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The fact is most american IT workers suck. Thus an employer might as well get an H1B. They will suck too, but be much cheaper. It only costs a company about $3500 do do the visa paperwork. No big deal when the yearly savings per employee are $50,000.
I know it's business at the end of the day and we have a capitalist economy, but with that kind of mindset, we're in for a very dangerous slippery slope. I won't even say corporations because smaller businesses do this too (pay their workers peanuts in comparison to what they make) but if we allow this to continue, they will pay people a dollar a day. Now that's exaggerating a little bit but I do believe we could eventually have a society where over 75 per cent of the population lives in poverty.
Agree, I see quite a few entry level IT positions come up regularly. The pay isn't always stellar, but it will build skills and build your resume. A good entry level position is a school district, the pay is close to corporate tech support level but the benefits are usually really good.
This whole time I didn't think to consider schools. I will have to make notes of all this advice.
I've done all of it. Poor companies, rich companies, small and large.
Some of the lucrative companies pay poorly, or expect 60-70 hr work weeks. Lucrative companies can suck to work for because while lucrative....that doesn't mean lucrative for you. And everyone wants that big company name on their resume.
Currently....small company not incredibly lucrative, but doing well seems to be the best work life balance for me, with mind boggling benefits. The work is enjoyable, and management seems to have a clue.
Interesting...I thought that with all the talk of lucrative companies, they must be shelling out big money (I know that some probably do). HAHA.
You're right...a big company would look good on your resume and be good for networking/socializing but with smaller companies, they may provide a more friendly atmosphere because everyone knows each other (it could also be the opposite. I've seen that too). With big companies, you do tend to feel like just a number.
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.
If you do all this, the rest is simpler.
With all this being said, I will definitely consider attending a university (maybe Kennesaw or G.S.U.) rather than a college unless the college is well known for its program. That's something I will have to research as the time draws nearer for me to apply.
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.
I'm embarrassed to admit this but I keep forgetting that I.T. and CS/C.I.S. aren't the same. I'll do some research on software development and see if it suits me. Thanks.
I know folks who work in Diversity Recruitment at the major companies. Let's just leave it at that.
I believe that there is a push to have a more diverse workforce because the industry was put on the spot for their lack of diversity. I suppose research was done after many minorities (which also includes women in the context of employment) complained that they are qualified and are just not getting any job offers. Many people tend to hire those who are similar to themselves and for a long time, that meant/means hiring mostly white males.
I was contacted for a job as Software Engineer or entry programmer as a ChemE engineer because I knew about 8 programming languages and had two years of experience working on academic research that involved heavy programming in the chemical engineering department. Working on chemical engineering application is as far away as you can get from a computer science project. The work is harder in that you have the same problems you encounter in a cs project, but you have to consider chemical engineering principles and experimental data. It's a nightmare in my opinion.
I was the only person in my chemical engineering class that could work on such research and consequently I was given my own research project. At some point I even worked with a graduate student. I learn a lot about practical software development. It's not same when you have to work with other people's code and the code is hundreds or thousands of lines code. What was worst when I got two piece of code written in two different languages. That was a real nightmare. The code is based on mathematical and physics modeling, which makes the code exceptionally complicated. Graduates students did not understand the modeling much less the coding. I had one graduate student move onto another project because the project was too hard. Ultimately I was force to translate the code from one language into another language and pray that everything worked out fine. I never got to the super computer computation, but I did learn a little bit about parallel processing and how it is done.
With all this being said, I will definitely consider attending a university (maybe Kennesaw or G.S.U.) rather than a college unless the college is well known for its program. That's something I will have to research as the time draws nearer for me to apply.
isnt the distinction that colleges only have one school (liberal arts) whereas unversities are a collection of colleges (humanities, school of medicine, college of engineering, ...).
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.
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this is bs. i would assume that a lot of mit grads (most ?) work in biomedical research doing real work (as opposed to hosting a video site that shows mostly cat videos). your too tunnel focused on internet social networks. very many more technologists do far more rewarding work with decent compensation.
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