When it comes to the IT field, it's more about experience and production
than formal education. Let's remember that many of the visionaries in the
tech industry have little formal education. (i.e. Gates, Jobs,
Zuckerberg) I, personally, was trained as a systems engineer at the US
Marine Corps Computer Science School; which ironically, taught us no
Computer Science, only operations oriented training. However, I will say a
milestone in getting jobs today, and one that I now personally struggle
with after having been in the top echelon of my industry for the last 15
years, is that as a Systems Admin, Systems Engineer, Network Admin, or any
IT Operations professional, you now have to be able to code. With the
proliferation of config mgmt tools like Ansible, Salt Stack, Puppet, and
Chef, if you can't write code, there is no place for you in the industry.
I'm limping along relying on knowing enough Ruby to use Chef and using a
lot of Ansible since it will basically uses shell script wrapped in what I
believe is a Python backend. Nonetheless, the IT industry is the last
bastion in which what you can do matters more than the fact you were able
to completely what is going to an almost completely useless degree. The
exception to the "useless degree" statement would be if your degree was in
some hard science that either focuses on CS, like CS, CE, or EE, or
requires an ample amounts of coding, like most physics programs do now; but
I digress. Nonetheless, bottom line, a degree is a inconsequential as long
as you have the skills and the work history to back it up.

Linux O'Beardly
@LinuxOBeardly
http://o.beard.ly
linux.obeardly@???

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Jason Taylor <jason@???>
wrote:

> Starting now, it's probably more necessary than it was 10, 15, 20 years
> ago. In my entire time in IT, I can count all the people I've ever meet
> that were born and raised in the U.S.* and with an IT degree on one hand.
> I've meet plenty with all sorts of other degrees: geology, philosophy,
> medical, you name it. In nearly 20 years I've only ever had one company
> tell me that a degree was an absolute requirement for working there. That
> was this year, so things may be changing.
>
> I don't have any experience with it, but I'd imagine that if you're
> looking to do something like actually design new hardware, you'd have to
> have a degree unless you're going to go entrepreneurial.
>
> * If you're looking to work on an H1B or similar, I suspect a degree is a
> hard requirement.
>
> On 11/12/2015 7:51 AM, Mitt Green wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone‎,
>>
>> This is offtopic. I'm interested in whether college or university degree
>> is necessary to work in IT industry (of any kind: admin, embedded systems
>> developer, driver developer, mobile systems, consulting, hardware etc).
>>
>> Questions:
>> 1) Are there many people without degrees in the industry?
>> 2) Which companies (just for examples) don't require it?
>> 3) Are there any hobbyists around here, that earn some money from
>> coding?
>>
>> From what I've heard, universities here teach something that is
>> obsolete and is not used anymore, or simply don't teach what we do
>> here (Unix, administration, hardware...).
>>
>> Thanks for any kind of information,
>>
>> Mitt
>> _______________________________________________
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>> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
>>
>
>
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