Re: Student-Degree valuable or not?

[JGrimshaw () ASAP com]

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

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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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