I view length of experience like tenure. I shows very little about the qualities of the candidate. In some places, like where I work, it is simply a measure of being able to not get fired. I could simply claim my few years of experience because I am extremely unlikely to get fired, and so accrue experience from that fact. But that would say nothing about my actual skills or value as a candidate. I feel the same way about college degrees. I know too many people, both with degrees and with lots of time experience, that are poor choices for a lot of tasks, simply because who they are and the other skills they lack. Perhaps experience or a degree can be an ok initial standard for getting a resume past the basic screening, but any competent interviewer should be able to tell when that experience was good or just from time served.

@kelly said in How Much and Long Does the A+ Typically Influence IT Hiring?: I realize that recording a video saves you a ton of time in getting out your thoughts, but I'm not going to be able to keep up with your thoughts if this is your new way of posting I’ve told him many times I will not watch videos, but I don’t think he cares but I have no idea what he said in any of them.

@momurda said in Survey of Fake Jobs SAMIT Video: Anyway to get it to transcribe these to a document whose text you could put underneath your videos? Gotta find an easy way to pretty it up. But I know how to get it now, so I can work on that.

@scottalanmiller said in Job Hunting is Like Online Dating SAMIT Video: I can see a podcast mechanism being very handy. I like podcasts on an old fashioned MP3 player with no Internet myself. I can offer to make the podcast on this.

@scottalanmiller said in How to Spot Fake Job Postings SAMIT Video: Youtube Video Fake job postings are sometimes pretty hard to spot. But there are a lot of signs that can help us identify common fake jobs. The truth about this had me gut rolling in the car the other day. Great video.

At the highest level, this feels like it could be pretty easily compressed to two pages.

@wrx7m said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros: @scottalanmiller said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros: @wrx7m said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros: What if you are both? lol That's a hard aspect of it, there is almost always overlap. Not always, but especially in the SMB there is often quite a bit. Any SMB IT Pro will have to buy regularly. Many buyers do IT work on smaller scales so as not to have to go through the process of buying something simple. Yeah, I am an IT pro that has to buy. At some point, all pros have to buy sometimes. Heck even General Motors buys some of their parts from the outside!

It's not that college is always bad, it just comes with negatives that have to be weighed against the positives. The standard approach is to assume that instead of going to college (whether at 18 or mid-career) is to assume that the person will do absolutely nothing productive with their free time, accept the same stagnation and all other negatives that come with the educational process, and that they will then compete toe to toe after the one has completed college and the other has just waited for them to finish. But in the real world, someone ambitious enough to have gone to college for career reasons is also ambitious enough to work harder at their jobs, done a side job, gotten certs, learned on their own, moved on to another job, or so forth. Those are the more realistic actions of the other person that had the option of college. So when making the comparison, you have to look at those opportunities and look at the opportunities from the degree process and weight them in that fashion.

@travisdh1 Could be Valve with a title like that.

@john11smith said in Getting Started in IT SAMIT Video: I think bench work would be perfect for me. Please don't say I need CompTIA A+ for this. I feel like it is going backwards. Perhaps Server+ then? Sadly, A+ is the only broadly known cert in the bench world. The Server+ is a better cert, but only applies to a certain type of bench work and is only known by 1% of employers.