Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist
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@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@coliver said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@NerdyDad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@alex.olynyk said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
Group Policy, sorry thats vendor specific
Yes, and higher end. Very systems admin focused. Think what we'd expect from someone who wanted to enter university.
But coming from somebody that went through college, they are only going to teach you theory and principles and nothing too much vendor specific. If they do teach something vendor centric, then it will more than likely be Linux-based at it is easier to get your hands on (legitimately anyways) and deploy while sticking with the principle/theory.
VERY much the opposite. Windows and Cisco are taught at university 10:1 over Linux. They are PAID to be sales people for those vendors. And universities can't afford to hire Linux skills, but Microsoft and Cisco are a dime a dozen. So they teach whatever professors are unemployed on the market at the time.
College should only teach theory and principles. And that's all we are looking for here. If a college teaches hands on useful stuff, it's violating its mandate (outside of using them to demonstrate theory.)
I NEVER had a MS lab with servers or Hyper-V or anything. If I touched Linux, then it was through Cygwin. That was it. Otherwise, it was theory and principles.
How do you "touch Linux" through cygwin? Cygwin is an application layer for Windows only.
The only point of using Cygwin was to teach on how Linux's file systemS are different than Windows.
But Cygwin sees the Windows NTFS filesystem, not a Linux one. There is no Linux, at all, with Cygwin. What the heck did they think that they were showing to you?
And I barely made a B in the class because the teacher was not good at teaching. He had a difficult time explaining the same thing in different ways so that his students would understand how the principle worked. However, a lab would still have been very valuable for this class, even if the professor hosted it themself.
Probably not, since he apparently didn't know the subject matter well enough to even know what to have put in the lab!
Team up with Mike Rowe and create MangoU has an IT Trade school for the different facets of IT. You want to be a programmer? Take this course. You want to go into networking? Go into this program.
How valuable is that really? The people who need structured courses to learn are most likely going to have a very hard time with a fluid IT environment. I think most people could benefit from an internship long before they would benefit from a structured course.
Okay, so how about some kind of work/study program? Team the student up with half a day in the field, behind a helpdesk or something and the other half in school. The time they spend in the field pays for the schooling with maybe a little extra for themselves plus a 2nd job to live or something.
I'm not married to one solution. Just like love, IT will find a way.
Or, they could get an internship... many of the ones I've seen and the one I participated in was paid. This will give them hands-on production technology use and if they have a decent mentor they will get into a lot of the theory behind why things are the way they are.
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Has anyone seen a real internship that actually was all that valuable compared to "just go learn it?" I love the idea, but in day to day work how many people do a huge range of interesting things in a way that benefits education? Shadowing IT people at work now and then, yeah, super valuable. But I've known no internship that after a year taught as much as two weeks of just sitting down with a book and a computer and learning some stuff.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
Has anyone seen a real internship that actually was all that valuable compared to "just go learn it?" I love the idea, but in day to day work how many people do a huge range of interesting things in a way that benefits education? Shadowing IT people at work now and then, yeah, super valuable. But I've known no internship that after a year taught as much as two weeks of just sitting down with a book and a computer and learning some stuff.
I had good luck with my internship... but that may be because I was doing the sitting down with a computer and building my own lab in my spare time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
But I've known no internship that after a year taught as much as two weeks of just sitting down with a book and a computer and learning some stuff.
Never had an internship, and I did a lot of learning on my own. But I learned so much more once I was pretty much handed an environment and said "this is yours, now go and improve it, but keep it working."
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I wonder how much business training needs to be included? Like "don't confuse technical people with sales people". And of course "you are not special" and "don't get weird."
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@scottalanmiller We're all weird.
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@wirestyle22 said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller We're all weird.
Yep. Too late for that one.
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@coliver said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
y weren't as up-to-date with the tech as they thought. It was myself and a few other students who really pushed them to teach
Oh man - tell me about it - I found several training classes I took to be completely worthless.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
I wonder how much business training needs to be included? Like "don't confuse technical people with sales people". And of course "you are not special" and "don't get weird."
This could be actually more important than the IT knowledge in general - so the IT people need to know this And whoever they report to!
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
Has anyone seen a real internship that actually was all that valuable compared to "just go learn it?" I love the idea, but in day to day work how many people do a huge range of interesting things in a way that benefits education? Shadowing IT people at work now and then, yeah, super valuable. But I've known no internship that after a year taught as much as two weeks of just sitting down with a book and a computer and learning some stuff.
See, you say this, but just a post above you shoot down classroom study. Classroom study can specifically direct students to/through the fundamentals. Granted it might not be a full semester class. it might only be a 2-4 week class, after which you diverge into what your actual specialty will be. As I understand it, that's how doctors work. They graduate from med school, their residency is the real hands on stuff, in many different departments, helping them find the thing that they like.
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
I wonder how much business training needs to be included? Like "don't confuse technical people with sales people". And of course "you are not special" and "don't get weird."
This could be actually more important than the IT knowledge in general - so the IT people need to know this And whoever they report to!
I suppose this is the stuff he expects you'll get in college. Especially if you do a business or accounting degree?
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@coliver said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
y weren't as up-to-date with the tech as they thought. It was myself and a few other students who really pushed them to teach
Oh man - tell me about it - I found several training classes I took to be completely worthless.
I feel that way about most classes. I miss the old CBTs of ~2000.
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
Has anyone seen a real internship that actually was all that valuable compared to "just go learn it?" I love the idea, but in day to day work how many people do a huge range of interesting things in a way that benefits education? Shadowing IT people at work now and then, yeah, super valuable. But I've known no internship that after a year taught as much as two weeks of just sitting down with a book and a computer and learning some stuff.
See, you say this, but just a post above you shoot down classroom study. Classroom study can specifically direct students to/through the fundamentals.
You act like one disputes the other. Both are bad. Interns suffer for the reasons, I think, that I mention in the other post. Basically there is no good system for it. Classroom suffers because anything that involves "hand holding" or "spoon feeding" in IT is going to fail in general, it's not a field that will tolerate that long term. You have to be able to self educate or it's game over.
Books and labs, that's where I believe the learning is. Communities like ML provide better mentors than companies do (normally.) And classrooms struggle to be fractionally as useful as a book. Anything you can do in a classroom you can do better on YouTube. Classrooms, at best, are passable. But in practice, in the real world, you have mostly professors who failed to make it in the real world and who are terribly out of date and often totally incorrect (probably why they didn't make it) who take teaching jobs to put food on the table at a fraction of industry pay rates who them teach students who are trying to get away without teaching themselves. So, by and large, you have the failed teaching the lazy. It's a horrible combination. Some professors love what they do and put in a real effort. But very few because teaching is not that rewarding and the pay is bad.
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@StrongBad said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
I wonder how much business training needs to be included? Like "don't confuse technical people with sales people". And of course "you are not special" and "don't get weird."
This could be actually more important than the IT knowledge in general - so the IT people need to know this And whoever they report to!
I suppose this is the stuff he expects you'll get in college. Especially if you do a business or accounting degree?
Yes, exactly. Universities are pretty decent at teaching that broad "soft" stuff.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
You have to be able to self educate or it's game over.
Isn't this the case in nearly any professional field though? Sure doctors can go to lectures, but they are just as likely to read things and watch video as to attend a lecture or watch someone do it live.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
But very few because teaching is not that rewarding and the pay is bad.
I'm not sure what you consider good or bad pay, but our local community college pays around $30/hr for teachers, $60K isn't bad. Sure it's no senior IT Admin.
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
You have to be able to self educate or it's game over.
Isn't this the case in nearly any professional field though? Sure doctors can go to lectures, but they are just as likely to read things and watch video as to attend a lecture or watch someone do it live.
No, not in most. There is little to no need to self educate to any significant degree in any major field. Those who do have benefits, of course, but many fields force non-self education to keep the brightest from getting too much advantage. No matter how much you know as a medical student, you don't get to just be a functional doctor. It's not about how much you know or how competent you are, it's about paying into the system. So self education isn't very valuable. And the same stays true throughout later their careers.
What career requires daily or weekly or whatever updates like IT? Almost none, maybe actually none. Think about an accountant - how much new stuff do they need to learn year over year?
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@Dashrender said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
But very few because teaching is not that rewarding and the pay is bad.
I'm not sure what you consider good or bad pay, but our local community college pays around $30/hr for teachers, $60K isn't bad. Sure it's no senior IT Admin.
That's horrific. So a starting enterprise Linux admin on Wall St., that's someone with no college, no experience was nearly double that a decade ago. Think about that. And who do you want teaching classes? It needs to be someone that knows the material, knows the field, has experience and is a viable teacher on top of that. So in reality, anyone that you want to even remotely consider as a teaching is going to be able to earn $120K - $180K somewhere in the field. And there is little to no upward mobility in teaching, there are huge amounts of politics and career risk, there is little opportunity if you end up not liking the position or coworkers, almost no flexibility to do anything. There are big vacation benefits, but at locked in, awful times (only when there are big crowds and high prices.) You give up far more than most fields require and in return, you get very low pay.
If your professor can't just walk into any Senior IT level interview (for their discipline) as a top candidate, what use are they in teaching students? If students hope to graduate above the level of their professors, there is something really screwed up.
So while $60K salary might be decent if you get to live in a low cost area, have a low stress job that you like, get soft benefits that make it make sense; I'd say it is a guarantee that the university system cannot possibly provide any reliably meaningful form of IT education.
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I do realize that Wall St. is on the high side of salaries. But we are talking entry level people in systems administration. In Texas we were going to pay more than that for high school kids if they could show a little Linux aptitude.
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@scottalanmiller said in Of What Should Baseline IT Education Consist:
I do realize that Wall St. is on the high side of salaries. But we are talking entry level people in systems administration. In Texas we were going to pay more than that for high school kids if they could show a little Linux aptitude.
Not just high, extreme and rare outside of wallstreet is what I would say - perhaps also on the london equivalent.
