Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I wish there were more options for technical "trade schools" in the US. At my university I knew I wanted a career in information security and development, and I had a choice between Computer Science and Information Systems. Computer Science was mostly theory with not that much hands-on programming, while Information Systems had some more hands-on real-world programming but was heavily business/management oriented and essentially assumed only the most rudimentary programming and technical skills even in the highest level classes. I ended up going with Information Systems, which I'm still not sure if I regret or not.

I was fortunate enough to be a pretty self-motivated learner and become skilled at the things I was interested in through the Internet and self-teaching, and landed a pretty good job straight out of college, but I can't help but feel I wasted 4 years of time and money.

I would've loved to go to a university with practical Information Security/Assurance and Software Engineering programs at the undergraduate level, but sadly 1) none were anywhere near my area and 2) they're considerably more expensive, and college is expensive enough already in the US.

It's too bad that schools don't prepare graduates for real world jobs. Especially, for what they are charging. Personally, I don't know if most 10 yeared professors could keep up with the pace of change in the real world. I think what a lot of people leave out, when they are espousing their college degree, is the amount of self-learning, or who they know after graduation in order to keep/get their job? We still have a lot of naive Sheep who will judge you whether you finished that degree; so you will probally be glad you stuck it out and graduated? As to the dude above me who automatically put that Sales Person in a different "class" once he found she was a graduate of MIT--I'll give you a break, but repeat a quote I will never forget; "Chubby--you need to stop judging people on they way they look?" by Louis Medlock(Deliverance).

When I was in college I knew it was 90% B.S., but society expected me to finish the degree. Would I go today, I'm not sure. You need to be exposed to a few facts in life, so you don't end up believing in things that gave no scientific validity. On the other hand my sister is a multimillionaire, and believes in Psychics? She is also once very attractive, and thinks nothing of taking advantage of people for what they can offer her--she used to call it , "They would make a good contact!" Now--they call it Networking. Personally, I couldn't stomach it, but my sister doing great financially. Now if she could get her family to like, or trust her, or a partner who actually liked her for personality; she would have it all. Happy Holidays!

Just fyi, the word you're looking for is "tenured professors could keep up..."

I'm not sure trade schools, per se, are the answer.

The problem with trade schools is that you're just making a different bet on what jobs are going to be available in the future. Maybe the numbers are better than for some traditional university degrees, but it's fundamentally the same sort of bet: you educate yourself up in some direction, and then go look for jobs.

An alternate route, which has been used at different times in different places, is to first get hired at a company based on general competence, and then to get trained up in whichever direction they want you to work. That way, you have a guaranteed job after you finish training.

It's a much better system for the workers, but it requires different attitudes on the part of the corporations -- they need to be focused much more on the long term; they need to be willing to pay upfront in time and money to train up their workforce, and be stable enough to employee them long enough to make back their investment. Fly-by-night operations that explode rapidly for a couple of years and then collapse can't really afford that.

That's how trade schools work in Germany. About two thirds (up to 3/4) of the time you are at work and learn there, the other you are at a normal school. After you graduate (about 3 years) you most of the time stay at the same place to work.

I work at one! New York Code + Design Academy. There are similar schools across the country and world. People graduate having enough skills to land an entry level job as a junior developer without having to go incredibly deep into theory, we focus on implementation and actually building products.

I went through the M.S. Information Security program at Georgia Tech and and glad that I did it. Though at this point in my life I work mostly on building out web applications with Ruby on Rails for startups. Security is a tough sell in most of the industry. Bolting it on after the fact is almost always impossible, which is why I have had to learn so much about startups, their lifecycle, business model development, the customer discovery process, etc, in order to be able to attempt to build more secure software for startups before its too late in the process and bandaids are the only options remaining.

Point is, no matter what you do, there is a tremendous amount of learning to do outside of the university curriculum of your choice.

Any particular reason why you aren't taking a job in the infosec industry directly? Compared to being a RoR dev, I think you could be paid much more and have more interesting work.

Helping manage secure dev practices for startups is of course very important, but I think that would be much easier to do if you're either in some kind of CISO or appsec management position in the company, or are part of a third party auditing/pentesting firm that deals with startups.

I was in a similar boat as you were (wanting to go to a "trade school" type thing for IT, ended up going to a generalist school with business knowledge), and I feel better for it.

Granted, my schooling let me spend some time in Japan on a school exchange, which led to a whole other sequence of events. But I also got some classes on management, economics, and accounting that does help me understand how things are happening around me. Plus having a degree is pretty much mandatory if you want to work abroad (for visa issues). My school prepared me to deal with the human aspect of work, I think.

I did do a lot of self-teaching though, so I didn't end up learning much on the programming side of things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com