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That's interesting. I didn't know that so much emphasis is placed on where you get your degree from. Question though...you mention lucrative companies a lot and I was wondering what it's like working in a small/medium sized company. Do you know anyone who has not worked in a lucrative company and enjoyed it? Maybe the lucrative companies offer a lot more benefits?
When it comes to education, it's important to study at a good institution. People think that it's really complicated. It's not.
Study at a top school. Get good grades. Take part in research and internship programs. Get a job through the career services.
Got the technology field, go to Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech or many of the great schools available. Learn about the fields from the professors. Get involved. Take in as much as you can.
The big tech firms (and i've heard this about Microsoft from someone they tried to recruit, but it almost certainly applies to all of them) are desperate to increase their numbers for women and non-Asian minorities in tech, so they will hire anyone in those categories who is at all competent.
Best advice is to skip IT and go for software development. Get a CS degree. If it's the operational side which interest you, what the tech firms call an "SRE" (Site Reliability Engineer) would be the thing to go for; you need software development skills AND operations-type skills for that.
SRE is a terrible job though. You get paid well but horrible hours and a lot of stress. It's only a good role at Google and that has probably changed. Most guys I know in that role have incredibly poor health and will die in their 50s. I did it for 18 months and that was 18 months too many.
I came across the above article and I would like some advice from people who are actually in the field. Though the title of the article says "STEM," I see that most of the article refers to the I.T. sector. I may consider I.T. in the future as something to study in college and would like to know from people in the field how true the article is.
The article mentions many big name companies but I'm curious to know if this is something that has a huge effect on landing a job in the sector. Does the much cheaper competition make it really hard to find a job? And I see big numbers in the article but I did not see anything regarding the percentage of I.T. workers total affected by these layoffs. For example, in a given city, if a few big name companies lay off 10,000 workers, then what would be that percentage of people who are affected by such a thing. Let's say there are around 100,000 I.T. workers in a given city, that would be 10% directly affected (I should say that this would affect everyone in one way or another), which is significant.
I know that what I ask is complicated (because it varies depending on location in the U.S., etc.) but I really have no idea how huge this issue really is or if it's overblown. I've also come across articles saying not to be discouraged and that there are plenty of jobs in the field. Even if you can't give numbers, if you have any stories that would help, I'd be grateful.
And from a political standpoint, does anything really believe politicians will change the law to stop most of this scam from occurring? Does anyone see the issue getting a lot worse instead?
What happened in my area during 2008 recession. Some companies were firing, most were not hiring. Many companies had h1B slave workers. Some companies had hiring and firing freezes. H1b worker policies set by politicians. Democrats (Clinton and Obama had policies favoring American worker. Bushe's policies is when during the recession no American is interviewing for a position, only h1b's are interviewing.
That's interesting. I didn't know that so much emphasis is placed on where you get your degree from. Question though...you mention lucrative companies a lot and I was wondering what it's like working in a small/medium sized company. Do you know anyone who has not worked in a lucrative company and enjoyed it? Maybe the lucrative companies offer a lot more benefits?
It helps to work at a "hip" company. Or the right sort of established one. Think Facebook, Google. Whats App wold have been good. Pinterest, Twitter stuff like that. You'll learn more at a small company. You can also pick a niche, but that is more of when you have a graduate level degree.
You want to work somewhere that came out of Y Combinator. Or someone with funding from Andresson or Kleiner Perkins. These are VCs that have good connections and look good on a resume. They also help "alumni" get jobs.
Almost every post I see mentions getting an internship. I will definitely have to remember that! But is hiring an experienced U.S. worker/a new graduate really so expensive that one would rather pay for an H1B1 visa? I would think that they don't come cheap; somehow these workers must be getting paid much much less than their U.S. counterpart for so many companies to be willing to spend money for all the costs that come with this visa.
They are getting paid much less. For instance a H1B computer programmer get 64K a year. But they are actually hiring senior programmers that would have earned over $100K if they lived in the US. To resolve this problem, we should make it easier to change employer for H1B visa candidates. Then it will no longer make sense to underpay them, because they will just change employer.
But H1B workers are too few to actually effect the market for graduates. The reason they are not training IT graduates anymore is not due to them, but because IT has become much more difficult. For instance previously in web development you would just need HTML/CSS/Javascript, now you also need to know Bootstrap, Angular, React, Sass, Gulp, Typescript, Agile, and testing. Remember, web development is considered easy comared to other programming fields. The lack of training is something happening worldwide, and it is due to the complexity of good jobs.
Someone may ask why easy good jobs are not training people. That is because they don't need to, those jobs are getting hundreds of applicants. This allows the employers to pick the best.
That's interesting. I didn't know that so much emphasis is placed on where you get your degree from. Question though...you mention lucrative companies a lot and I was wondering what it's like working in a small/medium sized company. Do you know anyone who has not worked in a lucrative company and enjoyed it? Maybe the lucrative companies offer a lot more benefits?
If you're just out of college and have a degree from places like Strayer, U of Phoenix or DeVry, in many cases your degree won't be given much weight. Beyond that, I suspect the school you attended will be more important at places like Google or Apple than it will be at the non Silicon Valley type employers who hire the vast majority of IT workers. I'm sure there are niches out there as well where the name matters, but in the majority of cases as long as you went to a reputable school it shouldn't.
They are getting paid much less. For instance a H1B computer programmer get 64K a year. But they are actually hiring senior programmers that would have earned over $100K if they lived in the US. To resolve this problem, we should make it easier to change employer for H1B visa candidates. Then it will no longer make sense to underpay them, because they will just change employer.
But H1B workers are too few to actually effect the market for graduates. The reason they are not training IT graduates anymore is not due to them, but because IT has become much more difficult. For instance previously in web development you would just need HTML/CSS/Javascript, now you also need to know Bootstrap, Angular, React, Sass, Gulp, Typescript, Agile, and testing. Remember, web development is considered easy comared to other programming fields. The lack of training is something happening worldwide, and it is due to the complexity of good jobs.
Someone may ask why easy good jobs are not training people. That is because they don't need to, those jobs are getting hundreds of applicants. This allows the employers to pick the best.
I agree with most of what you said. I would say that web development, still, is the easiest starting point because there are a handful of jobs that require only basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Some development roles simply don't have any entry-level jobs. Take this from a guy who has applied to hundreds of development jobs and probably browsed through a million. I have never once seen a listing for a
Game Developer
SDET
that didn't require at least 3 years of professional experience.
The lucrative companies such as MSFT, GOOG, etc. always have Software Engineer/Developer positions that are open to recent grads or graduating college Seniors and sometimes only to recent grads or graduating college Seniors (the listing will have as a requirement "Must have graduated in the past 6 months" or "Graduating in 2016"). Those positions are very competitive to get. Your resume is at the bottom of the stack unless you're one of the top CS grads I described earlier in this thread.
Alternatives to "real" development are
QA Engineer (basically, a manual tester)
Support Engineer (basically, someone who files bug reports)
Content Developer (basically, someone who fills in HTML tags with words)
to name a few. I don't think anyone who thinks of themself as a programmer would take those roles as a 1st choice, but they make for great consolation prizes at MSFT, GOOG, etc. because you can still make $70k in those positions at those companies and apply internally for real development positions later.
As I mentioned earlier, Program Manager is a role that many of the top companies want CS grads to go into. Most CS grads I know who work at Microsoft are Program Managers. You'll make more than a Level-1 Software Engineer ($150k versus $100k at Microsoft).
There are plenty of jobs, but there's an enormous "tech gutter" that you can end up in if you aren't competitive enough to get hired as a real employee of a lucrative tech company like AMZN, GOOG, NFLX, MSFT, FB, etc.
If you do the following, then you can get hired at one of the lucrative tech companies:
Get a CS degree from a reputable program
Get a good GPA
Work 1 or 2 internships at one of the lucrative tech companies
Study the Crack the Coding Interview book and in general prepare to sell yourself as a young, bright, motivated individual who wants to do hands-on programming and knows how to throw around CS buzzwords like "Linked List" and "Hash Table" and knows how to throw around industry buzzwords/phrases like "Reinvent the wheel", "Quick and dirty solution", "Deploy", "Scale up", etc.
Apply at the lucrative companies during your senior year of college
It also helps if:
You're woman or racial minority
You're willing to work as a Program Manager
The tech gutter is when you don't have the qualifications necessary to get hired at one of those lucrative companies and so you take some 2nd-rate gig that then tarnishes your resume and burns you out. It's a self-perpetuating problem because the longer you don't work at a lucrative company, the less likely lucrative companies are to look at your resume in the future.
And yes, it's getting more competitive because there are over 1 billion people in India and almost all of them study IT-related fields and already have 10 years of experience when they come over here. Not just India, but also Russia and other Eastern European nations.
IT and programming are not the same, they may overlap here and there but they are two different professions.
Do you work in human resources?, you sound like one
i agree, the corporations quoted above are not the best companies an engineer, programmer, ... should work at (they are popular i guess). there are several non-internet based companies that provide important services under the radar.
i hope this doesnt sound like too much of a generalization but i find it that our offshore personnel are good and quick at being technicians (running reports, following flow charts, ...) but they arent usually the best engineers (modifying processes, looking for inefficiencies, ...).
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