Google IT Support Professional Certificate

There's no good reason not to, since if your security and auditing systems are correctly implemented, limited-permission DB users doing direct SQL have the same security and accountability as someone using a specialized app.

If this course is based on this view of the IT Support role (which I heartily approve of, but which is not the baseline norm in the industry) it really should be called the IT Support Engineering Professional Certificate or something similar, because otherwise it won't communicate it's real focus either to applicants or, perhaps more critically, hiring officers.

80% of traditional IT hocus pocus can be automated or performed by an office manager or admin.

And Microsoft has been pushing businesses increasingly toward technologies like Powershell and products like SCCM in the past decade. The trend is slower in the Microsoft world, but it's definitely toward automation taking on the type of work you'd traditionally have support techs running around handling.

Both are true: even ten years ago, there was a noticeable split between helpdesk and maintenance skills, and things that we might now call "DevOps". If you have hundreds or thousands of computers, you can end up with people who specialize in stuff like building packages and disk images for deployments, writing scripts for user account management, and other automation, and don't fix printers so much any more, even if they don't have a separate job title.

Not sure why your experience was so different? Sounds like you got a raw deal though.

I was once in your shoes. Same background, same regrettable life choices, same potential future.

If you want to develop, do it. Start by looking at the crap software your company likely pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for and think about how you could do it better. Start by actually trying to supplant it with something of your own creation.

I have a generic degree. All those "practical" things you lament missing out on, I learned by just doing it. But I never had cause to learn what big-o notation was or how to navigate a b-tree...you know, that non-practical knowledge a CS degree would have endowed me with. The lack of such has only stopped me from working at Google. Plenty of other shops are not in the business of recruiting only those who can write the freshest sorting algorithms.

Just don't spend the rest of your life in a job you hate, condemning yourself for being put upon. It takes little effort to invoke large changes.

Stateside too. I used to get asked to fix printers by friends and associates and in general get treated like a help desk by people all the time because all they know is "Dave works with computers" even when I started working directly with managing software development teams later in my career.

Heck, about 16 years ago when I was working the help desk in a call center I had someone ask me "Hey IT Guy why isn't the water fountain working?" as I was walking out the door. I asked her to wait a moment, poked my head into the office of the facilities maintenance manager and asked him if he could help out.

For some reason that last bit was especially insulting, both being called "IT Guy" instead of being greeted at bare minimum by name, and for the assumption that I somehow knew how water fountains work. I was a frustrated and angry young man then, heh.

Feels good nowadays when people ask what I do "Security and Compliance". I don't get asked to fix printers anymore.

Some of the best developers, DBAs, system engineers, etc, I've hired had history degrees, math degrees, journalism, EE, etc. The degree itself, for me, is just proof that you finished something important. I care more about what you know, and how well you can learn something new.

I don't think I'm that unique in this respect. The tech shops I've worked in over my career were full of non-CS degreed people. Mostly my experience here, though, is with non tech companies. Things like the IT departments in Healthcare, Travel, Automotive, etc.

I... think it's not so much a matter of 'trust' as you have to understand what people understand. My understanding is that their job is to help you navigate academia, and I'm sure they are competent at that. I can't imagine how they could be good at figuring out what you want to do. That's hard enough to do yourself.

The other thing about higher education is that it's usually not meant as vocational. Now, I'm in IT too, and for that matter, I didn't go to college, so maybe I don't know anything, but my impression is that a good school is about giving you a common intellectual and cultural background, not about actually teaching you how to do your job.

This is to say, after your undergrad, you should be prepared to learn how to do a job that requires a degree, and how to communicate with others who have gone through the same training.

(Personally, I am a little confused as to just what you learn in an "IT" degree; as far as I can tell, they don't give you much math, and on a personal level, the only people I've worked with who had 'IT' type degrees were management.)

More than half a decade ago I was hired out of an internship at a fairly average company doing fairly average work in a mid-sized Midwestern city making $51k/yr. I was 23 and the internship was the only IT experience I had.

So take an anecdote as an anecdote... it's not always true across the board.

When someone comes along with an official "I can MongoDB certified architect" certificate issued by Mongo themselves, it's a good talking point during an interview, but we don't consider it a credential in itself.

There's no way to vet every arbitrary corporate certificate that comes through the door; we don't know if it's the result of a rigorous apprenticeship, 1000-question exam, a practical and 10 years of industry experience or a couple YouTube videos and a questionnaire. We don't know if the standards changed with management; what used to be impossible to attain is now printed like money. We don't know if the way Coca-cola teaches students to do things complies with best practices or industry standards, or just with Coca-cola's vision for how things should be done (which is absolutely what I'd expect from an entity like Google, who has demonstrated this in other avenues of influence).

Equifax could have printed certifications. Until recently, they were a reputable name. Would you trust an information security certificate issued by them now?

There is no accountability with corporate certifications. You're advocating faith-based hiring by trading on name alone.

When I got my CompTIA Security+ in college, I got asked by interviewers why I got that and not the CISSP. The answer is, while the CISSP is a far more respected certification, the requirements and entry price are also far different. The CISSP is not an entry-level certification, it actually mandates a certain number of years in the industry.

MTA is entry-level. MCSA is entry level. MCSE is for established professionals, it is an expert-level certification, so of course it's more respected. The people taking it are already well-respected experts themselves.

The MTA is the Microsoft certification that's most comparable to this. Not MCSE.