Oh, please. Make up your mind. In one paragraph you seem to snub
college, in the next you extoll the degree, in the next you tell success
stories about folks with no degree, and then you say you're a successful
exception. Which is it?
I, too, am the owner and operator of a business. It's the second major
undertaking I've been involved with. The stock from the first company I
helped found made me my first million dollars at 29. I don't say that
to beat my chest: I say it to drive home the point that I *still*
regret not having finished school.
The bottom line is that for even the amazingly talented self taught
programmers or network engineers or other IT types, circumstances that
lead to a Dell or an Andressen or a Gates or a Torvalds are incredibly
few and far between. If that weren't so, we'd all have billions.
But - there are lots of good jobs out there for well rounded, well
educated IT folks. Unless you are the creme de la creme AND very lucky,
you should stack the odds in your favor. Get the sheepskin.
As far as the Internet just being born - check your history books. The
ARPAnet was brought on line 30 years ago. It went international in
1973. DNS arrived in 1984 and the WELL was running in 1985. UUNET
started offering commercial Internet access in 1986. In 1987 the
network broke 1000 hosts. In 1989 it was 100,000. CERN gave us the Web
9 years ago. By 1995 the Internet was a household word.
Today there is very little "pioneering" work being done. Some, for
sure, but now it's mostly tuning and improving existing technologies.
That tuning and refining isn't being done in garages by college
dropouts. It's being done in multi-million dollar labs at places like
IBM, GTE, Microsoft, and Cisco, by highly educated people.
Two years ago I could turn down contract networking jobs for $50 to $60
an hour without worrying about it. Look at today's networking market.
It sucks. Microsoft has flooded the market with Microsoft Certified
Systems "Engineers." Bunch of paper tigers. But C, Java, and database
programmers are a very hot commodity right now, demanding and getting
over $100 an hour in many cases. While there are certainly some folks
who can teach themselves these skills, most folks need the classroom
education. You've heard it a million times - if two qualified
applicants are being considered, the one with more education will
typically be chosen. That's not something my cousin's girlfriend's
father said he heard about, either. I've hired for projects as big as
450 IT staffers, and I've broken ties using education as the determining
factor several times.
I'm not defeatest, and certainly not moping about depressed. I love
running my own business. But I hire folks who have the appropriate
education to do the jobs I need done. So do most companies.
Regards,
Thomas D. Cameron
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