[toomuchtodo]

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.

[navr]

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

[JasonFruit]

Reading what you wrote, I wonder if you've considered that there might be non-technical, more personal reasons you've had a hard time finding employment in your field. Holding a 14-year-long nastygram-writing grudge against a job agency doesn't seem like the best use of your clearly valuable time. I really mean no offense here; I've had to make some adjustments in my way of dealing with people over the years, as well.

[navr]

there are too many stories. On 23rd of Dec 1999. I went for an interview with XXX, an Enron like looser company (btw, this is what happened in Enron, a distilled hitchhiker guide to enronization of NA: a company A sold assets to company B. Company A continued to use those assets). This was my second or third coming to their establishments (first time I visited them they were porting from Ingres to Oracle; on my second visit (different) they informed me they are porting from Oracle to - Ingres). So here I am on 23rd of Dec. 1999. I was greeted by a - think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever - a "project manager" (btw "project manager", "business analyst" and similar stupidities are all The Tools of Corruption of Enormous Proportions. Project Management exists...in projects like NASA Space Shuttle etc. Or Hadron Colider and similar. But to create a "project" around 4 (four) lines of Perl code?? That is plain stupidity (I used Perl intentionally to express my disgust with all of that nonsense which cost NA economies trillions and trillions of dollars, together with so called "HR departments", "job agencies" and similar stupidities). Back to our Travoilta PM. The guy had an Oracle book besides him (!it takes a disco dancer to at least come close to something that has any connection to Oracle whatsoever. All other idiots who declined my application for Oracle jobs, they opted for so called "behavioural" interviews (these are interviews where milk can be white or black, depending on the wish of the Travolta, pardon "interviewer"). Of course Travolta didn't understand a word I was saying. I was looking those huge establishments with 1000s of cubicles and at that moment I knew one thing with 100% certainty: this is going down sharply very soon. I knew something (but not enough, and not enough time to learn more) about short selling. I remember thinking: this Travolta company's stock is $125 and it must go to $60 no question about it. I had 300,000 at the time. Long story short: the stock went down not to $60, not even to $6, but TO F. 6 CENTS (!). From $125 to 6 cents. And I was a prime witness and I due to trading inexperience did nothing. I mean how many stock analysts could have such opportunity to observe a praised (top 3 companies in the field) company from inside and spot a huge technical signal: SELL, SELL, SELL.