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Iontomorrow
Viewer

Is a 4 year degreee still a requirement?

Hi everyone,

I have an Associates in CIS, several certifications and 10 years of experience as a sysadmin/engineer. Security has always been something I have been involved with but never a direct focus.

I am considering whether going back to complete a 4 year degree has any merit. It feels that unless I start working at a tech company, jobs like I am used to are drying up in favor of outsourcing, contracting, and IaaS, cloud, etc.

So I am considering the options of remaining technically hands-on and digging into security or going the IT management route.

How does anyone out there that may be a hiring manager feel about candidates with or without 4 year degrees? Do they still hold relevancy?
80 Replies
fortean
Contributor III

The Internet as we know it today - at least in The Netherlands - isn't that old at all.   From the late 1980's onwards Dutch Universities and some closed user groups had had some kind of Internet access (SURFnet, EUnet), but general public access was not allowed in those days, due to the Dutch state monopoly on public networks we still had in these days.

 

I was one of the founders and the first president of the Internet Access Foundation (IAF) - which was actually the first PUBLIC "Internet" provider in the Netherlands. We were established in 1992. As I wrote, in those days our Universities already had Internet access, and they would have loved to connect the public to it. But they weren't  allowed by Law.And the party that HAD the rights to give access to the public - Dutch Telecom - was not really aware of that thing called Internet - they were still rolling out ISDN in those days...

 

To circumvent this problem we used a (very expensive..) dial-in connection with milnet, in the US.  Hence, in the initial days we "just" provided mail and Usenet news. Later on the monopoly was lifted and we started setting up our own national infrastructure, using our national railway's infrastructure. I believe it was not before 1994 we started providing TCP/IP over SLIP and later still over PPP. In those days there were no browsers as we know them now, we had gopher and later on we had Mosaic, which was the first browser that in as far as I know, supported HTTP.

 

The Internet as part of everybodies life emerged much later, I'd say somewhere around 2000-2003.

 

So, though it is hard to imagine this, but the ubiquitous Internet - is maybe 10 years old. And even older forms don't go much further back than say 20-25 years. Before that you had to be a US soldier, a researcher, student or hacker to have some kind of access to one of the Internet's predecessors.

--
Heinrich W. Klöpping, MSc CISSP CCSP CIPP/E CTT+
Baechle
Advocate I

Michael,

 

In and around the 1980s I used Kermit.  What about you?

 


@Ravenshroud wrote:

Cool, which browser did YOU use 50 years ago?  IE or Chrome?

 


But technically they were called terminal emulators then because the displays were in ASCII or ANSI code, not HTML.

 

On systems where I didn't have Kermit, I think I literally just redirected transmissions through one of the COM ports to the display, and piped my keystrokes back to the COM port.

 

 

 

                    __...----..
                             .-'           `-.
                            /        .---.._  \
                            |        |   \  \ |
                             `.      |    | | |        _____
                               `     '    | | /    _.-`      `.
                                \    |  .'| //'''.'            \
                                 `---'_(`.||.`.`.'    _.`.'''-. \
                                    _(`'.    `.`.`'.-'  \\     \ \
                                   (' .'   `-._.- /      \\     \ |
                                  ('./   `-._   .-|       \\     ||
                                  ('.\ | | 0') ('0 __.--.  \`----'/
                             _.--('..|   `--    .'  .-.  `. `--..'
               _..--..._ _.-'    ('.:|      .  /   ` 0 `   \
            .'         .-'        `..'  |  / .^.           |
           /         .'                 \ '  .             `._
        .'|                              `.  \`...____.----._.'
      .'.'|         .                      \ |    |_||_||__|
     //   \         |                  _.-'| |_ `.   \
     ||   |         |                     /\ \_| _  _ |
     ||   |         /.     .              ' `.`.| || ||
     ||   /        ' '     |        .     |   `.`---'/
   .' `.  |       .' .'`.   \     .'     /      `...'
 .'     \  \    .'.'     `---\    '.-'   |
)/\ / /)/ .|    \             `.   `.\   \
 )/ \(   /  \   |               \   | `.  `-.
  )/     )   |  |             __ \   \.-`    \
         |  /|  )  .-.      //' `-|   \  _   /
        / _| |  `-'.-.\     ||    `.   )_.--'
        )  \ '-.  /  '|     ''.__.-`\  | 
       /  `-\  '._|--'               \  `.
       \    _\                       /    `---.
  LGB  /.--`  \                      \    .''''\
       `._..._|                       `-.'  .-. |
                                        '_.'-./.'

 


@Ravenshroud wrote:

 

What a poor comment that was.  You know what I mean.  This isn't the political websites you must visit to troll like that.


Was this supposed to be positive self-talk?  Because if your question wasn't serious, it really appears like you're the one trolling.

 

Sincerely,

 

Eric B. 

denbesten
Community Champion

@rslade wrote
The Internet turns 50 next year ... 
@Ravenshroud wrote:
...which browser did YOU use 50 years ago? IE or Chrome?

49 years ago, you would have used the inbuilt email program on your mainframe or mini. 25 years ago, you would have used NCSA Mosaic as your web browser.

 

You are confusing the Internet with the World-Wide-Web.  The former is a (now) global communications platform that supports many different applications, such as email (c.a. 1969), newsgroups (c.a. 1984), gopher (c.a. 1991) and the web (c.a. 1989).

 

Baechle
Advocate I

Rob,

 

You make an extraordinarily good point here.

 


@rslade wrote:
Not necessarily. I used to tell my seminars that the test was to see if they actually
had five year's worth of experience, rather than one year, five times over. It's
very easy, in a job, to simply do the same things over and over again. (You don't
have to, but it's easy. It's harder to stretch yourself.) It's a bit harder to do one
year, four times over, in university.

Experience is not the same as progressive experience.  Additionally within the constraints of knowledge and experience, the University experience encourages a well rounded person knowledge wise (general humanities/arts requirements and electives), it rewards and provides venue for "good citizenship" such as social clubs and volunteering opportunities. 

 

The College/University at the Undergrad level acts as a filter for maturity, even later in life.  The fact that someone attended and stuck it out, regardless of the major, speaks volumes to a person's ability to function in diverse social settings, deal with stress and time management, and recall knowledge to solve problems across a wide range of both related and unrelated topics.

 

At the Graduate level, the experience acts to provide folks a safe space for critical thinking, conducting research, engaging in debate sometimes around emotionally charged topics, and dealing with emerging and sometimes perspective altering new data.

 

Some of the biggest reasons that students drop out of school based on an insurance industry study are:

 

(1) inability to balance work and school [patience, and financial and time management skills];

(2) Tuition is too expensive [patience and financial management skills];

(3) Illness/Injury [not relevant];

(4) Stress [poor stress management, coping skills, and stress resiliency];

(5) Not academically prepared [ability to self assess knowledge and skill gaps, recognize deficiencies and weaknesses, make reasonable preparations for taking on more difficult assignments];  

(6) Too much socialization/not enough time on study [time management, focus, overall maturity];

(7) Not emotionally ready [not sufficiently independent and unable to adapt to new social environments].

 

Think of University as a 2, 4, 6, or more year multi-tiered certification program for independence, critical thinking, time management, stress management, focus, and ambition... not so much in the context of what subject the "major" was in.

 

 

The subject of the degree really only matters for "Professional Degrees" as opposed to "Academic Degrees".  Professional degrees are prerequisites for a license, like Attorney, Medical Doctor, Accountant, or Engineer.  Academic degrees on the other hand, the subject is less important than the life experience.

 

Sincerely,

 

Eric B.

 

 

Baechle
Advocate I


@brennj4 wrote:


This says it in a nutshell.   

Good post/. 


Thanks.  So, in answering the original question:

 

No, a 4 year (or any other degree) is not a requirement.  However, don't count on being one of the few that "make it" without one.

rslade
Influencer II

> fortean (Contributor II) posted a new reply in Career on 07-24-2018 04:12 AM in

> The Internet as we know it today - at least in The Netherlands - isn't that old
> at all.   From the late 1980's onwards Dutch Universities and some closed user
> groups had had some kind of Internet access (SURFnet, EUnet), but general public
> access was not allowed in those days, due to the Dutch state monopoly on public
> networks we still had in these days.

Sorry, you're all a bunch of newbies. I was on the Internet before it was called the
Internet, and when there were only about 1,000 people on it.

Dial in to a mainframe, text only, mostly email, file transfer was rather a process
... I miss those days ...

====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@computercrime.org
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the
people he gave it to. - Dorothy Parker
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://www.infosecbc.org/links
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
http://twitter.com/rslade

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cindelicato
Contributor I

I'm with your, @rslade. Who else among this group knows the adventures of using an acoustic modem?
rslade
Influencer II

> Baechle (Contributor III) posted a new reply in Career on 07-24-2018 09:46 AM in

>   In and around the 1980s I used Kermit.

I recall Kermit with great fondness. I used quite a number. (Including ones that I
had to install ANSI.SYS for. And then I had to install it again when I was testing
out ANSI bombs ...) At one point I was working for a company that made VT100
emulators, while, at the same time but for another group, I was testing/reviewing
VT100 emulators ...

====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@computercrime.org
Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. - W.C. Fields
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://www.infosecbc.org/links
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
http://twitter.com/rslade

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Ravenshroud
Newcomer III

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.

I seem to have gotten myself in trouble with this one. 😅

Rslade, you’re just old. 🤗
rslade
Influencer II

> cindelicato (Newcomer I) mentioned you in a post!

> I'm with your, @rslade. Who else among this group knows the adventures of using
> an acoustic modem?

I believe that, somewhere, I still have a pre-Bell 103 acoustic coupler modem for
110 bps. (A friend once had to use one as he was supporting sites in northern
Ontario, and the phone service wouldn't support anything faster ...)

(I really have to inventory some of my old junk and get it to a computer museum
some time ...)

====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@computercrime.org
It is collectively understood, although never stated, that the
pub-argument ... is essentially an enjoyable game. No strong
views or deeply held convictions are necessary for pub regulars
to engage in lively disputes--in fact, they would be a hindrance.
- Kate Fox, `Watching the English'
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