31 year old Operations/DevOps at a startup. I still find time to build CNC mills from scratch, and my current/long-term project is building a 40' sailing vessel for a circumnavigation.
I have no college education. I can weld (quite well), I've built 3d models for laser sintering, I've assembled carbon fiber body panels. If you want to do something, learn how to do it. Then go do it!
Unfortunately, this only tends to work during periods of economic prosperity. When times get tough, those without credentials usually seem to be the first to be ousted.
But I've long wondered whether that's true. How'd you fare during 2008? It'd be nice to collect some datapoints from someone else.
The phenomenon seemed most true just after The Bubble. I think tptacek mentioned he had some pretty substantial credentials yet finding a job was extraordinarily difficult.
Faired okay in 2008. Company I was working for went out of business (was IT manager making $96K/yr), was hired 3 months later to do IT operations for datataking for a detector at the Large Hadron Collider ($86K/yr). Managed ~6K linux boxes, had a good time, learned what essentially became my DevOps career. Left after a year to go back into the private sector for a $40K/year salary increase managing datacenters.
I've only been asked 3-4 times about my college education (or lack thereof), and its never stopped me from getting a job. YMMV.
this can happen only in NA: people w/out school lead data centers. I know a Sociologist who was a Director of IT Strategy and Planning, a retail salesman and Preacher becoming Oracle Developer (I had to visit internal establishments of a big job agency just to see who is it that they are hiring for Oracle positions because I, who started doing Oracle with it's first commercial version, Oracle 5 Beta in 1988., and worked in and around Oracle ever since, was certainly not amongst those lucky souls. They even told me, just before the Internet Bust 2000-2002 that "they will not be recommending me for Oracle projects"!? I made sure that in the last 14 years, every 6mths or so I send an email to that person starting always with that quotation and always reminding him that I was the state Champion of Math and Physics at the age of 17 and never mentioning my University Electrical Engineering degree and M.Sc. Computer Science including 25 years of experience in IT - btw, in order to feed my family, back in the 90s, I had to go low level, deep down low where no shoe salesman can ever go, writing STREAMS drivers and Unix communication gateways - ALL other positions were taken by people not educated in IT, computer science and electrical engineering. 2000s improved a bit: they started hiring Chemical and Mechanical engineers in IT as well, but not computer science and electrical engineers. Nowadays still 80% of IT positions are taken by intruders in the field!), etc. etc. NA led world to this Slump of All Slumps from which it will never recover, read my lips
> When times get tough, those without credentials usually seem to be the first to be ousted.
I have seen those without credentials having a harder time finding work, but I don't see why they would be the first to be ousted. Credentials are great for making the first cut in applying for a job, because they have to make that decision with relatively little time and effort. Credentials are also great for applying to companies that have little trust in their ability to interview candidates, but after you have been there for a while, they know what you can do. It doesn't make sense to get rid of people based on lack of credentials (and I've never seen it happen).
of course it does, read my post above. Even if an uneducated person is (uneducated) Edison himself as for every Edison there is an (educated) Tesla. No exceptions allowed
When it comes to hiring, a degree acts as a filter. Let's say 200 people apply for a post. (and when the economy is bad that number goes up). I know that of the 200 probably 20 would be perfect for the job.
Now I don't want to interview 200, because all I need to find is one of the 20. So first thing to do is filter the pile based on some objective measure. Having a degree is a quick way to get from 200 to 100 or less. And my experience has shown, that at least for some jobs, the bulk of the 20 will be in the 100 that are left.
Of course I'm talking about technical jobs here - if I was looking for a carpenter I'd use a different filter.
Are there people who would be perfect for the job excluded in the filtering process? Of course the are. But I'm going to reject 19 perfectly good candidates anyway so filtering a few out early is fine.
Of course the filter is not the only filter, and is not absolute. Experience trumps education so good specific experience can get you through to. And (for me) personal passion for the work trumps them all. That's hard to put in a resume, but is great whe I find it.
Incidentally of the 200 resumes the goal is to interview as few as possible. Ideally < 10. Like I say, I don't need 20 great people, just 1.
Statements like this are really easy to make when you have money to support your family. I've often said "I don't want to work for someone who does [x]" then taken a job for someone doing [x] and a lot worse because when push comes to shove, I needed the money.
14 years ago, mostly because people like you, I got high blood pressure. I started to read a lot about it in the coming years and, in my twisted mind, I even considered myself to be an expert in the filed (!?), more so because in my University times I was doing research in Biocybernetics, digital processing of biomedical signals etc. So I was on the health forums, writing about the subject like some, God forbid, doctor. I was in a heated discussion and a forum member, a Cardiologist, told me: "- Listen, go and read 9000 pages so that you can become a Cardiologist. Then come back and we can discuss". I thought for the moment, remembered my 47 exams in University Electrical Engineering department, and wholeheartedly agreed with him. I never wrote a single post about health again
The trick is to learn some things that don't require a lot of company support. "Gold standard" skills, if you like. I sell books and classes, for instance.
Those still get harder in a downturn, but you need less company agreement that your skills are good. Instead, sell directly to people who mostly don't care about your formal credentials.
It's not perfect. But even a little goes a long way.
Learn skills that are in demand in any org. I can do Sysadmin/Network Admin/IT Manager/Devops for an enterprise, a SMB, a startup, or even consulting part-time if you don't need a full-time person.
You don't need AWS? Cool, I can manage Hyper-V, Openstack, or VMware. You use .NET instead of Python? I can do that. You need me to be customer facing? Easy as pie.
I am not an IT professional. I've a business professional that uses IT to solve problems.
EDIT: /u/todayiamme, saw your reply you wanted to get in touch. I'd love to!
After you get 8+ years of real world experience doing what you do under belt, your education becomes irrelevant in most fields.
So if you've been lucky enough to have someone believe in you without caring about your missing degree, and you do that for enough years, you should be just fine.
> So if you've been lucky enough to have someone believe in you without caring about your missing degree, and you do that for enough years, you should be just fine.
I'd say luck comes into play in any job. You could have an ivy league background. Now someone thinks you're overqualified for the position, and picks the cheaper candidate.
In my case, it was part luck and part a numbers game. I was 17, and applied at ~30 companies for their IT roles. Why not? It was cheap for me (print resume, mail, follow up over phone) both in resources and time. I took pics with of my racks of older cheap PCs in my parent's basement doing distributed.net's RC5 challenge, all networked and cable tied, proxy configs, etc. It wasn't a hard sell to a decision maker.
That also depends on the population of your country! In India, you are worthless without a degree. People look down on non engineers. Even bachelor of science in computer science is considered crap. Your value as a developers depends only on how many other developers are out there.
I would love to see details on your 40' sailing vessel project. How much of it is your own design and how much of it involves relying on designs from others.
I'll have details up on my blog someday! I rely heavily on other designs, as I'm no nautical engineer, but I do pull elements from different craft designs (its a catamaran).
I built my CNC mill with my wife. She's helping me build my boat. We've been married 6 years, and we enjoy working on projects together. We also try to spend as much time with extended family as possible.
Awesome, glad to hear you've been able to find a balance. Sounds like a big part of that is your shared interests in these areas with your wife which allows you to focus the time there.
Out of curiosity, how much technical knowledge was needed for the CNC mill?
Life is all about prioritizing the things that are important to you. If I have to work less to still work on projects and have a family life, I can do that.
Engineering is simply systematic application of thought to solving problems. Breaking problems to smaller logical solvable units and then just solving them.
Engineering is not reading a few books and appearing for exams.