Re: Student-Degree valuable or not?
JGrimshaw_at_ASAP.com
Date: 09/26/03
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To: security-basics@securityfocus.com Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:40:36 -0500
While remaining entirely objective on this, I would like to point out that
I know a number of college graduates your age, all software engineers,
that are unemployed.
It would seem that they are demanding too much at $30k a year; the
off-shore developers are much cheaper and apparently have much more
experience than my associates. Most of my associates haven't received as
much as a phone call back. I will not delve into the network
administration or network engineering side, but only what you have touched
base on.
Since you are asking for a four year forecast, I couldn't possibly suggest
what the economic environment would be like. However, I would like you to
consider the following:
Congress recently reduced the cap on H1Bs allowed within the United
States.
Many large corporations, such as Microsoft, lobbied for the cap to be
extended, or at least kept the same.
Off-shored jobs are not coming back without some radical new
legislation.
The technology industry now appears to be without a continuous source
of imported, highly skilled engineers.
Now that the H1B cap has been reduced, in my infinite and perhaps
misguided wisdom, I fail to find reason about why jobs going off-shore
will also be reduced in any way. The same manner of thinking follows with
my views on what will happen now that the proposed overtime rules have
been rejected. The pace will likely increase.
The technology companies are right; there is a shortage of highly skilled,
but low paid, engineers in the United States. Congress cited that there
was a large amount of unemployed tech workers, which seem to be invisible
to the industry, as part of their reasons as to why they were reducing the
cap on H1Bs permitted into the country. Perhaps their actions will help,
perhaps not. $15 an hour is a lot of money to pay a citizen, when you can
instead pay $6 an hour to a noncitizen.
My suggestion? Pick a niche, become very good at it, and be versed in
just about everything else. If you can do something well, and get by with
everything else, you'll be quite valuable. Also, security is very hot
right now. That is not a bad bandwagon to join, but be prepared for
someone outside of your facility to be able to run the same scans, review
the same reports, offer the same solutions and implement the same fixes.
This is not a knock on anyone or their abilities, but a simple matter of
evaluating the economics of business.
"DANIEL SIMPSON" <DANSIMPS@uat.edu>
09/25/2003 06:23 PM
To
m>
cc
Subject
Student-Degree valuable or not?
Hey,
I just retired from a 4 year stint in Silicon Valley where I was a
System Administrator/Technical Engineer for a couple start-ups. I
started getting more and more into Information Security and finally
decided to quit my boring job and move to Arizona to enter a 4 year
program at a private university. I'm getting my B.S in software
engineering with an emphasis on security. How valuable will this degree
be and what are the forecasts for the job market in this field in about
4 years. The program is REALLY expensive and I cashed out all my
investments/savings to pay for it (roughly 10k a year). I might even go
to law school afterwards. Is this degree worth the estimated 40-50k? I'm
22 btw, my dream is to work for Microsoft or Goggle for a couple years
and start my own security firm.
Any suggestions would be awesome.
Dann
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- In reply to: DANIEL SIMPSON: "Student-Degree valuable or not?"
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