How important is a degree to work in I.T.?

bitslice said:
Entirely possible,
But what is there in a degree course that is any use in a job, practically nothing.
It proves you can remember how to plug stuff into equations, super. Nothing an A level guy couldn't do given the same book to look at.

Bode diagrams, there is I think one guy in here who uses them and we all did that stuff to death, naff all use to anybody.
It's a great way to spend a few years, it just isn't that useful.
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????
A degree in Computer science.. Teached you C, C++, networking and other it stuff.

A Degree in robotics & AI.. Teaches you All about Robotics, Embedded systems, Fuzzy logic, genetic algorithems, nerul Networks, c, c++, Java, SFML.

How is any of the above not usefull in an IT job or a job in robotics?
 
No degree here.

Is it worth it? Not to me right now, if I stay doing what I am doing.
However, if I wanted to move around within IT I'd probably struggle without the basis and knowledge that a degree could offer. If you have the time to do it, I'd say do it.
 
bitslice said:
Entirely possible,
But what is there in a degree course that is any use in a job, practically nothing.
It proves you can remember how to plug stuff into equations, super. Nothing an A level guy couldn't do given the same book to look at.

Bode diagrams, there is I think one guy in here who uses them and we all did that stuff to death, naff all use to anybody.
It's a great way to spend a few years, it just isn't that useful.
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I'm not sure you can use your personal work experience and apply it as a blanket rule to all people working in all IT jobs... some people do actually use stuff learned at undergrad and indeed post grad level in their job. Granted there are lots of people in banks with PhDs etc.. doing jobs someone with a Masters could handle - I'm not sure that there are that many A level guys out there who'd be all that keen on say stochastic calculus but a quant developer implementing financial models at a large sell side bank or software vendor will likely require a decent grounding.

Data mining is becoming a big area these days... doing it at a useful level requires a solid mathematical foundation... generally requires a degree.
 
The only people in my company that don't have a degree is the secretary and the cleaner.

If you like to clean toilets for a living you don't need a degree. If you want to develop cutting edge software then you will need a good degree in maths, physics or CS, preferably the former 2.

I use my degree work and experience in m Phd all the time, only wish that I had maths as a joint honors. The following is some algorithms and data strictures that I have used implemented over the years:
Markov processes, monte carlo simulation, extended kalman filters, Dijkstra's algorithm, Belman-ford algorithm, A* search, stochastic A*, Constraint relaxation, Floyd–Warshall algorithm,dynamic programming, linear programming, Mixed Integer linear programming, simplex algorithm, qsort, merge sort, Kruskal method for minimum spanning trees, Hungarian algorithm, Bloom filter, particle filter, IDDFS, Damerau–Levenshtein distance, Fisher–Yates shuffle, Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm, FFTs, Knuth–Bendix completion, Delaunay triangulation, Lanczos resampling, Jacobi methods, Eigen vector analsys/ PCA, neural network, linear regression, evolutionary algorithms, spiking networks, simulated annealing, tabu search, swarm intelligence, PID control, Gaussian elimination, newtons method, Davis–Putnam algorithm, red-black trees, T Tree, B tree, Heap, Trie Tree, kd-Trees, Directed acyclic graphs....

Yep, anyone with A-Levels knows all of that and a degree is useless.
 
Nah someone with 'barely A-levels' can apparently just pick up a relevant book.

Seemingly through the ages of 18 to 20-something we all undergo a change whereby the people who were previously underachievers when it came to learning suddenly become highly capable and everyone who was previously strong academically becomes second rate to the school leavers...
 
Wow .... so much bad advice on this thread.

You've got a year left, you should finish it off. It is better to have that "piece of paper" and not need it instead of needing that "piece of paper" and to not have it.

The I.T. field can be a bit murky at times with what exact skills are needed where because there can be quite a lot of overlap with technologies, etc. You want to be in networking but having some programming skills will help. As a network engineer you will be called upon to write scripts and potentially also fix issues relating to bad coding. Having that understanding will make you a better employee to prospective employers.

The current job market is atrocious so if an employer had to choose between 2 people to fulfill a role, 1 person has 1 year's experience only while another had a degree and 1 year's experience .... guess which candidate has a better chance?
 
There are quite a few companies out there that look for a degree as a min standard of eduction. I'm not sure they actually care what the degree is in lol. If your almost there I'd say it can be worthwhile obtaining.
 
Weazle said:
The current job market is atrocious so if an employer had to choose between 2 people to fulfill a role, 1 person has 1 year's experience only while another had a degree and 1 year's experience .... guess which candidate has a better chance?
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This, it will be used as a differentiator. Experience is certainly king but you will probably find it easier landing your first job if you have a IT related Degree.
 
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I always chuckle at the job adverts that stipulate that you must have a degree from a certain university or universities. Not sure I'd want to work in that sort of elitist environment (at least that's how it comes across). :p

"Have you seen those backup tapes, old chap?"
"Oh yes, they're in the safe next to the latest delivery of Foie Gras!"

There's a mix in my team of people who've done degrees and those who haven't. Everyone is very capable and down to earth. :)
 
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I have a degree... in 3D animation. I wouldn't have applied for this job if I'd had only read the vacancy description, because it had all these required competancies in various software and things I'd never even heard of, but my sister's boyfriend referred me and told me that anyone with a brain could pick it up and they just made the job description like that to scare people away so they wouldn't need to do 100 interviews, lol. It's not particularly glamorus but there's opportuntiies to climb the ladder...

Who you know > what you know, in this case.
 
D.P. said:
Yep, anyone with A-Levels knows all of that and a degree is useless.
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What, so you walked out of Uni and straight into a job and had all that at your fingertips did you? You are only posting to show off...

You know as well as I do that a degree gives you the name and a few examples on any single topic. In the real world you still have to research the same topic and work out how to apply it.
Most jobs may require a subset of a degree but in greater depth and have to be translated into something practical.

In the lala world of Cisco they must imagine that everyone subnets their network, in the real world that only happens in very big companies.
 
I would rather take a degree in something else if I had the opportunity to take a degree. A degree in electrical engineering or similar would be far more worthwhile than a degree in comp science. Even if you don't work in electrical engineering and get a job in IT, you will still have a very worthwhile degree that opens up a lot more fields of work. Another option would be to spend all the student loan on certification courses and spend three years getting every IT cert out there.
 
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user / system support its worthless unless you only happen to be going up against other unqualified people....

some areas its obviously worth having but those would not really be IT (im my mind) programming / app development I can imagine a degree will help.

having a degree in a good subject with a top grade will probably help in any job situation as it shows you are reasonably smart. I worked for an IT training company and the requirement for the lecturers was a degree 1/1 in any (sensible but non it related) subject...
 
get your degree if you are part through it dont waste that time and get as much experience along the way as you can it will always give you the edge in interviews and on a cv. all the guys working for me have to have one (its in a different field)
but we look for it when we advertise. saying that some people who have turned up with all the paper work are thick as two short planks when it comes to application of knowledge so its no gaurantee. but i would say you may as well finish it.
 
groen said:
I would rather take a degree in something else if I had the opportunity to take a degree. A degree in electrical engineering or similar would be far more worthwhile than a degree in comp science. Another option would be to spend all the student loan on certification courses and spend three years getting every IT cert out there.
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+1, I wonder why uni's dont focus on useful courses... it would be good for employers to be able to say "wow we have 3 applications from people with masters degrees in IT / Networking", rather than "dam no qualified people applied jsut a load of people from uni with pointless degrees".
 
PianoBasher said:
LOLWUT? :p So you use /24s for point to point links then? :confused:
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Depends on the site, why bother for three PC's on a link. What is the broadcast traffic going to amount to?
Anyway I'm referring to single networks. Cisco expect people to subnet by department or floor or something ridiculous.

Anyway, on topic I'm all for doing a degree, but simply for the paper, it's what you study afterwards that makes somebody useful.
 
bitslice said:
Depends on the site, why bother for three PC's on a link. What is the broadcast traffic going to amount to?
Anyway I'm referring to single networks. Cisco expect people to subnet by department or floor or something ridiculous.
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Well I'd argue it's good practice to always use /30s (or /31s but I've never seen them used wherever I've worked) for your point to point links regardless, otherwise you're wasting massive amounts of space for no reason other than laziness. :)

Agreed about the Cisco idea of VLANs/Subnets per floor though - it doesn't tend to happen very much from what I've seen; it tends to be more by department/functions than floor. I've worked at a few small companies where we didn't bother subnetting the server and user lans because it wasn't justified, however, subnetting by application for example can save you a real ball-ache in that you can just pick up that subnet and put it in a completely different location without affecting anything else. :D
 
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Yes all qualifications are just pieces of paper, one of my old employers convinced me not to do my CCIE as I didn't really need it and I had the experience etc, when they came to make people redundant one of the criteria they used for selecting people were their qualifications!
 
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