College is not where you find a career. College is where you have fun and drink beer

[xoxoxoBruce]

Both Westinghouse and Boeing showed me the transcripts they obtained, and that was for a nobody job. I see in the news, frequently, someone in corporate or government being fired for lying on there resume. But that only came to light after they'd been in the job for some time, often years, and had pissed people off enough to start looking for a way to get rid of them.

[Clodfobble]

And it's not like they could take back those years of salary, or give them any worse punishment than firing them. Take away the job they never would have had if they didn't lie? Not so bad.

[Griff]

We're getting to a point with electronic information collection that its probably harder to run a resume con without altering/creating an original record, but do that and its easy living.

[ZenGum]

I've often been asked for certified copies of academic transcripts and/or sighting of the original degree, and that's even for jobs outside universities.

[Clodfobble]

I guess Mr. Clod and I have just always worked for companies with slacker HR departments. Maybe if they'd hired an HR manager with a degree...

[Undertoad]

Best IT boss I ever had came up through the ranks of the supermarket chain where we worked. He had interest, but not a lot of expertise in computing. But he knew people, and how to manage them, because he had actually had to do it and show results for two decades in the markets.

Most of the time he didn't know exactly what I was doing, but he could see that I was productive and effective. When I came in with a proposal to revolutionize the chain by networking the stores, he didn't know exactly what I was proposing, but he could see the benefit of it and fought for it with the company's board. Together we moved mountains.

Most IT managers are promoted from technical positions and have no idea how to actually manage people. The last director I had, when it came time for the company to move, specifically chose his office because it was furthest away from his people. He was a disaster, and it's partly due to him (and 85% due to his useless CEO boss) that the company no longer exists. He helped drive a wedge between development and marketing --the people who were trying to figure out how to monetize their services. He made it possible for development to become an empire of their own, and eventually empire was everything and development literally stopped producing new products for people take an interest in and buy.

[Undertoad]

But once Unisys and RCA stopped producing hardware, telephony became an uninteresting industry, Western Electric devolved, Commodore packed up shop, and half my CS friends moved to California, what real Computer Science was being done in the Philadelphia area?

I should have moved with them, if I wanted to stay in the industry. But it looked like Sysadmin was a pretty good bet, followed by being first into the Internets and whatnot. Now everything is commodity except the huge-ass corporations, when "enterprise-class" means they are still spending million$ on hardware for one reason or another.

I cain't work in a corporation I just cain't

Call it excuses, but those fuckers and I, we never got along

So that's why I went off the grid and tried to forge a different life story for myself, but that sorta hasn't really worked out, and I blame myself but uh I also found out that doing a lot of blaming myself was super-unproductive

Man I like it when a thread can be partly about me

[Clodfobble]

Regarding tw's list of courses, many community colleges offer courses within a department that are not necessarily part of a degree in that department.

Many adults' computer skills are lacking. A young admin assistant may need a course in how to use Excel, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. And what department should that course go under, if not CIS? That doesn't mean that if she takes all the classes in tw's list, she's going to walk out with a Computer Science degree.

[ZenGum]

It's not just IT.

A certain former employer of mine was a private college with no more than 50 staff, run by the owner. Profitable, growing, with happy staff. Then about five years ago it got swallowed whole by a certain global education provider; "business model" decisions were imposed, good staff lost, and the school is now struggling along on the edge of viability. Directors have been imposed and replaced.

Again, in universities, I've seen managers who are focused on supporting staff to get the job done, and managers who are focused on empire building to secure their own advancement. They exist everywhere, and they suck.

[infinite monkey]

Proprietary schools are the downfall of higher education. Plain and simple. They're the debbil.

[Pete Zicato]

Sigh. Well PW, it sounds like you're doing all the right stuff. Maybe I've just been lucky.

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by Pete Zicato

Sigh. Well PW, it sounds like you're doing all the right stuff. Maybe I've just been lucky.

There's still more I can do to improve my situation. Time to stop making excuses.