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There are three ways to play the game: 1. Play by the "rules": stockpile the degrees, certifications, awards, etc. that we all know are largely useless but are
by cheetos 12y ago
There are three ways to play the game:
1. Play by the "rules": stockpile the degrees, certifications, awards, etc. that we all know are largely useless but are absolute requirements for signaling your way through a standard corporate job interview. If you are after a normal, boring, corporate American desk job (nothing wrong with this depending on your life situation) you must play the game by the rules. If you don't, you will delude yourself and lose opportunities to lesser talented candidates who are better at playing the game.
2. Leverage your connections: use your professional connections to bypass / skip many of the requirements set by the "rules" to get a job. This requires less of playing by the rules but means you must have a solid professional network of people that have good jobs at companies that are looking to hire and are impressed enough by your work to give you a recommendation. This is harder than it seems, even for those with good connections, but I personally have found the most success finding good jobs these way.
3. Set your own rules: start your own business. This is the toughest but allows you to completely skip the rules. It also requires the greatest amount of talent and offers the greatest amount of reward. Speaking from personal experience, however, unless you have stockpiled savings and have excellent work ethic, this is a massive risk that has the potential to destroy your savings, emotional state and family relationships.
If I were you, I'd focus on a combination of #1 and #2. Get the college degree even if you think it's useless -- I'm sure you're being rejected immediately because of a lack of college degree. If you really don't want to do that, start working your professional network for referrals or start working on a great side project that you can present at an interview that showcases your talents and makes up for your lack of degrees. #3 is the dream, of course, but I've found that there is enormous value in the stability of a regular paycheck and insurance, especially when you have dependents, despite the soul-crushing nature of corporate jobs.
Good luck.
- tfg4k 12y agoI'm actually working on (and have been for about a year now) #3. But you're absolutely right. It's by far the toughest route.
- PhoenixWright 12y agoThis is the most succinct and dead on description of job hunting I've ever read.
- danellis 12y agoThere's no sense in getting a college degree just for the sake of having it. They're expensive and take up a lot of time, and they're not needed to get into tech jobs. Yes, some companies will care about this, but many, many companies will not. They care about what you know and what you've shown you can do. Leveraging connections, on the other hand, is a great idea. Most jobs are not actually advertised anywhere, and if you can use your connections well you can find yourself applying for jobs with very little competition.
- mod 12y agoIt seems like you chose to selectively ignore what he said the use of a degree was. And he didn't say "just for the sake of having it," he said it's a requirement to get your foot in the door at corporate jobs. It is.
- danellis 12y ago> he said it's a requirement to get your foot in the door at corporate jobs. It is. And I disagreed with him, which I think is okay. It's demonstrably not a requirement for all corporate jobs, so you can't make sweeping generalizations like that. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that you don't need a degree to work at companies like Citrix or Google, for example.