of environmental policies. Also none of us get any younger, and the "save it until later" might cause one to be too old to enjoy some of these trips properly.
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FFS, does every high school graduate need an apartment and new car three weeks after graduating? They are hiring high school graduates to work in warehouse while they figure out their next move. I'm surprised you didn't ask "how are they going to support a family of four on that pay rate!"
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It's a job seeker's market now. No such thing as unrealistic.
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All of the skills, and none of the attitude. Sounds like a win!
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None of what attitude? Real worker unrest has always been at the level of blue collar, or lower. Unions exist(ed) mostly at that level. Googlers might get a little pissy but show me their battle of Blair mountain [wikipedia.org].
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Worse, this may encourage employers to start treating formerly "white collar" positions more like blue collar jobs, which always seem to have a ton of draconian work rules and worse management/labor friction.
Technology has always been semi-marginal in terms of its white collar status and larger corporate acceptance, I don't think it will take much encouragement to kick it further down the totem pole into a fully blue collar job.
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That's the point of all the hammering on "STEM education". Notice it's always pushed by titans of the tech industry (or their upstream funding sources like the DoD.) They feel tech workers have too much say in their organizations and need to be knocked down a rung.
The goal is to be able to treat tech workers the same way they treat truck drivers.
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I think there's just a lot of frustration that they have not been able to organize and scale the labor side of information technology the same way they do factories or other mass production. It's kind of ironic, but I think a lot of factories which have altered their top-down models to involve line production workers in decisions (however limited it really is) tend to improve productivity and worker engagement, yet I think most corporations think the opposite about technology work.
It's kind of funny how we
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I no longer participate in the tech workplace but when I was involved, both as a programmer and system admin, a strong level of technical expertise was required for all but the most entry level positions. Has this changed or are these boot camp programmers doing simplistic web design or something equivalent?
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you should see some of the new hires around here
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I too wonder about this. No company I've ever worked for would even return phone calls without a degree.
The stuff I work on isn't bootcamp-level programming. Highly multi-threaded, soft real-time, five-nines reliability. I recently ported some legacy embedded software to a new compiler and build environment. Would a bootcamp graduate even know where to start?
My boss and I have discussed a DSP project I'd love to sink my teeth in to...
...laura
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Technical expertise does not require a college education. I was already a senior-level engineer by the time I decided to pursue my education. I was lucky enough to get my start at a time where promotion was a norm and worked my way from help desk to engineer with nothing but mentors, books, and a lot of free time at night learning to program and manage systems. I 'proved' myself with industry certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and others.
I really feel that IT is no different than being a mechanic. You learn through trial and error, research, and effort. In the end, managing a server isn't much different than rebuilding a carburetor.
College is not without its value though. Classes on law, business, writing, speech, and other communication skills are invaluable in my career. In addition, I was exposed to technology concepts and theory that was not presented in my self-education.
I think there is a path for both kinds of learners in this field.
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I totally concur and would like to add to your comments: Unlike being a mechanic you can make backups and afford to break things, just to see what happens. Plus, there's virtual machines and snapshots. Life is awesome.
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The labor participation rate has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded as a higher than expected number of people took early retirement.
Immigration was restricted during Covid.
There were 1,000,000 "excess" (higher than normal) deaths over the last two years with an additional unknown amount disabled due to long haul Covid and lingering effects.All these factors and more have combined to put immense supply pressure on the labor market. Yet suddenly the libertarian bros don't believe in economics anymore. Fancy that.
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Was "immigration" restricted during covid? I suppose it depends on how you define immigration.
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There were / are restrictions on work visas issued. During the timeframe it appears they greatly curtailed processing student visas. There were well publicized restrictions on asylum applications. And others.
This is a site tracking what all was done and is still in effect:
https://www.nafsa.org/regulato... [nafsa.org]Now whether these were bonafide temporary restrictions or Covid provided a convenient mechanism to do what some wanted to do anyway, you'd have to ask the prior administration.
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Do you call the people entering the United States of America illegally "immigrants"? If so, immigration is at record levels. If not, please share the term you use (and please don't assume their intentions in your reply) to describe the current record levels of population increase.
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they (the UK) discovered that a combination of certain probiotics, and prebiotic inulin actually beat long covid. You can actually get OTC probiotics of this specific combination online.
https://www.gavinpublishers.co... [gavinpublishers.com]
https://www.cambridgeindepende... [cambridgei...dent.co.uk] -
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Why don't you do the math yourself and then reply with that along with what your question has to do with anything the above posted about?
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*Citation needed
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And working conditions improve for everyone. When bosses realize that there is one person for every three jobs (I made up the number, but the principle stands), that one person gets treated a whole lot better than when there are three (or more) people for every one job. We are in a rare circumstance where employees have real market power.
If we can attribute that to Trump's immigration policies, then immigration policy is working for America's benefit for a change.
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About 900000 of those excess deaths were in retired people
Actually about 730,000 of recorded Covid deaths [statista.com] were people 65 or older. Don't know how many of those were retired, and don't know what the ages of excess deaths not recorded as Covid were.
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A lot of the people below 65 were also on disability. Covid kills disproportionately high if you have diabetes. Those disabled by diabetes and overweight died in droves.
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Retired people have a strong impact on the economy. Many work part-time to supplement their income. All buy food, shelter, and medicine in some form. Many travel and enjoy their retirement spending money in the local communities they visit. Retirement isn't always sitting in a nursing home waiting to die.
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We are talking worker shortage and resulting inflation. Not about demand. Sure retired folks create a lot of demand. But guess what 900000 retired folks suddenly dying off means a lot of their descendants got a sudden windfall. All the money saved for retirement came as a windfall to people in their 30s and 40s and they are spending it on Teslas, Boats and RVs so the demand side of the equation has also stayed more or less.
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Yes, but you did not say that. You said "people whose death impacts neither the economy nor the population". The death of the retired impacts the economy as you yourself just suggested.
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I know this trick. It's a call center job, right?
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The call center at the company where I work has historically been an "onramp" for techs. It had a high staff turnover compared to other departments but if a good person came in that could pick up the skills and progress on their own (maybe crack a book or take some networking classes, the company would pay for entry-level certifications and even training) the opportunities were there and many progressed to higher positions.
People with tech aptitude but perhaps not qualifications seem to be plentiful
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by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:49AM (#62439914)
A college degree is mainly proof that you have the sticktoitivity to power through and finish even when the going gets tough. Knowledge is always updating in todays world so you have to keep learning. You cant depend on only wht you learned in college. A college degree is proof you know how to learn and techniques for learning are different in different fields so a computer related college degree shows you know how to learn in the computer field.
Bootcamps may teach you how to code but they do not give an employer assurance that you have the gumption to stay around when the going gets tough. So you may also need to have a 3-4 year stretch at one company on your resume to assure employers you can be depended upon. Of course if the project is a 6 month or 3 month project employers will hire bootcamp trainees.-
Self taught means you know how to teach yourself. It's not always the case that being spoon fed information in college means you will continue teaching yourself during your career.
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It's not always the case that being spoon fed information in college means you will continue teaching yourself during your career.
If they're spoonfeeding you knowledge, you're not getting an education from that college.
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If you are talking spoonfeeding, bootcamps are an order of magnitude higher than colleges in spoonfeeding. Thats by design. Instead of letting students arrive at the insights in the course of doing a full courseload you are trying to distill the insights down into months and spoonfeed them.
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yes, even if we just had a general education continuation program of 2-3 years I would be happy. High Schools do a really shit job of teaching people how to write anymore. If you know any high schoolers, have them take this challenge: Compose a business letter to the VP of Marketing for Acme Corporation, proposing a new product. Then have them fill out and properly address the envelope. EPIC FAIL almost entirely across the board.
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A college degree is proof that you're a good test taker. I got A's in many college classes that I remember little to nothing about, but I was good at taking the tests. Everything of consequence to my software development career I either learned between the ages of 15-20 before stepping foot into a college, or I learned on the job after getting the job. The vast majority, though, I learned before hitting 20. Everything since then has just been filling in the gaps, and learning new stuff I found to be interes
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As I said you are never going to survive on what you learned in college. You have to keep learning. College trains you to keep going even when you have hours of assignments due on minors which dont really interest you but you need to do to meet your breadth requirements. It trains you to be able to do stuff which you dont enjoy. You may feel you learnt everything after college but college defintely taught you time management and prioritization and that sometimes you need to just bite the bullet and do things you dont enjoy to get that A. If you dont learn that you may be the best coder in the world but noone will work with you.
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College is a reflection of who you were in high school, not today. At any job, the better educated you are, the worse you are at your job, unless you're at the VERY VERY top of the job market.
Get a degree from MIT? Doors open people give you easier interviews and see the best in you. They want to think you're the genius who will bring them to the next level. It's an inherent bias. The person with a community college degree or bootcamp certificate had to fight a lot harder. The elite-degreed engin-
Military experience is similar to college. If you stuck it through you will stick it through when things get tough. I disagree with you that college educated kids cant handle drudgery. A lot of college is drudgery. If you can sit through boring lectures from professors who teach because they couldnt make it in industry you can sit throw droning from experienced people in industry and grab maybe the one nugget of wisdom amongst the 100 boring war stories.
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A college degree doesn't prove anything other than that you were able to have an organization willing to give you a "degree". All other implications come from the organization that granted you the degree. If you trust Harvard to be selective about attendees and vigorous in ensuring the attendees understand the material, then you might have some sort of evidence that the person can do something. Might.
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I'm struggling to buy this story. Most of the job listings I see, beyond major high cost of living cities, are wanting masters degrees for everything. Bachelors + years experience for entry level. Rafts of requirements for various different languages and then the salary is just stupidly low for the requirements.
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"...masters degrees for everything. Bachelors + years experience for entry level. Rafts of requirements for various different languages and then the salary is just stupidly low for the requirements."
They all say that. It's boilerplate. Ignore it. Apply anyway if you think your resume and skills can support the stated goals.
Just make sure the "soft" section communicates your value. Hire a CV coach if needed.
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What the hell jobs are you looking at?
Taken directly from a job posting we have up right now:
I emphasized the "undergrad degree or solid work experience" because you'll see that line or something similar in just about every job posting from an organization worth working for - we all know that a college degree in software engineering or the like is nice, but if you've already been doing the job, it's not required unless some PHB just says it is because reasons.
Sure, there's a few "languages" listed there, bu
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TFA is behind a paywall, so I have no information on just what these tech jobs are. I'm betting that a lot of them are call-center support, and that kind of thing.
Mind, I am all for people changing careers, but any real change generally requires additional education. Change from electrician to network engineer - a few classes, and you're golden. Change from photographer to web designer? A course or two on UI design, plus some practice with a framework or two, and you can get an entry level job. Change fro
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How do you know that Pothole Patch Patrick didn't already have a side hobby of Python development?
Just because a guy is working road construction doesn't mean that he doesn't know other things, and making that assumption is part of the problem.
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Graduated in 1986. No university or college.
Retail computer tech -> Manager -> Help Desk Rep contracted to industrial company -> (Briefly) Novell guy / MCSE -> critical operations team -> team lead -> manager -> project manager -> today.
i guess my point is that a degree doesn't make you useful. And no degree doesn't bar you from entry. Show your talent enough, and people will notice. Valuable people will bring you along with them.
You'd be surprised how loud quiet competence can be.
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I guess my collar has never been blue...
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I'm not that far off from what you've shown. I have a 2-year community college degree. My career path:
Call center -> QA engineer -> IT engineer -> Senior IT engineer / architect -> DevOps Engineer -> Site Reliability Engineer -> Senior DevOps Engineer -> Director of DevOps Engineering.I was also invited to apply for an IT Director job at my last company because the CSO thought I'd be a good fit, but I don't enjoy doing traditional IT anymore.
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Competence is being outlawed by sex and racial quotas, so why bother with demanding fake degrees for fake achievement from fake colleges?
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and told HR where to shove their additional degree/certificate requirements that the hiring manager didn't ask for?
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when all the mines closed. It didn't work. I remember seeing a bunch of miners coming in after the training courses. All but 1 washed out in a few months, that guy eventually became a cable TV installer.
I'm sure on a large enough scale some of them don't. The goal here is to lower tech wages by bringing in more labor after all. But this isn't a solution to the problems blue collar guys face.
Instead we should be investing a ton of government money into bringing new wind and solar online. California s-
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"If private industry won't do it - that should tell you all you need to know. Its evidently not worth doing."
You mean like cleaning up the sources of air and water pollution? Ya, I can see that's not worth doing. ..evidently.
In other news, up and down the East Coast sewage systems are being flooded by excess ocean. Septic systems are being ruined and draining into the underground water used for drinking. Nope, evidently it is not worth coming up with fixes. If you are in a car driving towards a cliff, do y
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They can do much better than most PHB people do.
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A six week course where they teach how to Kiss Ass, Shift Blame and play Golf (sometimes badly on purpose). How to take notes and delegate work. They certainly will also teach how to be tall, white and have just the right touches of silver in your hair.
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They learned to code, good for them!
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The trick is to find a company with a CIO that has a clue, that understands that ability and experience are more important than being willing to go into serious debt for a piece of paper saying you were willing to go into serious debt for a piece of paper.
They also tend to accept a lower starting pay because they lack said debt.
Considering the pace at which technology changes, I seriously question the value of a lot of these 4 and 6 year degrees. Just how much of that education you got is outdated before you walk down the aisle?
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Just how much of that education you got is outdated before you walk down the aisle?
Job training gets outdated pretty quickly, especially for tech jobs.
Education, not so much.-
Agreed. Learn to think and you've got a solid career skill. You don't necessarily need a great education for that. I knew someone who only went to a tech school who became CTO and was one of the few CTOs I ever met who understood technology and knew how to design and test a circuit. He knew how to think and got out of the rut most technicians end up in. But a good education helps you get there better, as it is teaching you to think, and giving you a broader based education. So you were just assembling
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That piece of paper shows you understand CS concepts such as normalisation, caching, b-trees, hash tables, graphics concepts, cpu architecture, networking topology and theory. Etc etc etc. Any fucking idiot can bang together mickey mouse code built on top of APIs that do all the heavy lifting and are written by the real talent. Sounds like you're a shoo in for a webdev role.
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The CIOs will hire clones, they don't care about skills, just certificates. Can you install a server, can you re-imagine a drive? Hired! Can you think? Don't care that's not a part of the job, if you want to think go to R&D, product development, tech support, anywhere else but IT.
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You are learning the wrong things in school bro. The things you should be learning in school are things that do not change or change slower than what normally occurs in a lifetime. If you are learning ephemeral data in your colleges then you are at a trade school, not a college.
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You are learning the wrong things in school bro. The things you should be learning in school are things that do not change or change slower than what normally occurs in a lifetime
My major courses were computer languages. I learned things like Pascal, because that's what was being used at the time. I didn't learn Java because it didn't exist at the time. They can't teach what hasn't been invented yet.
That's what happens when you take a major that isn't like Humanities or Art. Most technical fields evolve
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Systems engineering, depending on the industry and domain can often be more about domain knowledge than about theory. At some level you need both, but those can be different individuals.
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The reason why, is because you understand what you are doing. The best software engineers I've worked with have had liberal arts degrees - one in media design, one in English, one in political science. And the absolute best engineer / architect I ever worked with had 1 year of art school.
If you know your shit, nobody cares where you learned it. College definitely helps to give you foundational skills and learn how to learn, but in an industry that reinvents itself every 10 years, spending 4 of those years learning about the last 10 doesn't always help to create the next 10.
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So where did these liberal arts types learn about the best sorting algorithms for different scenarios, b-trees vs hash tables, various types of normalisation, key value vs relational etc? Or by "software engineer" do you mean some gimp who can bang together some javascript and produce a half working web page?
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From information. It's not like these topics are not covered in plenty of publicly available information. Books, talks, papers, etc. There are some people (read: some, not many, not most, not least, not.. any number implied, because that's not the point I'm making) who're perfectly capable of figuring out what to learn, how to learn it and where to find it.
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Right. And someone can become a doctor just by reading some manuals too, who needs to be taught? Well done on proving you're just another arrogant ass without a clue. Stick to writing your toy code and let the adults do the hard stuff.
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Spoiler alert: it's not 1994 any more. We have the internet, with a shitload of sources for such things. Moreover, why rewrite your own sort when there's tons of optimized libraries for doing that readily available, or loads of tutorials that explain and dissect various sorting algorithms.
Quite frankly, if I'm interviewing someone, I'm not asking them about sorting hash tables. I'm looking for someone who is willing to tell me that they may not know the answer now, but they'll find it and get back to me.
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If you think you can self teach yourself a CS degree you obviously havent done one, but that's fine, you polish that chip on your shoulder. IT needs seat warmers such as yourself to do the mundane coding jobs that anyone with a few months training could manage just as vehicle engineering needs the guy with the oily rag and wrench who changes the plugs and adjusts replaces broken parts. But he wont be designing suspension geometry or analysing piston flame front physics anytime soon. Enjoy your life doing t
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Often it does help. Theory is always applicable. Maybe I don't use a Fourier transform every day, but I do know highly paid people who use that regularly. How do you do the layout of your board to reduce interference without being a dummy and adding tons of ferrites? You get promoted and now have to write up documents that customers will see, so you need to rely on your college writing classes so you don't sound like an idiot. And the theory gives you a leg up reading the newer literature for the newer s
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Right, so when that team put together a customer billing system which is still in use by a major company from scratch that still handles a couple billion dollars a year worth of invoicing and account accruals, modeling the very complex business logic necessary including state-by-state contractual terms required, that was exactly the same as using "Javascript to make a text box blink."
Someone seems salty that other people are able to do the same job as good or better, without the expense of college.
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That's some great use of stereotypes there. I'm not saying there isn't a bunch of that, but just like with all things where talent is an unequal force among the players, certain people rise above. One of those "liberal arts engineers" as you put it wrote three different banking integrations that is still being used to move over a billion dollars a year through ACH bill payments. Another was the team lead and head engineer on an investment platform. They were full-stack engineers writing full application
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"They were full-stack engineers "
IOW webdevs. Thanks for playing.
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Yes, surprisingly when you're creating a web-frontended application, you would have web components being built. That doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing, or that there wasn't other services running underneath in order to deliver data to that web application.
Your posts reek of salty desperation. Why don't you try having an open mind for once - you might find that you're just being an egotistical jerk who's afraid that they are about to be replaced by someone younger and smarter. But you k
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Mate, I hate to break the news to you but webdevs are the bottom rung of the developer food chain. I realise that might prick your ego since you seem to think you're some kind of elite, but you'r really not. When you've found some liberal arts types who can write device drivers requiring comprehension of the hardware from dodgy chinese translation or some control systems involving real time solving of spacial equations (both of which I've done and more) then get back to me. In the meantime you keep on telli
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