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Obstinate
Snowy Owl
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17 Apr 2014, 4:54 pm

Hello, I am thinking I'd like to go into IT work (mainly mobile phone and computer hardware repair) , and I was wondering, is college really required for the field? I know about the certification and am watching videos to prepare me for it the CompTIA A+ Certification. I was also thinking of going to community college to take courses in it. My biggest fear is that I am absolutely terrible at math and think that'll hold me back from getting my degree. That, and taking programming.

So is it really that difficult to code? I tinkered with it a little bit in the Myspace days but nothing professional. Would like a variety of opinions both for and against it :).



cberg
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17 Apr 2014, 5:16 pm

College makes it easier and thousands of times more expensive to get a job here; school is also a job in its' own right, but pays nothing. Programming is entirely a matter of understanding binary/boolean (true/false) reasoning and familiarizing yourself with the resources your projects will need; many coding disciplines focus entirely on supporting infrastructure programmers and testing products - material or not. Hardware repair only ever gets more difficult... most consumers these days will only pay up for the thinnest devices, meaning they're extremely difficult to dissect, and parts cost has been soaring. I still know all I need to repair Nokia & most Android devices, but Apple hardware and basically everything sold through telecoms is designed to be REPLACED, and that's exactly what most tech illiterates do.

People aren't out to make any sense; they'll spend as much as on their car to buy an aluminum laptop they absolutely never wish to learn the mechanisms of.

I'm a highschool dropout with a GED, and a better mobile device hacker you'd be hard-pressed to find - refusal to live in a basement off PayPal forum donations precludes many like me from releasing our bags of tricks upon the internet at large. I think learning shell script (BASH console) is worlds more important than any old certificate, and so do sysadmins anywhere on the planet. At the end of the day, all we're really discussing is bytecode and hardware architecture, so focus on the logic and you'll be fine!


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Obstinate
Snowy Owl
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17 Apr 2014, 7:53 pm

I was thinking mainframe/corporate computer repair actually, since that seems to be where the money is.



MissDorkness
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21 Apr 2014, 12:30 pm

Obstinate wrote:
I was thinking mainframe/corporate computer repair actually, since that seems to be where the money is.
I definitely don't disagree there. But, if you're going corporate, it might be hard to get past the HR filters without a degree.
I tried it for years.

Community College courses or community education courses (shorter, cheaper and not usually good for college credit) might be a cheapish way to try out programming or networks, etc to see how well you do with it.
I went to Uni for my CS degree. Easily half the people in my programming classes did not belong there, just didn't have the knack. The other half, with enough guidance from the teacher and textbooks and working things out together, picked up on it. It was a great experience, even if I will be paying for it for at least the next five or six years. :razz:

Whenever I interviewed, though, I got a lot of disdain for not having real world experience.

Instead of ending up in IT, where I wanted to go, I stayed in Facilities and got a System Admin role. It's not very hardware intensive like my last job was, though. No one wants to use paper anymore, and many companies are going away from providing mobile devices, since so many people have their own smart devices.
So, if you want hardware, you'll have to go Desktop Support or Network.

I miss the hardware side, but, I really dig the software, so I'm cool.

Oh, and my comment above about getting past HR filters (most corps will have you apply online and they quick filter the results to pare down the applicants to something manageable before even looking at resumes or interviews), you can many times get around that by personal contacts referring you, so, if you can network your way into a company, the degree might not be that important.