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Getting an IT Job Without a Degree

I frequently talk to high school students or young adults who are hoping to land a lucrative IT job without a degree. Unfortunately, few of these individuals have the skills necessary to get the job they want. While many high schools now offer an increasing number of computer courses, rarely do they provide the depth or breadth of skills required by employers. However, this does not mean you need a degree to work in IT. In fact, some of the best techies I know started their career without a degree.

If it is possible to get a job without a degree, how do you do it? First, it’s important to recognize that IT jobs are broadly divided into two groups – system management and software development. System management jobs involve the management of computer systems, networks, servers, and other computer hardware. Additionally, cybersecurity professionals fall into this category (although there is often some overlap with software development skills). Software development jobs include web developers, software engineers, mobile application developers, and a variety of other jobs focused on using computer code to create applications for users.

Information Technology Certifications

Typically, individuals with system management jobs have degrees in Information Technology Management. However, those without a degree can show their competence with a variety of tech certifications. Some of the most widely known certifications are from the Computing Technology Industry Association better known as CompTIA. This includes CompTIA’s most well known certification for desktop maintenance and support – A+ certification. However, CompTIA offers a variety of other entry-level certifications as well. Network+ certification shows competency with network management and Security+ demonstrates basic security knowledge.

In addition to CompTIA certifications, a variety of other organizations provide IT certifications such as Cisco’s CCNA, Amazon’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and Google’s Associate Cloud Engineer. These certifications – unlike those from CompTIA – are vendor specific. However, the skills these certifications demonstrate are highly valuable to businesses.

Software Development Projects

Software developers typically have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. And, while there are some certifications available for programmers, they are not as widely desired as those for IT management. As such, it’s more difficult to demonstrate programming skills to a potential employer. However, this can be overcome by providing sample code on GitHub or BitBucket. If you want a job as a developer, spend some time creating professional-quality software applications that demonstrate your knowledge. Then, ensure to include a link to your repository in your resume. While you learn to code, don’t neglect learning SQL, HTML, and JavaScript. During the last decade, these skills have become standard for nearly all software development jobs.

I’ve talked to many young men who would like to become game developers. For them, I would recommend you consider your background in math and physics first. While there are libraries that make game programming easier, it’s hard to get far without some knowledge of matrix manipulation, trigonometry, gravity, and other topics that require a solid background in math and science.

Conclusion

While most people enter the IT world with a bachelor’s degree, it is possible to find good jobs without a formal education. If you want to work in the system management field, focus on certifications. If you want to work in software, focus on projects you can demo to show your ability. While either of the above will require effort, there really are no shortcuts in the IT world. Furthermore, if you are expecting an employer to pay you the high salaries common to the IT world, your efforts will be well compensated.

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Financial Planning

Money

The unprecedented impact of the Coronavirus will certainly be the subject of countless articles during the following decade. After all, there’s much to be learned from this event in a variety of fields. Economists, epidemiologists, lawyers, and business owners will all approach the subject from a different angle. Undoubtedly, many of those conversations will involve financial planning and economic impact.

As I look at the nation, after over a month of lockdown, the most obvious thing I see is the lack of sound financial planning. From the individual to the federal government, this event has exposed a gaping hole in our ability to plan for disasters. Of course, it’s easy to say that nobody could have predicted a pandemic – so how could we prepare? But countless disasters happen every single year. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, winter weather, and extreme cold are common events that could easily bring harm to a business or family.

Furthermore, sound financial planning has always said you should have six months cash on hand. That’s wise advice for individual, corporate, and government financial planning. Yet, within a week of the lockdowns, people were lining up at food banks across the nation. Surely businesses would be better prepared. Right? Sadly not. Within short order, the government opened loan programs to keep businesses from failing. Even worse, the government itself was unprepared and an extra 2 trillion dollars was added to an already unsustainable national debt to deal with the virus.

From one end of our nation to the other, nobody had any money in the bank to weather a week long storm – let alone a months long shutdown. And, sadly, I think we’ll see innumerable businesses lost in the fallout of this national disaster.

How can we – the business community better deal with these kinds of events in the future? First, we obviously need to ensure that we have adequate cash on hand to continue to meet our financial obligations even if we are unable to conduct business. Second, we need to find creative ways to operate our businesses using eCommerce, cloud systems, or other technologies that can operate even during a disaster. Third, we need to encourage everyone – at all levels – to put money back for a rainy day. We may not see another plague in our lifetime, but we will undoubtedly see other disasters.

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Local Hack Day 2019

Learning

In December, I once again spoke at the South Hills School of Business and Technology for their Local Hack Day. I shared some of the lessons I learned throughout the year, and would like to share them here on my blog as well.

Team Members

Throughout the year, I encounter people who would like some development work on the side. They may be experienced developers looking for additional work, recently graduated noobs, or people just trying to find a place to start on their software engineering journey. As a small business, I don’t have the bandwidth to take them all on. But when I see potential, I try to see if I can plug them in. This year, I learned three valuable lessons about staff. First, inspect what you expect. Just because someone says they possess a particular skill does not mean they actually do. Finding this out late in the game can be very costly. Second, I would encourage noobs to check their attitude at the door. If you’re just starting out, don’t assume you know more than me. You don’t. Third, friends don’t always make great team members. They may be great to hang out with, but mixing personal and professional relationships can be dangerous.

Customer Relations

As a software engineer, learning to deal with customers is a new challenge for me. This year, I learned the value of contracts. While I have always preferred to do business with a handshake, I’ve learned that customers may not always think the same. Without a contract, you have no recourse when your customer relationship goes south. On the flip side, when you do have a signed contract, treat your customer like the girlfriend (or boyfriend) that you’ve always wanted. Show them how much they matter as a customer. Otherwise, they’ll find a service provider who will!

Productivity

I started this year doing a lot of work that yielded no value. As a business, I must focus on those things that generate revenue for my organization. Some of that work is obvious – such as billable customer hours. Others tasks are essential, but don’t generate revenue directly – such as advertising efforts. Still other tasks are utterly useless – stop doing them. For things that are essential but don’t generate revenue, find ways to automate them or to lesson the workload. I use Hootsuite for my social media, for example, because it optimizes my social media workflow.

Valuable Tools

As a developer, it’s important to have the right tools available to not only be in a position to exploit future opportunities but also to be able to meet current business demands. I have been telling people for the last year to learn OpenCV and Artificial Intelligence. The future will undoubtedly involve computer systems doing work previously only done by humans. In the meantime, learning how to create PDFs is a far more practical business need for everyone. I’ve also found LaTeX to be a very useful tool for creating business documents. Not only can I easily check the documents into source control, but I have 100% control over the layout without my software injecting the style it thinks I want.

Education

In the tech world, you can never be left behind. You need to always be learning new tools, frameworks, and languages. Go to sites like Udemy or Coursera and further your tech skills. Seek out valuable certifications and read books. Louis Pasteur famously said “luck favors the prepared”. In the tech world, that’s typically the programmer with the broader skillset.

Conclusion

Each year of our lives, we should strive to be more than we were last year. The starting point for that is to reflect on the last year and learn from your successes and your mistakes and then to apply those lessons to the coming year. Look back on your last year and take note. This year can be the best year ever if you put in the effort to ensure you’re on the right path.

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Value & Time

Growth

When we think about value, we think about the cost we pay for something. However, that’s a very shortsighted definition. We probably only consider cost as defining value because most of the things we buy are defined this way. For instance, when we go to a grocery store, we look at two brands of cheese, and the cheaper one is the better value. It doesn’t matter much which is the better quality cheese, it simply matters which is the cheaper cheese. As consumers, we typically only consider the cost. To me, the definition of value is far more complicated.

Buying Vacuum Cleaners

Twenty years ago, when I would buy a vacuum cleaner, I only considered cost when purchasing. The cheapest vacuum was the best value and the one I would purchase. But time and time again, I found that my value vacuum cleaner would stop working after about a year. So, I’d go back to the store and buy another one. I was paying about $100 per year to purchase vacuum cleaners. Note that now my value definition has a time element. After several years, I considered buying a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It was four times as expensive, but I had hoped it would do a better job than the $100 vacuum cleaners and that it would last longer. And today, 15 years later, I still have that same Dyson vacuum cleaner. If it were to break today, I would have spent $400 over 15 years for my vacuum. That’s a substantially better value than before!

Value of Technology

The cost of computer technology is very similar. You can buy the $300 laptop and expect to replace it next year, or you can buy a MacBook and have it for 10 years. But custom software is a little more difficult to directly compare since the price tag isn’t as clearly defined. What I’ve found is that when customers purchase consulting services or software development services based solely on the cost of those services, they often find that the price tag explodes over the lifespan of the product due to poor development. When you find the developer with the lowest cost, he probably has the least experience. He will take longer to accomplish the work since he’s bound to run into more snags than an experienced developer. He’s also likely to overlook things that a senior developer wouldn’t. These issues will result in additional costs during the lifetime of the application to fix in addition to lost time and productivity from your software users.

Conclusion

Paying for custom technology services is more like buying a vacuum than it is purchasing a block of cheese from the grocery store. The true value of those technology services will be defined not by cost alone, but by how long those services solve your technology problems.

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Classic Hacking

Security

I’ve been involved with technology since the mid 90’s. During the late 90’s, I worked on Unix systems. It was those experiences that lead me to love Linux, taught me to program in C, and helped me learn to automate tasks using various scripting languages. But the 90’s were a much different time for security. Nobody really worried much about hackers or social engineering. And now, over 20 years later, I see people in the workforce that have been robbed of some of the fun I had in the past due to increased security on machines. Of course, increased security is good, I’m not going to argue otherwise. But it has also made a lot of the ‘fun’ from the past no longer possible.

Remote Display

When I was working on old Unix systems, one of my favorite hacks was to set my display to another computer. Since Unix display works as a client/server model, you can actually set your app to appear on any computer monitor you want. So, it was common where I worked to find the most horrible graphic you could and display it on someone else’s machine. Always a good laugh. Other tricks would allow you to play audio on their speakers (great when the individual has fallen asleep at their desk) or turn their keyboard buttons on and off.

Password Files

Long before the /etc/shadow file, passwords were stored in the /etc/password file. And, since the file was readable by anyone, you could easily grab the entire password list and run it through a tool like John the Ripper. Even more fun, commands like ‘ypcat’ would allow you to get the passwords of all users on the network even if they weren’t on the local machine.

Email Overflow

My sister’s first experience with the internet was through a device called “WebTV”. This device was a small terminal that would turn your TV into an internet terminal. It was a cheap, easy alternative to a computer. It also suffered from a pretty simple flaw – you could only have a limited number of emails. (200, I believe.) I found an unsecured email relay – pretty common in the 90’s – and spammed my sister with enough messages to flush out all her email. As you might guess, she was mad.

A New World

How things have changed. Unsecured email servers are much more difficult to find, and Unix is now much harder to hack out-of-the-box. While most of the hacks of twenty years ago were mischievous in nature, today’s hackers are far more sinister. And, thankfully, the world has adapted to become a safer place. Nonetheless, I still look back to the simpler days of computing and the fun we had.

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Payment Terms

Money

Recently, a fellow small business owner asked me how I handle billing. For a small business, money is often one of the biggest concerns. Without a steady flow of cash, you can’t meet your business objectives or your personal financial requirements. As a small business, you have to determine when to bill and how to bill. Even worse, you have to define how you deal with delinquent payments – which can kill your business.

When To Start Billing?

The first question to answer is when do you start billing? This is particularly true if you’re billing by the hour. Does the clock start ticking at your first meeting? After the project requirements are defined? After the project is complete? For my business, anything after the initial project meeting is billed to the customer. I think it’s important for a customer to understand that project planning, requirements gathering, and any other tasks completed before any actual code is developed is an integral part of the development lifecycle. I typically bill the first of the month after any billable hours have accrued. I’ve found that the longer you wait, the more the bill increases. Then, you risk the customer suffering from sticker shock when you finally send the bill after months of work.

Late Payments?

When I started my business, I was so pleased to have customers that I didn’t worry about late payments. I assumed that my customers respected me enough to pay me on time. I was incredibly wrong. What I’ve found instead is that many companies will put me at the bottom of the list of payees. Why is that? Well, I think it’s pretty simple. The customer knows they have to pay their lease on time or risk eviction. They know when they fail to pay their internet bill, they won’t be able to perform their mission. What happens when they don’t pay you? Likely nothing. Additionally, they know you don’t have a collections branch and are unlikely to use a collections agent. Thus, they have absolutely no reason to worry about when they pay you. I have learned to include verbiage in my contracts defining payment terms. I give customers a 5 day grace period, and after that the customer is charged a late fee. Additionally, all the customer’s projects are paused until payment is received. If you continue to work, you end up months behind on payment and continuing to work for free.

What About Equity?

I’ve had many ‘customers’ offer to pay me in equity. I do the work and they will give me a percentage of the revenue generated by the software. I have a very simple answer for this kind of relationship. No. While an individual may think that their idea will generate millions, they rarely do. Even worse, you’ve now wasted time developing software that you will never be paid for. The original ‘customer’ lost nothing. You lost countless billable hours to a project that will never be profitable.

Conclusion

Money is the lifeblood of any business. What I’ve learned is that it’s imperative to have clearly defined payment terms and procedures for your business. When you fail to make those terms clear to customers, you will quickly find that your business struggles to get by and that you are spending more time nagging customers to pay than you do performing your business’s objectives.

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Social Media Etiquette

Social Media

Today, social media is increasingly being used as a tool for marketing and advertising. However, if done poorly, you run the risk of tarnishing your brand and being viewed as a spammer. Here are a few simple etiquette rules for social media.

Avoid Follow/Unfollow

Today, I was notified that I had a new follower on Instagram. After seeing that it was a local business, I decided to follow back. Trying to develop relationships with local businesses is an important aspect of my social media efforts. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I had an opportunity to visit their Instagram page. But when I did, I noticed that they had already unfollowed me. They had no actual interest in my content or in developing a relationship – they simply wanted to show me their products. This isn’t much different from spamming and does not present a positive view of your organization.

Create Content Not Advertisements

People are unlikely to follow you on social media to see what you have on sale this week. People want to see your personality, what your business stands for, and who you are. Of course, all businesses will occasionally create content that advertises their goods and services, but if that’s all you do, expect to be unfollowed. Social media is for growing communities – not a new tool to spam me with ads.

Stop Nagging Me About Services

On LinkedIn, in particular, this is common. Someone friends you and – wanting to grow your own circle of connections – you accept. Then, you get a private message about the services they offer. Viewing it for what it is – spam – you ignore the message. A week later, another message. Then a month later, a message asking if you got the previous message. Yes, I got them all. I chose to ignore them because I wasn’t interested in your product at this time. Additionally, I now am distrustful of you as I see you too are a spammer.

Like/Know/Trust

Want to develop your social media the right way? Use the like/know/trust model. First, users like you. They see your posts, enjoy your photos, laugh at your jokes. After a while, users feel that they know you. The’ve seen your stuff, they know what you stand for, and they feel that they understand you and your company. Finally, users trust you. They have seen you in action and know you’re knot a spammer. They recognize that you provide valuable content they want. They know you’re someone they could reach out to if they need your services. That’s the formula for success. You develop community and relationships, and people see you as a valuable asset instead of a spammer.

Do Unto Others

The golden rule applies to social media just as it does anywhere else. When you’re engaging in social media efforts, ask yourself how you would view another business if they used the same tactics. If it’s not favorable, don’t do it.

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A Programmer’s Purpose

Today, it’s becoming increasingly popular for programers to be ‘opinionated’. In the software world, to be ‘opinionated’ means to believe your way is the right way. Other ways are wrong, and your way is right. There’s nothing wrong with having a preference, but the truth is that there is little room for opinion in software engineering. Software projects need to meet requirements such as budget, programmers available for maintenance, stability, etc. Championing a new language or framework may be fun, but when you leave, are there other developers available to support the project? Even if your preferred framework is better, it’s of no concern to a client when the language dies for lack of users and they have to pay to have the application rewritten.

A computer science student I know is all about Julia. Honestly, I’ve never met a single Julia developer or even seen a line of code in that language. On the list of popular languages, it’s not even a blip on the radar. However, this student insists that Julia is the way of the future. I’m not sure where he’s hoping to find work, but it won’t be in the local area. I remember the same thing when Scala came out. Every video I saw spent half their time attacking Java development. As above, I know absolutely no projects written Scala nor do I know any local companies either using it or planning to.

How should we select frameworks and languages?

The answer is actually pretty simple. Commercial software development has one purpose – to support some business use case. As such, frameworks must be chosen to support commercial business. What things make a language or framework commercially viable? It should be stable, have tools available to support commercial usage, and be widely used such that new developers can easily be found in the future. Additionally, it should have adequate resources available to help when you get stuck.

Commercial application development is no place for experimenting with new frameworks or basing your decision on an opinion about what is better. Find commercially viable frameworks and save yourself the hassle of supporting your new framework that may be dead in a year.  A programmer’s purpose it to write commercially viable software – period.

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Do What You Want*

So many businesses today are doing what they DO NOT want and confusing it as the right thing to do. Maybe they feel like they need employees to follow the 9-5 workday to achieve success. Perhaps they are doing things just to “fit in” with other businesses, and at their own expense. Even still, most businesses that I’ve encountered have some aspect of their work that adds no productivity or value, yet they continue to “go about their business” anyway.

However, I need to be clear… the asterisk in the title is there for a reason. The message conveyed is both good and right in its true nature, not to be confused with or distorted into a message of business driven by greed, hedonism or self-gratification. So long as a business’ goals and core values promote good in an ultimate and absolute sense, it’s hard to go wrong. Simply consider how each decision relates back to the mission and vision of the company.

Personally and vocationally speaking, my efforts are focused on helping other businesses, organizations, and individuals to do exactly what I’ve suggested. If we don’t want to do something, we’re certainly not going to be capable of doing our best work. We can put on a good show and do enough to get by, but the world would be so much better if every business and every person was operating at peak potential for the sake of making the world a better place. Let me know what you’re doing that you shouldn’t be, and I’ll do my best to help you do more of what you want* in any way that I can.

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Leverage Networks

Over the last several months, my mission has been to focus on company scalability. As a community minded individual, implementing a business model that would encourage Talixa to grow only when we help others do the same has always been a priority. I would argue that this is the reason we saw so much growth so quickly. In April, Talixa transitioned from a part-time company to a full-time company. By July, we had enough projects to keep us booked full-time through the end of the year.

Initially, those were my goals. My work revolved around doing whatever I could to ensure that the company was an asset to the community. As we’ve brought on more team members, I needed to redefine what specifically I could do to allow Talixa to become an even greater asset to the community. What I’ve realized is that I need to make myself available to the rest of the community so I can see more of our community reaching their potential, through Talixa’s infrastructure.

Tom never needed me to help him grow his company. I firmly believe that. However, in looking at what happened as a result of my decision to be a part of the company’s growth, I realized that the element of collaboration, transparency and accountability could explain the rapid growth. When other people can see what we’re working on, we can get the necessary feedback to make the right decisions to position ourselves for sustained growth.

With all that said, Talixa Software & Service, LLC is offering a brand new service… one that I’m particularly excited to share. As far as social media is concerned, our community overall does a fantastic job of utilizing facebook to spread the word and market the products and services that are locally available. However, I have seen very few people utilizing twitter to its fullest potential. People like Elon Musk (Tesla, Space X, Boring Company) are utilizing twitter to accomplish unbelievable things and reach the masses, despite claiming that it is the most difficult platform to conquer.

I have been in the process of tearing the platform apart, breaking down every bit of information I can understand, in order to come up with a process to leverage our local networks and scale our community, catering to our strengths and capitalizing on them. Our business model has worked incredibly thus far, so I don’t intend to change it at its core. Talixa will only scale by helping our entire community do the same. For this reason, we have created twitter business packages to deliver exceptional value, and the reason we can offer the service at the most competitive price is because we’ve created a win-win scenario… a blue ocean.

If your business is on twitter, send us your twitter handle (e.g. @TalixaSoftware) and we’d be happy to give you some extra exposure through our twitter, even if you aren’t actively tweeting content. If your business isn’t on twitter, make an account right now! Otherwise, you’ll miss out on the huge potential to accomplish immeasurably more than you’d expect. If you’d like to learn more about our service, check out this link: bit.ly/2MuMPoF

If you have any questions or feedback about what we’ve ventured into, please reach out! We’d love for you to be a part of what we’re doing and reap the benefits alongside us.

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