hey John, what's your education like?

i saw your personal webpage and i find your life to be very interesting! you deal with computer networking, which is what i am doing right now..

too bad i have only a diploma in that area, and not a degree :confused:

not only your fitness life that inspires me, it is also your personal life that does it for me too.

i wish to be a network administrator like you as my interest lies in that area of subject, and also to have your killer body! :cool:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/section/movies/amg/dvd/cov150/drt600/t635/t63558uytj6.jpg


Just kidding networkfreak

I'm 99% self-taught. I started using computers and programming when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I started out on an Atari 400 and my love for all things computers continued to grow over the next few years. I ran BBSs, programmed, phreaked, hacked and - miracously - managed to avoid trouble with the law. In the mid 90s I started using Unix and Linux and started getting heavy into computer security and C programming. I also started getting into Cisco, TCP/IP and networking around that time.

I have some college, but I did not major in anything to do with computers. I did not finish college, and have always been able to land good jobs based on my abilities and real-world experience.

That's about it!

Don't be upset that you don't have a degree. You can gain a lot of information from a degree, but what's key in the job market is your expertise and knowledge. I worked my way to Director of IT without even having a two-year degree, and it was simply by keeping pace with self education and delivering results.

Some companies are oriented to the degree/paperwork, etc, and it makes sense because when a company is inundated with thousands of resumes, etc, that is a way to weed through the documents and find the people who focused, worked hard, and earned their credentials.

However, most companies create positions based on the performance of those positions and how they contribute to the bottom line. If you can demonstrate that your knowledge and experience will do this, there are plenty of opportunities to move ahead.

I just realized after looking at my books that while it took me 10 years to reach Director of IT and that income level, it's only taken me 18 months to generate the same income in free enterprise on my own ... and I get to pick my vacations and hours!

There are some great IT opportunities, but there is no reason you can't create your own opportunity as well. In free enterprise, you are paid what you are worth, rather than what the job is worth.

Jeremy
hey John, what's your education like?

i saw your personal webpage and i find your life to be very interesting! you deal with computer networking, which is what i am doing right now..

too bad i have only a diploma in that area, and not a degree :confused:

not only your fitness life that inspires me, it is also your personal life that does it for me too.

i wish to be a network administrator like you as my interest lies in that area of subject, and also to have your killer body! :cool:

and you could program, deal with cisco products just by self studying?

o man, u r such an inspiration..

im only 20 this year, and i cant wait to achieve what you have in a few more years..

Don't be upset that you don't have a degree. You can gain a lot of information from a degree, but what's key in the job market is your expertise and knowledge. I worked my way to Director of IT without even having a two-year degree, and it was simply by keeping pace with self education and delivering results.

Some companies are oriented to the degree/paperwork, etc, and it makes sense because when a company is inundated with thousands of resumes, etc, that is a way to weed through the documents and find the people who focused, worked hard, and earned their credentials.

However, most companies create positions based on the performance of those positions and how they contribute to the bottom line. If you can demonstrate that your knowledge and experience will do this, there are plenty of opportunities to move ahead.

My mom was always disappointed that my husband went to college instead of university. She finally let it rest when he was IT manager overseas making more money than her (He was 25, she 54 and with a master's degree)

Most of the guys my husband works with are pretty surprised that he's gotten to where he is with only has a two year college degree. It's clear that his expertise in some areas clearly surpasses those people with triple the education that he has. He picked up all he knows on the job, and is always asking questions to learn more; always taking on more responsibility than what is given to him.

He picked up all he knows on the job, and is always asking questions to learn more; always taking on more responsibility than what is given to him.

This is the key in IT. No matter how much you THINK you know - there's always room for improvement. Not a day goes by that I don't read something and think "Geez - I didn't know that."

(RANT)

I have a neighbor who drives me absolutely crazy because he wants "a high paying job in IT" - yet I try to explain to him he needs to start building a foundation of basics - learn TCP/IP inside and out, read up on directory services, learn some scripting, get familiar with Operating systems (different ones is always a plus) - and what does he do? Goes out and interviews for jobs having not opened a single book, not installed a single OS and not networked two PCs together. Does he honestly think he's just going to "figure it all out" on the job?

If I interviewed for a job that I had no clue about I would be so embarrassed - I can't understand him.

(/END RANT)

here is my number 1 hint for any aspiring *tech guy/girl*

double check your work. always always always! Especially SPELLING. Mistakes happen, but in the IT world, mistakes usually end up costing money (mail not going to the correct place due to a typo SUCKS) and mistakes are usually really easily preventable... and are almost always caused by little things like bad typing (mail - mial, etc.)

My brother for years made aliving as a jazz musician. One day he enrolled in a college. Exactly one year later he graduated as an IT. The day he walked out of college he had a job waiting for him. Now he is an IT/Supervisor for a television network. But then again he always got straight A's in school.

I'm so glad there are folks like you out there who are really interested in tech stuff...when I was younger I really enjoyed it and even worked on some programing languages briefly...but nowadays I'm so far behind the curve, and I know y'all are gonna be fixin' my computer connections in a few years :)!

I'm 99% self-taught. I started using computers and programming when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I started out on an Atari 400 and my love for all things computers continued to grow over the next few years. I ran BBSs, programmed, phreaked, hacked and - miracously - managed to avoid trouble with the law. In the mid 90s I started using Unix and Linux and started getting heavy into computer security and C programming. I also started getting into Cisco, TCP/IP and networking around that time.

I have some college, but I did not major in anything to do with computers. I did not finish college, and have always been able to land good jobs based on my abilities and real-world experience.

That's about it!

I had an Atari 800. My dad used to get books that would have BASIC code to write games. I remember sitting there for hours writing lines of code only to have the worst game ever as the fruits of my effort.

I learned BASIC on AOL in a chatroom! Imagine that. This was back in 1995 or so, when the service was actually useful; for a fee, you could take courses in private chatrooms with a teacher and other students. I still have my certificate somewhere! :lol:

Anyone remember those magazines in the 80's that had the lines of BASIC code in the back? You would type in the code line by line and end up with a game, or some sort of bogus application. Back then, moving a square block across the screen and making it bounce or change colors was mind boggling.

I learned programming by picking apart the code and figuring out what it did. All on my Tandy ColorComputer2 and my TV as the monitor.

Ahh, memories.

Anyone remember those magazines in the 80's that had the lines of BASIC code in the back? You would type in the code line by line and end up with a game, or some sort of bogus application. Back then, moving a square block across the screen and making it bounce or change colors was mind boggling.

I learned programming by picking apart the code and figuring out what it did. All on my Tandy ColorComputer2 and my TV as the monitor.

Ahh, memories.

Yes! I entered thousands of lines of code into my TI 99/4A. :lol:

Yes! I entered thousands of lines of code into my TI 99/4A. :lol:
Ha! Jeremy and I have talked about starting ourselves on a TI 99/4A. Great computer, I knew that thing inside and out. Me, the TI, Compute! magazine and my dad's casette recorder (I couldn't afford the hard drive). Good times.

ok since we're going down this road, I worked a summer mowing lawns and doing gardening to save up 80 dollars to buy a Commodore Vic 20.

Then I decided to create an Adventure type game, this was a text based game in which you would type in commands like "go west" or "go east" to walk around and "pick up hammer", "open door", "look in mirror" etc etc and eventually you solve some sort of mystery or something.

Well I started typing in commands in basic to create my own type of game until I hit "out of memory".

I never got into the TI's or rather I couldn't afford to and I was more into motorcycles and motocross instead.

A degree is often worth its weight in toilet paper. People do get some personal development in university (whatever that means). I was glad I went. I didn't "learn" much, but it changed me as a person. It's not a particularly great way to gauge the character of a person but some companies will not hire people without a degree. Mine will not even look at somebody's resume without it. No doubt people who've applied for this job have a better knowledge/competency than I do, but like Jeremy mentioned when you have to sift through thousands of resumes you need a statistically (if not concretely) meaningful way to get rid of some people.

Fighting that glass ceiling I think a lot of motivated people will start their own business and here whether they have a degree or not is of little consequence. Unless they're an accountant or physician it's unlikely that their customers will care whether they sat through anthropology 101 and did a course on African History for some required credits.

I recommend most people get a degree. Exceptions would be if the degree sucks and their grades suck and they will come out with tons of debt, which sucks.

ok since we're going down this road, I worked a summer mowing lawns and doing gardening to save up 80 dollars to buy a Commodore Vic 20.

Then I decided to create an Adventure type game, this was a text based game in which you would type in commands like "go west" or "go east" to walk around and "pick up hammer", "open door", "look in mirror" etc etc and eventually you solve some sort of mystery or something.

Well I started typing in commands in basic to create my own type of game until I hit "out of memory".

I never got into the TI's or rather I couldn't afford to and I was more into motorcycles and motocross instead.

That sounds like a CLASSIC I had for my Atari---- ZORK!

I'm 99% self-taught. I started using computers and programming when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I started out on an Atari 400 and my love for all things computers continued to grow over the next few years. I ran BBSs, programmed, phreaked, hacked and - miracously - managed to avoid trouble with the law. In the mid 90s I started using Unix and Linux and started getting heavy into computer security and C programming. I also started getting into Cisco, TCP/IP and networking around that time.

I have some college, but I did not major in anything to do with computers. I did not finish college, and have always been able to land good jobs based on my abilities and real-world experience.

That's about it!


That is soooo impressive..... :claplow: :claplow: :claplow:

:tu:

Ah, yes.

That's how I learned how to program computers. I had a severe sunburn that kept me home for a few days when I was seven years old. My parents both worked and we were a very low income family. We had a TI-99/4A but no games. I was bored out of my mind so I sat in the middle of the living room with the machine and grabbed the manual and began entering programs.

By around 10 or 11 I got my Commodore 64 and started programming with machine code ... in fact, I was so used to coding the instructions directly to memory that when Assemblers came out, I had trouble using them because I felt they were too awkward with their "abstract labels and loops."

By 13 I was programming demos and being "hired" by groups that wanted introductions to their products ... which were, um, well, we won't go there. Let's just say it wasn't a professional job working for publicly traded companies.

In high school I was introduced to more structured languages and learned Fortran, Pascal, COBOL, and C. In fact, I was in an advanced high school program and for my computer science diploma from the International Baccalaureate program (IB) I had to create a software program, so I developed compression software using a Huffman encoding scheme. It compressed about half as well as PkZIP did at the time, but took about 100 times longer. :)

After graduating, I picked up a book and forced myself to learn object-oriented programming, C++.

My first job however was working on midrange AS/400 computers, using an outdated language called RPG/400. It eventually evolved to RPG/ILE which was more object oriented, so I had a blast using that, but saw the web as the real wave of the future. I had worked myself to the position of a Development Manager but negotiated dropping down to a Programmer Analyst while keeping my pay, and transferred into the computer department. There, I learned COM+, picked up XML as a back end using XSLT for the presentation layer, using objects that were encapsulated in JavaScript in the browser and then were duplicated into VB-based server side objects for interaction with the business model.

When I decided I had enough experience, I decided to move on and get some practical experience doing public-faced Web applications, rather than the intranet-based models, and joined a company as Director of IT that produced healthcare software. They had a nutrition program similar to eDiets for Hispanic-speaking people, and it was written entire in Spanish. They had some hospitals that wanted to brand the software but provide options in English, so my first project was creating our own multilingual content management software. It was an awesome project and as our budget and department were small, I wrote the majority of the code myself (you can see what the result was at www.midieta.com or www.mydiet.md for the English version ... you can see it's the exact same software but translated) ... it was, again, a lot of fun.

The reason I share all of this is not to brag but to show exactly how much you can take on if you choose to use your free time investing in knowledge rather than drinking and wishing you earned more income. I could have said I wasn't good enough for the Director position, but instead I put forth the effort to find a company that had a problem to which I could offer the solution.

Even in the corporate world, it helps to learn a little marketing and sales because that's what you do everytime you send a resume or sit across the table in an interview.

You can absolutely create your path, whether as an entrepreneur or in the corporate world, if you CHOOSE to be passionate and stay in the game long enough to reap the rewards.

Jeremy

Ha! Jeremy and I have talked about starting ourselves on a TI 99/4A. Great computer, I knew that thing inside and out. Me, the TI, Compute! magazine and my dad's casette recorder (I couldn't afford the hard drive). Good times.

What you've done is so impressive too, Jeremy... :)

There must be something about being an intense computer mind melder that naturally evolves into becoming a physical fitness dedicant, as both you and John have such similar histories. :nod:

Maybe I need to spend more time at the computer myself :D :cool: