The Big Evil Question
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@coliver said:
I've harped on this a number of times on here and on SW. I got a bachelor's in IT from a local Community College (that was part of the SUNY system). The IT education was terrifyingly bad...
I actually had a great SUNY CC and SUNY college experience. Both MCC and SUNY Empire were amazing schools but were dramatically different than any other colleges and universities that I worked with over the years. I've had both the experience of "good classes" and the experience of "bad schools without a single respectable class" for comparison.
This has been handy, because I've seen both that it can be good but more importantly that it isn't necessarily and it is the second thing that is key - having a degree means nothing because of the latter. Anyone can buy a degree, so anyone claiming that a degree means something is to be heavily suspect - either they are challenged by things that are very simple OR they don't understand the college process. One is very bad, the other isn't positive. And as a hiring manager, I can't tell which it is, or if it is both.
I've also worked heavily with OCC to improve their programs, which they honestly worked very hard to do.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
The HR people who are doing level one interviews for these larger companies don't know the difference between a phone cable and an ethernet cable, so they can't possibly do more than check a list of requirements to see if you should go onto the next level. Sadly HR continues to put college as one of those requirements.
This should be its own thread BUT..... is HR driving hiring in the enterprise? I've seen absolutely zero of this. I think this is one of those myths circulated in the SMB by college grads in an attempt to justify, after the fact, their degrees. Someone certainly does this, but is there really a volume of this out there?
Yep, HR was not involved in my hiring here (I guess we are enterprise). Never did I once talk to them, and I report directly to the IT director at corporate. All they've done is make sure paper work was in order and do the background checks.
I've always had HR involved, but never "in the way." They were always just there to discuss benefits, talk about legal stuff, make sure that paperwork was done correctly, etc. They were there to assist, not to sabotage.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
The HR people who are doing level one interviews for these larger companies don't know the difference between a phone cable and an ethernet cable, so they can't possibly do more than check a list of requirements to see if you should go onto the next level. Sadly HR continues to put college as one of those requirements.
This should be its own thread BUT..... is HR driving hiring in the enterprise? I've seen absolutely zero of this. I think this is one of those myths circulated in the SMB by college grads in an attempt to justify, after the fact, their degrees. Someone certainly does this, but is there really a volume of this out there?
Are they driving it, probably not, but are they inserting themselves in the middle with their own requirements - this I have seen. West Corporation is an example. My friend who manages an IT dev team has been told by his management and hr that his new hires have to have college (and in most cases masters) degrees. Of course there are always exceptions to this, but that's the job posting that's put out to the world.
I know GE gets involved a lot in there stuff, but they are also a very politically driven company. (along with the others they own NBC, Time warner(I think) etc, etc)
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
- IT, CIS, MIS are middle of the road. Colleges are horrible at teaching this stuff, can't hire good staff and don't teach good material. Taking these classes means you mistook college for a trade school. See this degree I see as a neutral, neither good nor bad, just ignore that part of the resume.
I would say Universities are bad at this stuff. Many Community colleges are good at it. They are way ahead of in terms of technology than the 4 yr colleges. And most of the professors are part time people who actually work in IT and just teaching on the side for extra $$
Even there, though, how many are top IT people rather than just "who needed some extra cash?" University doesn't pay well and it is a decent time commitment. How many top IT people need extra money and/or have spare time to dedicate to something like this?
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@Dashrender said:
Are they driving it, probably not, but are they inserting themselves in the middle with their own requirements - this I have seen. West Corporation is an example. My friend who manages an IT dev team has been told by his management and hr that his new hires have to have college (and in most cases masters) degrees. Of course there are always exceptions to this, but that's the job posting that's put out to the world.
Other than West, a known small enterprise with all these problems, have you ever seen a respected or any other enterprise do this?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
- IT, CIS, MIS are middle of the road. Colleges are horrible at teaching this stuff, can't hire good staff and don't teach good material. Taking these classes means you mistook college for a trade school. See this degree I see as a neutral, neither good nor bad, just ignore that part of the resume.
I would say Universities are bad at this stuff. Many Community colleges are good at it. They are way ahead of in terms of technology than the 4 yr colleges. And most of the professors are part time people who actually work in IT and just teaching on the side for extra $$
Even there, though, how many are top IT people rather than just "who needed some extra cash?" University doesn't pay well and it is a decent time commitment. How many top IT people need extra money and/or have spare time to dedicate to something like this?
Realistically why would they teach? If they are at that level in the field they could spend less time and gain more money doing hourly consulting.
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West, we have previously determined, isn't a good place to work and doesn't consider themselves to be a good place. They see themselves as very low end by their actions. They've come up again and again as an example of how bad a smaller enterprise in the midwest can be.
But the bulk of the enterprise is bigger than them and more competitive. There is no question that there are bad shops out there, but the question is .... is this normal or the exception?
There is also the question of "is it true?" Lots of people say that they have these requirements but don't have them in the real world.
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I've heard most telecom companies aren't good. Dish is one of the worst. Verizon seems to be on the better end offering many services and good quality (but very high priced for the consulting and cloud services).
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WSTC: West Corp has a market cap of 2.5BN USD and is traded on NASDAQ.
Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska.
26K employees world wide.
So big but not huge. Much smaller than our local grocery store here in Rochester, NY, for example. That has grown significantly and was much bigger in market cap (but not publicly traded) and much bigger in staff, by 10K, a decade ago and they have grown significantly since and is not considered an enterprise and acts mostly like an SMB
Looked it up, I underestimated the size of the grocery store's growth since I was there...
Up to $7BN USB now and 44K employees!!
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I will say going to college for any creative field is the worst idea ever. You can't teach creativity. You'll be paying a lot for nothing. You just need to learn to use tools, and the best way to do that is from people in the field and owning your own equipment (which can be much cheaper than college). A creative college professor is the worst person to learn from, becoming a professor/teacher is normally a sign they failed at being an artist, filmmaker, music producer so they decided to teach. Full Sail University is the top school for creative degrees yet, is the biggest rip off of any college I know. Many of the graduates have hunderdes of thousands in debit (it's a very expensive school), and end up working min wage jobs. Having a degree, especially that expensive of one in the creative world is seen as a negative as firstly the students think they are worth more than they are because full sail says it's real world experience but, it's not. No one wants a stuck up brat on set who thinks they know everything while having done nothing. And secondly creative types are expected to manage some of their budgets for the respective departments, going to college like this show a lack of business sense.
Agreed on most counts. I will say that I was doing some graphic design stuff for one of the school groups I was involved in when I started taking some art history classes, and found that the analysis of classical works was extremely helpful for me. I tried to frame what we learned in those classes as finding the reasons why these pieces of art, out of all the art in the world, had withstood the test of time and become regarded as "important". It helped me learn how to use form, coloration and contrast to more intentionally guide a viewer's eye throughout what I was making so they could pick up the important bits at a glance. This also helped get me on the path to UX when it came to web design instead of just stuffing content down users' throats.
The straight-up art classes were better for teaching specific skills like sketching, pigment mixing, etc... but I feel like the people that went to my school to learn that sort of stuff were making the best of a silly choice their high school selves made.
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@scottalanmiller said:
WSTC: West Corp has a market cap of 2.5BN USD and is traded on NASDAQ.
Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska.
26K employees world wide.
So big but not huge. Much smaller than our local grocery store here in Rochester, NY, for example. That has grown significantly and was much bigger in market cap (but not publicly traded) and much bigger in staff, by 10K, a decade ago and they have grown significantly since and is not considered an enterprise and acts mostly like an SMB
It's bigger than us if you count just the Subsidiary I work for at a big under 10k employees. But with our cooperate company, and the other subsidiaries we are way way bigger. Granted we are #2 in our industry.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It's bigger than us if you count just the Subsidiary I work for at a big under 10k employees. But with our cooperate company, and the other subsidiaries we are way way bigger. Granted we are #2 in our industry.
You know someone isn't too big when you are comparing them to the subsidiaries of other companies
