list problems?

Steve Gibbard scg at gibbard.org
Wed May 22 23:32:04 UTC 2002


On Wed, 22 May 2002, Leo Bicknell wrote:

> So, do you need a degree to get a job?  Absolutely not.  Can you
> make the same money initially without a degree, most likely.
> However, I suspect you'll find more often than not without one in
> 5 years you'll have gotten your 10% raise and still be a grunt,
> while your coworkers who had that preparation will have been moved
> up to roles with more responsibility, and significantly more money.

Interesting.  My personal experience, the experience of various people I
know, and stuff I think I've read somewhere, tend to show the opposite.

Coming out of high school in 1995 with every opportunity to go to college,
but feeling burned out enough on school that I thought it was best to wait
a year or two, the tech jobs available to somebody with no experience and
no college education tended to be of the very low paying variety.  I found
a job at a company that had interesting stuff to do but no money to pay
somebody who already knew how to do it, so for probably about what I would
have been making at McDonald's I started learning how to run office LANs
for my employer and their clients, do some fairly simple programming, and
other things of that sort.  I've moved up considerably, both financially
and technically, since then, but it took a few years for my salary to
reach and pass what my college educated friends were making in their first
post-college jobs.  It seems pretty obvious to me that for somebody
without work experience, there's no question that a college degree is
worth a considerable amount of money.  At this point, it's been several
years since my lack of a degree seemed to be an issue.

That said, I certainly wouldn't tell anybody who didn't have a clear idea
of what they wanted to do instead, and why it couldn't wait, not to go to
college.  A lot of my non-college educated friends didn't do all that
well; not starting out, and not several years down the line.  A college
degree may not be absolutely essential, but in most cases it probably
helps.  As for me, it's been a couple years since I was last job hunting.  
Maybe I'm in for a rude awakening.

I went on from that first job to spending most of what might otherwise
have been my college years building and running the network of a growing
local ISP, and learning an incredible amount in the process.  I'm pretty
sure I learned far more about how the Internet works doing that than I
would have had I spent 1995-99 in college, and it looks to me now as if
the sorts of learning experiences I had during that time wouldn't have
been nearly as available four years later after the Internet had become a
big business, or now during the economic crash.  I made the right choice
for me at the time, and then I was quite lucky.

-Steve

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Gibbard				scg at gibbard.org	




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