Quote:
Originally Posted by ScoobsMcGee
It seems like you may be confusing education with intelligence and skill. While I understand it may be more prevalent in information security, most of the people I work with either have no degree or their degree isn't relevant to the job.
Again with a focus on IT, while a degree can be helpful when first starting off, much of what was learned in school will be outdated in five to ten years. Change that to months for information security. For anyone hiring in this field, ignoring skill and talent due to lack of education is a sure way to pay more for people who may not be as technically qualified to do the work.
|
This is highly debatable (and personally I feel strongly 50/50 about it myself).
While the technologies and tools may go out of date, that does not necessarily mean that the concepts/strategies will expire the same way.
I learned to problem solve in different types of ways that I wouldn't have without being in a CompSci program.
Of course that doesn't mean a persistent, highly goal-forward independent student outside of formal education could never learn the same thing.
But I'd hazard a guess that many students, both in typical university learning environments, and those going to hacker schools/self-learning/etc. have the same problems. Not everyone is goal-oriented enough regardless of where/how they study.
I knew plenty of students in my graduating class who never had internships and wound up needing to pivot to non-software engineering careers because they lacked the self-discipline to go above and beyond.
But I've also known of people who didn't go through a normal university program and yet while they know the latest technologies and tools just aren't as capable of problem-solving because they didn't have the same opportunities to learn techniques and strategies for breaking problems down, etc.
The best people I've known who "self-learned" either by doing everything independently or going to hack schools were those who basically did CS or similar programs, went off and did non-technical careers for years, and then needed to basically do hacker schools as a booster to get back up to speed.
I don't think we should ignore people if they didn't come through a university/traditional educational background, but we should really re-develop how we look for and hire them. (which is a huge, separate topic I won't even get into here other than... whiteboarding sucks and I hate it
)