IT Education: Degree or Certificate?

[Floid]

It all depends what you want to do.

If you want to be a field tech on through perhaps to a sysadmin, the company certificates are the fastest way toward having someone notice your job application.  The downside is that the programs themselves are, by prerogative, geared to make you little more than a salesperson for the company.

If you want to be an 'engineer' or a 'developer,' it can help to have academic CS training under your belt, if only for the amount of 'networking' and 'headhunting' that goes on as you approach graduate school.  However, even then, nobody's looking out for you except yourself, and you'll have to steer a course through academia that gives you the right courses and the right knowledge; in the US, it's quite possible to come out with a degree in "Computer Science" barely knowing more than how to fire up Visual Studio and/or bust out some Java.  (It's a balancing act.  On the one hand, there's no sense being in college unless you can muster the focus to really 'challenge yourself;' on the other, it's hard enough to find a 'satisfying'/'interesting' job with the fancy piece of paper, unless you've got the energy and skill to start from square one, as did the likes of Apple.)

If you're working to live, the former path can be attractive (but don't expect to take an early retirement, at least, not a voluntary, pensioned one)... If you hope to be able to live through your work (Torvalds, Dillon, Carmack... Dave ;-)), then a full degree sounds like a good idea, and you will have to put in superhuman levels of work to get it.

(This is, of course, from a wholly US perspective; I'll say that Asian academia sounds even harder to navigate successfully vs. American -- though, on the other hand, there are probably fewer fratboys -- and I'm getting the impression that Australia's idea of 'IT' training, be it CS or related degrees, seems to have something going for it, in terms of focusing on the 'right' things without requiring so much effort on the part of the student to avoid being 'educated stupid.')

Of course, I fizzled out trying to get my prerequisites down at second-tier (if that?) schools, and I'm too idealist to sign up to be a MS or Cisco shill (even if that'd probably be quite profitable, compared to being an umemployed slacker... I'm starting to think about getting an A+, just so I can prove to strangers I'm not an idiot, but I'm not sure I want to pay for that), so take my 'advice' with a big heaping grain of salt. ;-)

I'm not sure what Novell's doing with certs, but that might be interesting, because (not entirely unlike Cisco with IP), it's impossible to teach "Linux" without transferring some sort of general knowledge.  Still, I'm saying that as someone who's finally gotten enough *NIX under his belt to know when he might be being bull___tted.

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Edit: Clarification on the above -- To aspire to be one of the greats, or anywhere near them, you need both the academic experience and the hands-on 'spare-time' tinkering that I marvel at anyone's ability to find time to do. :-?  I think my mistake was in paying too much attention to high school, when I should've been off hacking!

[Floid]

I would dead recommend AGAINST computer science degrees.
Science is theory and hypothesis, and does not apply to
the stark realities of the real world. You want to learn
to code better? Coding in THEORY is all well and good but
it'll be useless for a proper project. You'd do better
taking on a realistic project and devising your own
solutions. Writing and optimising your own code is the best
way to learn to code. A little formal education doesn't
hurt, but you need to do it as an "engineer", rather than
a "scientist".

Whew, I could really rant about this, but I hope someone's already noticed I've recognized to death the value of 'real' experience.

So, that said, "science" triumphs because science is reproducible.

What science could "reproduce" in 1970 was fairly pathetic, because science didn't know enough.  (Actually, it turns out it did, but moving at the speed of academia, it took a long time for that knowledge to trickle down and around to the right places.)  ... What it did know was too 'expensive' to ever bring to market; note PARC, if you want.

Thus, it took kids in garages and bedrooms to make the 'breakthroughs' that science could then study.  Who knew these "personal computers" would be such a hit at all?

You can't compare Woz and the like directly to Tesla, but for practical purposes, note the parallel.  Early marketers like Commodore and Atari didn't necessarily care how it worked (along the lines of Marconi), and as long as they had "more magic" than anyone else (wrought by purchasing more cool kids, like Amiga), life was good.

Well, today, science is to some extent borne out, both because, faced with the likes of the Apple II and the Amiga (and here's where the flip side came in -- the engineers of both were, of course, better 'scientists' than the scientists!), the big movers threw their scientists at the problems, and because, for absence of science, everyone hoping on miracles had a tendency to piss their money away down blind alleys.

OS/2 and NT were architected by 'scientists;' they flopped in their own ways, and the 'scientists' learned from their mistakes, found patterns in the industry, and so on.  XP and the average Linux desktop environment are both infinitely more 'bloated,' yet they've taken off like wildfire (and run rather nippily in spite of themselves, to boot).  Since their advances are now entrenched in the literature, it's now hard to do worse, though especially in MS's case, the entire planet is now waiting for a slip-up.

There's no sense in fearing science; that amounts to worshipping ignorance.  However, it's only bad scientists who worship science without constantly questioning and testing it.  Maybe it's forthright to bring up Dillon again, but I think it's safe to hold up the cycle of DBSD development as "good science," and I think most of us here can be convinced that that system will/already_does kick a fair bit of a$$ technically. ;-)

At this point, I suppose it's worth pointing out that 'science' has even crept into purchasing departments, to the point that, yes, it's a bit harder to push snake oil these days.  (Or at least, snake oil is held to a slightly higher standard, in terms of maximum-time-before-lawsuit.)  You can still get by pushing it... but do you want to spend your life profiting off the suckers, or earning the respect of the wizards?

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All that said, the worst CS profs I encountered were the ones trying to teach 'science' while trying to be pragmatic.  It's one thing to remind a student of what happens in the Real World... and another to take Visual Studio as the one true hammer for all the world's screws, even if that is the present state of belief.

[Floid]

I was actually hoping for CompE (Computer Engineering), which, depending where you go, is a CS/EE double-major somehow finagled to fit in 4 years.

(I still hope to get one, someday, but at this rate I won't until I'm in my 50s.)

It sounds like a plan, but I'll suggest the following: Don't show up until you already have a firm understanding of the Calculus.

(Of course, maybe my problem was in needing to understand it as a math major would... but after three years of bouncing schools, my algebra and trig skills had rusted out anyway...)  :bigcry:

[Floid]

It'll only add fire to the flame if I say that, obviously, bringing jobs back to our shores won't necessarily increase literacy (computer or otherwise) one whit, and going isolationist is sure to piss off everyone we've just entered into these happy trade arrangements with...

But, unfortunately, I think the next 50 years are doomed to suck until that wealth gets redistributed one way or another.    

"Knowledge work" is one of the few things that really is portable... but if it helps any, it's absolutely ridiculous to plonk a helpdesk in the middle of 'the wrong culture' vs. the people it's meant to support, and that's already bitten enough posteriors that a correction is hopefully already underway.