Comment on School of hard knocks
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
It seems to me that, at least in IT, a degree matters for your first job, and even that is very slowly fading.
After the first job experience is what matters.
Saying it is slowly fading is wrong and misleading. A degree proves you can commit to learning something. It gives a basis for me, an engineer, to talk to you, an engineer. It tells me we have a common knowledge ground.
The era of bootcamps is over. For one person getting a job without a degree a hundred get rejected.
I have the degree and think this whole thing is a bit silly. I work at Google as a senior SWE, and have been focused on machine learning for the last 10 years. The degree taught me a few interesting things that I would have picked up on my own, and way more uninteresting things that I don’t need for my job. Despite the degree, getting a new job at a high level requires leetcode, which is similar in principle-- a toll booth that most people can pass if they pay the fee (studying).
Many things make this problematic, including basic respect for time, but especially equity. We get a largely homogenous neurotype and background because only a narrow slice of people have the ability and will to meet these requirements, and they are only very loosely correlated to job performance.
It’s a positive too though-- without these entry requirements, companies could not justify high salaries. I say this knowing it is to my detriment-- we do not need this.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
IT is a super broad field. Many IT jobs just want you to have some certification level to get into (no degree required) or some number of years in similar work. My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license. Some IT positions want you to have bachelor’s or higher in a specific IT niche.
I like to tell some of my clients, that I’m like a general physician, I can tell you what’s wrong, fix quite a few things, prescribe fixes for the bigger issues, and refer you to specialists for things I have no business touching.
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Please do elaborate.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I had a forklift certification and got a job at an ewaste recycling facility moving pallets of equipment meant for refurbishment and resale. That job had a lot of down time so when I wasn’t moving the equipment I took up working on the computers, then the laptops, then the servers. I got so good at it that they gave me an ITAD client to handle. It was military servers that had been decommissioned. My job was to identify and sanitize/destroy and data storage before refurbishing the equipment to be resold at a profit share with the organizations I was working with.