Here’s an article about .NET vs J2EE. I don’t like the way things are panning out either, but in 5 years from now I believe .NET will be the dominant architecture.
You can have a very good career in IT without a degree in Computer Science at all. In our IT department, we have an MLS, a mathematician, and an English/Political Science major. If you go into user services (which sounds appropriate), you skills need to be in troubleshooting computers, and that’s best learned by doing.
I’m graduating with a degree in International Studies. I’ll be going to grad school, incidentally, pretty soon in either a European Studies program, or a Business degree. I speak German (okay) and Spanish (pretty darn good), so something tells me it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be in a IT field that makes better use of people skills.
Hey look what I found!
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
pretty cool eh? That MIT OpenCourseWare stuff is really neat…
ocw.mit.edu
You sound bright and motivated. Go for it.
But don’t expect it to be too easy. You are entering the market along with legions of unemployed victims of layoffs and outsourcing and thousands of freshly minted CS majors who entered college when kids still got hired off the beaches during spring break. I know new CS graduates who are selling vacuum cleaners door to door and working in warehouses. I know old tech vetrens who have roomates because their new customer support job doesn’t pay enough to rent a whole room.
Expect to spend a few years doing tech support for high school computer labs at seven bucks an hour and stufflike that, and take classes in your spare time. If you ever get a job at a large corporation or a government job, your lack of formal school will hold you back. It’s a competative field, and it pays to do what it takes to stay competative, no matter how good you know you are. Network with everyone you can- the more people you work for, the better chances you have of landing jobs, and make sure to save independently for retirement, as IT is not really good steady work.
I would never recommend anyone going into IT or computer programming. Think about… what’s the deliverable? Code. And code is extremely easy to ship via the internet. This means it can easily be done anywhere in the world, for anyone in the world.
Unless you plan on moving to India and China soon, I would not recommend going into IT or computer programming…
Yeah, I suppose that’s why I meant it would have something to do with actual human interatcion. What part of IT would require good people skills?
Also, I never really wanted to state that I planned on switching careers. I basically just wanted to explore the options of getting some other kind of credibility on top of my education to this point.
I disagree (and, incidently, so does the Bureau of Labor statistics, who studies such things and predicts a great deal of job growth across the IT sector).
Yes, its true that an code can easily be shipped, and that it’s just as easy for an Indian programmer to write a program as an American programmer. But what’s not easy is the communication of what exactly the program should do. People have enough trouble communicating with Indians in call centers who are working from scripts on relatively simple transactions. Specifying how a program should perform, specifying how you want its behaviour to change, etc. are all a great deal more complicated and a great deal harder to communicate.
So I think there most certainly will be decent employment for programmers in the upcomming years, albeit for cultural rather then technical reasons…
I’m glad my IT education is on the hardware side of things. It is kind of hard to fix a network issue or server problem unless you are right there to do it.
Getting a job in IT is like getting a job anywhere else. Lots of people got into the industry because they thought it is easy and they’d make good money. Luckily, most of them don’t have the apptitude for the work. It is easy to compete with them because of that. If you have the apptitude then you should do okay. It might take a while to get the break you need, but if you are good you will make it.
I work overseas. If everything goes as I hope I will continue to work overseas. You make more money, you pay less taxes, and you get to travel to places others normally don’t get to go to. Find some way to work your interest in IT with your current education. Go the business route. See if you can specialize on IT if you go that route. See if you can get a job working with a company that outsources their programming overseas.
Just my 2 cents worth.