I have a BS and MS (just finished) but still rely on my portfolio, skill set, code samples, and most importantly knowing people. The problem with certs and degrees is that they can be bought. I suspect that degrees help get you past HR and help you in salary negotiations. I guess I’ll find out soon as I’m about to start sending resumes and calling around.
Even with my Ph.D. finished, I will still get paid garbage because I like working in education too much 
Move out of Rochester 
I have placed 3 CIOs in the past 1.5 years.
I can’t even think about interviewing someone who doesn’t have at least a bachelors. Most of the applicants I had previously held CIO position and all of them had their Masters.
No CEO wants to hire someone onto their executive team that has only a High School diploma and some certs.
Not having a degree may be good now when you are in your upper 20s but you will not get considered for Senior level position, and if you do there will be someone with the same amount of experience but they have a BS.
Who on here really has aspirations of becoming a CIO?
Much more interesting on the engineering, design, and development side…and you can still get similar compensation…
My Mother is a Project manager, makes a ton of money and has just an associate’s degree. Senior level is do-able with no degree, definitely not executive level though.
I agree. I love the hands on and project design. I wouldn’t want my bosses job who deals with customers and creates the time lines for all our installs and travel days for projects. Too crazy and too much BS. A coworker of mine in rochester who was a Sr Network Engineer moved up to like the project management and hated it. She preferred working in the field and hands on stuff.
The type of people in this thread would not become CEO’s or CIO’s.
Maybe a CTO, and to honest quite a few of the CTO’s I’ve read about or know of, DO NOT have bachelor degrees, or any form of degree at all, and we are talking 6-7 figure salary in charge of some pretty large companies.
cough Bill Gates
People who live in the upstate NY bubble don’t understand the real world of IT.
lol
BS
working on my MS
CISSP
EnCe
CCE
CFE
unfortunately I don’t agree with you at all… degrees in IT are pretty worthless by themselves, IMO. However most places use it to weed people out (which is dumb) When I am hiring people for helpdesk/network admin I couldn’t care less if they have a degree or not. I care more about certs than degrees, but I also don’t care about certs that much. My network admin is the shit, he has no degree and no certs, but he can fix or setup just about anything even if he’s never done it before. It’s all about the resume and interview, proving that you actually know what you’re talking about, showing that you have knowledge and experience and what your personality is like are well above any piece of paper.
cisco certs are important for ANY cisco based company IMO. MCSE is ok, its a quick way to prove you’ve seen windows server before, lol. A+… and the like, you might as well have jerked off into the books.
yea, because IT is not learned on books or in classes, it’s learned by doing shit… day in and day out. The shitty thing about IT though, is it is a field for people our age (25-35). You can’t be TOO young because then chances are you don’t know much, you can’t be too old because chances are you’re outdated. End of the day if you are good at it, you’ll get good cash, but there are sooooo many people that suck lol.
EDIT: for me, all i’ve got is a BS and then work experience.
You need to remember IT is pretty broad, its not just help desk stuff! Its more the type of job within IT that determines if a degree or certification is worthless or not.
yea, thats pretty true. in a HUGE enterprise, certs probably are key because they can hire super specific. for most medium (buffalo sized) businesses, this is not the case though. I don’t do much in programming, so maybe certs are good there. But when I think IT, I think systems admin, networking, phones, desktops etc., not programing.
chino, hiring for a help desk is barely hiring IT. Just because you have 1 good Network Admin with no degree or certs doesn’t mean that is true with every person.
There are a lot of REALLY shitty IT people out there. Also, Computer Science degree is WAY DIFFERENT than MIS/IT degree.
I have no degree…and the CERTs I do have were for reasons relating to customers/licensing.
In regards to certifications, I’d just like to throw out there… www.transcender.com
Basically nullifies their validity. Certifications essentially GET you the interview.
for every one of you, 10 of them
I am talking about real world IT not UB CIT helpdesk twom… I am pretty sure between the two of us I have more experience in hiring of REAL IT people.
You can think what you want about a computer science degree but i’ll put any amount of money up that percentages favor someone that spent 4 years working in IT than someone with a 4 year CSE degree.
boardjnky relates IT skills to installing/configuring LAMP…