[Courses] [Careers] Carla the Country Geek

[Mary]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2005, Julie Sloan wrote:
> It's practically impossible to get recognition from the big publishing
> houses without being connected with some University's Master of Fine
> Arts program.  My point is, this isn't a CS-specific problem, and for
> sure not gender-specific.

That is US (North America?)-specific though -- Australian authors often
have informal affiliations with a university and may teach in order to
have some extra money, but there is definitely not this thing about
needing to have a Masters degree and a university affiliation before
publication.

Degrees get a little like guilds sometimes. As Carla says, people who
have them tend to hire people with them. You can argue either way about
this kind of behaviour: at its best (if the guild training is good) it
can guarentee a field that, say, 80% of the guild members are at least
reasonable and also having to get into the guild training means that
there aren't 10 people competing for every job. At its worst it's just
insular.

In any case, if sysadminning and support HAD to be (informally, badly)
guilded, I can't understand why a CS degree is the training of choice.
My CS degree was good training for a programmer (which is what I am, so
that's OK). Everything I know about sysadmin and support I learned
elsewhere.

-Mary