al6200
December 24, 2010, 2:14pm
114
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Otherwise, I don’t know how you get around the notion that it’s better to become an IT worker, or perhaps a software developer, than an engineer. As an IT or software worker, the development of your skillset, and hence the trajectory of your career, is largely in your hands. Barring truly expensive systems such as storage networks, most IT skills can be learned with equipment available at a quite reasonable price. A pod of servers with which to learn how to build a Linux, Solaris, or Windows cluster costs only a few thousand dollars using cheapo used hardware and either free or cheap trial vendor software. {You can download Windows 7 Enterprise Edition for free for a 90 day trial, Linux is opensource freeware, and Solaris is available for free for lab purposes.} If you want to learn networking, you can build a well-stocked Cisco home lab with used gear from Ebay for $5-10k - which you could then sell back on Ebay to recover most of your costs once you’ve finished. That’s a bargain compared to the cost of college. Heck, if you become competent at both servers and networks, you can construct an facsimile of your company’s entire IT backoffice infrastructure in your home lab. Hence, a highly enterprising and curious IT worker could learn in depth every single piece of infrastructure that his employer operates.
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<p>I think this actually makes the IT job worse, because there are fewer barriers to entry, and hence maintaining a high salary is difficult. If there’s a skill that you can only learn from a handful of schools or employers, it will be very hard for people to learn your skill and drive down your salary.</p>