Michael,
@Ravenshroud wrote:
I accept that us Americans were newbies and I didn’t have much use for the Internet before AOL. Circa 1982-3 for me. Honestly before gaming and pxxn the Internet was just a net.
Actually I think your current perception and desired weight of formal education matched mine early out of high school.
I fooled around with computers mainly because they were there. My grandparents (whom I grew up with) were on the Internet before I was. My grandfather was an electronics engineer for Bell Labs working on long range signaling systems and had a lot of equipment at home. So, learning the systems, dialing into network ramps, and seeing where I could get to was my early version of a text based dungeon adventure. That is until my grandparents figured out why their phone bill was so high, and got me hooked on "BBC" and "Baseball," "Hunt the Wumpus," "Zork," and the interactive "Hitchhiker's Guide." That was until I found "MUDs" and the phone bills went up again.
I personally viewed high school (other than the social experience) as a complete waste of my time. I wanted to drop out, earn my GED, and move on as quickly as I could. I viewed higher Undergrad and Graduate education much the same way. I already had the capacity to look at a problem, do some research on how to solve it, and then apply those lessons - so why was the 'system' holding me back?
I also didn't have an interest in doing "tech" for work. In fact my first few jobs were retail associate and as a furniture installer. Meanwhile in the 1990's under pressure from my tech-heavy family, I dropped out of college twice in a row because I couldn't stand programming or "Computer Science." And I SERIOUSLY couldn't stand waiting for everyone to catch up. I was done with most of my semester's programming assignments in the first two weeks. So there I was attending 3-hour mind numbing lectures about how slow everyone else was at this stuff. Why did I need a degree?
It turns out that I didn't. When I asked a friend for help moving over to tech, it took another 4 years and I was the the acting IT Operations Director for a multinational conglomerate based out of NYC reporting directly to the CTO. But, that was the beginning of the end. Making it to that level without a full appreciation for the needs of big enterprise and the language of business meant that I had reached a place where I couldn't grow any further at the same pace, and even began to be a little toxic. I was managing IT for the sake of building an IT empire, rather than doing things for the business "good enough" to keep our operating income as positive as possible.
Now I had three options at this point. (1) Go do something else. (2) Take a step back down the ladder and spend probably 15-20 years learning on the job what I needed to be successful in senior positions. (3) Go to school and take it by fire hose in a handful of years. Do you know which path I chose?
I left. It was getting on 2001/2002, and I joined the military. The military paid for my bachelors degree, my masters degree, and my post masters grad cert. in Criminal Justice and Digital Forensics. It was practically free, so I figured why not? Unfortunately, I had to pay out of pocket for my Accounting courses. But it was during the process of attaining my degree, including struggling through elective and general subjects I wasn't particularly interested in; along with the social skills I developed with students in those courses who were passionate about that subject, that I began learning the value of the experience. The value in building relationships, being interested in other people's passion even if you're not interested in the topic, and persevering with a smile through boring monotonous crap that wasn't my passion for a higher common goal (the degree).
There are people that can work in the foxhole of their job for a long time and never develop those skills. You practically can't survive the college experience without them. So using a degree as a screener makes sense. If you don't have a degree, you might be able to prove you developed those skills through experience in your cover letter... Might. I've seen it happen though.
Sincerely,
Eric B.
