Disclaimer: I'm a STEM graduate (chemistry) and have been out of school for about 15 years.

The company I work for is essentially an IT services and consulting firm. Since IT and software development is not a profession like engineering or medicine, educational backgrounds differ wildly from person to person. One of the extremely rare traits that is great for our new hires to have is the critical thinking/troubleshooting/organization skills that STEM education provides, combined with a good grasp of communications skills that the humanities provide. While an English or fine arts major may not have the technical background to do some of the work we do, it's sure nice to find a STEM graduate who can write in complete sentences and document their work well.

One of the other things that a well-rounded education does for you is that it makes you a more interesting person. I've had the opportunity to work with lots of people over the years. Those who are 100% tech-focused and those who are 100% "fluff"-focused aren't very pleasant to deal with. Somewhere in the middle of these extremes (further towards the technical in my field) can make a very knowledgeable co-worker who is also plugged into daily life and can talk intelligently about other subjects. People who are all the way over to the techie side do very good technical work, but you certainly wouldn't put them in front of a customer and won't get good documentation of their excellent work.

I'm really not trying for self-promotion here, but I do feel that one of the reasons I haven't been unemployed for a very long time is because I'm flexible enough and have a good enough personality that employers don't feel like they're forced to keep me around just for my knowledge.

When I was in school, bashing my brain finishing my science education, I do remember looking at the humanities, psychology and communications majors and thinking they couldn't possibly amount to anything. Looking back, I'm glad a well-rounded education was forced on me in the form of required general education classes. Allowing someone to get through schooling without at least some attempt at exploring the other side (and this cuts both ways...) means they get the equivalent of a DeVry or ITT Technical Institute education.

My personal opinion is that the second amendment is dated and no one should be allowed to personally own a gun. BUT, I'm aware that there's a huge collection of libertarians, rednecks, whatever who feel they need one. So changing the Constitution is out of the question. Anyone trying that will get the rednecks at their doorstep just like this person did. Either the South and most of the West will secede again, or they'll try to take over.

The problem with the US is that we're way bigger than we were in 1789, and have 300+ million we need to keep happy. We also have little need for an unorganized militia, although the more survivalist among us might disagree on that one. The reality is that gun use is very different in urban areas than it is in cities. In the country, people go shootin' at some food. In cities, they're used primarily in crimes and by the mentally ill to wreak havoc. This is why mayors ban handguns -- not because they think it'll do anything, but because they can't be seen as contributing to the problem.

Anecdotal example about differing opinons -- someone I know who grew up in an urban area moved out to a rural location. Over the years I've known him, he's gone full-on libertarian and is constantly railing against gun control. I have no idea what changed, but I guess it's the differing way guns are viewed. Country = useful tools, city = aids to criminal activity.

I've never had the desire to own a gun, nor do I see the appeal. However, like I said, I realize we're stuck with this state of affairs. It does not make the gun lobby look good in the public eye when someone attempting to make gun ownership safer is threatened by a bunch of kooks. I don't see the anti-gun movement making death threats on gun owners. Even if the people making these threats are only a small sample of the pro-gun group, they sure make a bad impression.

I'll agree with almost everyone else on here -- never leave yourself in a position where one person can wreck everything if they decide they're having a bad day. Look at the Terry Childs incident. You can debate the reasons why he did what he did, but the facts of the case are clear. He set things up such that he was the only one who could bring back router configs should they reboot by not storing them in NVRAM. Since he was allowed to do this, his refusal to hand over the console passwords one day essentially made it so that he controlled everything. They key here is not to stand over the new guy, but to make sure there is always a way to take back access should you need to. I'm desperately working to document a set of systems I inherited because I realized the other day that the operations groups who were supposed to know everything about running them didn't. And since I'm in the engineering side of our highly segmented IT organization, my primary focus shouldn't be day to day admin work.

I'd like to think the days of cowboy IT admins are coming to an end, but I'm not so sure. In fact, with everything moving to the cloud, the guys who control the cloud vendor account have tons more power. I'm sure people here could tell plenty of stories of people getting fired, then VPNing in through their "doomsday" back door account and wiping out servers and backups. Just keep the keys and make sure you take them all away when someone leaves. Another story from my previous experience -- no company names because it would scare people to know this happened. But, basically, the "network guy" of a startup that grew super huge in the space of 5 years disagreed with the new CIO and started getting pissy about various things. So much so that the CIO brought in network contractors to start trying to rein the guy in. When the guy refused to work with them, he was fired. Only after that was it discovered that there was absolutely zero written documentation. It took months of very careful probing and the cooperation of the guy's underlings to get the network equipment manageable again.

If you're truly leaving IT behind for pure management, good luck. I just inherited a sorta-lead role in addition to all the other work I need to do, and it really is a different skill set. Humans are way less predictable than computers.

Also, for the sanity of those below you, please do not implement ITIL as a top-down mandate. ITIL is so horribly complex system that vendors like Remedy, CA, BMC, etc. will try to sell you as a prepackaged solution to all your IT problems. The reality is, unless you start cutting out parts of the processes you don't need, IT will become a nightmare world of useless busywork. We're at the point where we have to think about changes in terms of "how much work will this take to get pushed through?" rather than whether it's a good idea.

In 1999, it was all about eyeballs, clicks and e-commerce. In 2010 it was all about cloud and mobile. Now it's all about tablets and eyeballs again with the entertainment angle. I know interest rates are low and stocks are an attractive investment now, but some of the stuff pumping up this current bubble is even less well thought out than pets.com and the like back in '99 and 2000. You would think some people would learn from the last 20 years.

I see how Netflix et al can be a very useful service for entertainment junkies. With two young kids and a very demanding job, I don't get much time to watch movies and TV anymore unless you count Disney stuff. What I don't see is every single company trying to go out and do what Netflix did with their original content creation. It's kind of like Morgan Stanley going into the chocolate business to compete with Hershey simply because their investors told them it was a good idea.

Oh well, I'll just sit back and watch this bubble pop too, and hopefully I'll still be employed in my boring old-school IT job. :-) Oh, look over there, it's a shiny cloud!!!

This is one of the first rules of administering servers -- unless it's an absolute necessity, let someone else find these firmware bugs.

This is especially true now that firmware controls so much in modern hardware. I've had business PCs that have gone through more than 10 EFI revisions in their 18 month lifecycle, and all the release notes show that they fix surprisingly low level things.

The unfortunate trend is that these firmware bugs are more and more prevalent. It seems like manufacturers are skimping on QA and testing. I'm not surprised that HP is affected -- their maintenance applications and documentation look like it's now written by an offshore team. So, I wouldn't be surprised if the EEs and SEs sitting in Houston have to write specs and have their offshore counterparts hack up the firmware changes. Worse, since they're getting the NICs from Broadcom, it's engineers --> offshore team --> Broadcom --> Broadcom's offshore team, making it even more likely that confusion will be introduced.

Is it possible that we're just near the top of the Big Data bubble and that educational institutions haven't been able to bring specialized programs online fast enough?

It's starting to feel a little bit like 1999 again, just with different buzzwords:
- Social
- Big Data / Hadoop
- Cloud
- Internet of Things

In 1999, it was all just Web 1.0 and eyeballs. How far we've come :)

If you look at the percentages, contractors are much higher than FTEs. They also have much higher costs and less stable working conditions, which the higher rate compensates for. Given the...uneven...quality of contractors I've seen who are nevertheless well compensated, I've often considered jumping into that lifestyle. After all, if idiot hustlers can bill $150+ an hour on a project and tank it, imagine what someone who knows what they're doing can do! Having a family really does make you stop and think about that though.

Advantages to contracting:
- Never the same job twice
- Absolutely every cent you spend on anything is a deductible business expense, so you pay much less in taxes
- Flexibility

Disadvantages:
- Constantly moving, never getting a chance to see something all the way through
- You're a one man/one woman sales force
- Future work never guaranteed

I kinda wonder if some men in this profession, growing up with almost no women around in school and later in work, develop poor attitudes about women largely because there just aren't any around.

I think that's part of it, though I'd be hesitant to paint everyone with the stereotypical "mom's basement" brush. I've met some people like this, and they really live up to the stereotype, but this is becoming less and less of a reality these days. Feel free to provide counterexamples. :-)

Every time someone says we should encourage a more diverse workforce, 200x more people say there's no need. I think women are partially self-selecting not to be involved with this culture. Even if it were just perception, I'd hate to think that my potential colleagues' only experience with women is through various forms of adult entertainment. Couple that with insane hours at most workplaces and you don't exactly have an inviting atmosphere. We shouldn't mandate diversity, but I do think the entire profession could stand to grow up a little. I work in a niche professional services firm doing various consultingy things, and we have a reasonably diverse workforce. But, we also have a pretty good work/life balance and everyone behaves themselves for the most part. So, I think there is at least a correlation.

The other thing to consider is that the nerd factor is only part of the equation. Startups and some established SV firms have the...I hate this word, but I'll use it...brogrammer culture. Software development is increasingly more about gluing various libraries that someone else wrote together, and that's doubly true for web apps. So in situations like this, you're not getting the hardcore nerds -- you're getting the people who might have gravitated towards sales and PR jobs doing development.

Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe one of the reason tech workers get a bad rap is because of little kids like this? When people are put in charge of an environment like this, and they don't have the self-control to handle themselves, no one will grow up and every non-techie will point out the out of control nerd farm.

One of the things that does bother me about our chosen profession is the...lack of professionalism. I'm not saying everyone has to live in a PC world with no expression of opinion, etc. But, you would think that by one's 20s (and beyond in some cases!) one would have enough self-control to realize what sexual harassment is. I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it. I'm a guy, and I probably wouldn't want to work somewhere like GitHub, or be a Linux kernel developer, etc. In my opinion, it's not unreasonable to say that an office shouldn't be run like a strip club. I see a lot of posts accusing people of being overly PC and how they should be allowed to harass whoever they want without restrictions. I'm betting that most people are referring to the "sexual harassment training" that HR in large organizations has to give. It's silly, yes. But you know why we have it? Because some people are morons when it comes to personal behaviour.

I would be all for the IEEE, ACM or some other organization lobbying for all software and systems engineers to be lumped into the main body of the engineering profession. People could be licensed and responsible for their work, there would at least be a code of ethics on paper, etc. And, training would be formalized so that people would at least have a grounding in the fundamentals. PEs have to at least pass an exam that demonstrates they were paying attention in their college classes.

As a parent who got a late start due to some biological issues, all I can say is "Good luck." Even with frozen eggs, it's very hard getting and staying pregnant. My wife and I are only in our late 30s, and it took a huge amount of medical intervention to get our two kiddies here.

Plus, the other thing to consider is that having kids is definitely a young man's game. I'm doing all right, but having a 3 year old and 1 year old is extremely tiring, as I'm sure it is to a 25 year old, but that just goes up as you get older and have more responsibility at work, etc. Free time doesn't exist anymore, and I'm not going to get that back for a very long time if I keep doing this right.

I guess I kind of understand why people wait. If my wife and I had kids when we were 24/25, we would probably be broke now and in perpetual debt. Having kids later allows you to save a little bit, build up a cushion and actually be able to provide them a decent life without taking out 4 mortgages and 20 credit cards. The problem is that waiting too long to find a mate (i.e. being unattached into your late 30s) puts you in a disadvantaged pool of single people. Lots of single women I talk to who haven't found anyone yet say the quality really drops off -- and they cite immaturity of the man as the reason. Past the mid 30s, you either get the permanent single guys hopping from one club to another on the weekend or the unmarryable.

I've had different experiences. I worked at 2 places that threatened to relocate to the South, one to Atlanta, and one to Orlando. The first one was just a corporate fiat, as in "those NY guys are too expensive, close the office and move it all down here." The second was an active IDA poach by Florida. Both wound up not working...the first was because, as you said, the company would lose too many of their knowledge workers and they weren't confident they could find new ones. When they started bleeding people, they realized they might want to rethink it. The second was basically just called off because the company got a sweetheart deal from New York.

My experience has been that companies will try to move their less skilled work or work that is considered non-core (like IT) to cheaper locations first. If the target location gives them a good enough deal, they'll just move the whole company. This is probably just short-sighted MBA stuff...executives are largely shielded from whatever environment the lower infrastructure investment produces. Their kids will go to private schools, they'll live in the best areas, etc. so they don't see any of the problems and they also see a quick win. Even if you get to keep your salary and relocate, you'll either be up for a layoff right away or never have your salary increased by much again, until your compensation matches the local market. So, you have to take that into consideration; either you love the area you're moving to and make a decision to stay, or you'll have to pull up stakes again and move back.

When even the real estate agents running a relocation tour mention that your kids will need to go to private school to get an equivalent education to where you're coming from, you know you're going to be in for an interesting experience.

Typing this on a Unicomp model based on the original design. Awesome keyboard, but it lacks the heavy steel backplate of the original.

Please buy a keyboard from this company so they keep making them. :-) http://www.pckeyboard.com/

Generally, any computer equipment before the mid 90s was made quite well, simply because it was so expensive at the time. It also tended to be heavily over-engineered. Some Compaq ProLiants from that era are 100 pounds because they're just solid metal all the way through.

I'm a Rust Belt kid, so seeing northern cities on something of a comeback trajectory is a good thing to me. The problem is image -- you have to find techies who are willing to put up with a very messed up local economy and deal with winter. I'm from Buffalo, and winters there are very long and cold. The obvious benefit is that the cost of living is much lower than California or similar. I couldn't believe last time I was in CA to visit a friend that they had just paid almost a million dollars for a 3-bedroom house with no property. I don't care how good the weather is, that's absolutely nuts, and I live in the NYC metro area, so I know about high real estate prices.

I think it's all cyclical. Right now where I am, everyone is moving to North Carolina (Why??) People cite a much lower cost of living. That's true -- you can sell your Long Island house and buy (literally) a mansion on several acres in NC. The only problem is that Charlotte, RTP, etc. are still cities and real estate that's close to jobs is going to be more. Your mansion is going to be 25 miles' drive from anywhere. Atlanta has a similar issue -- people deal with multi-hour commutes so they can live in a massive house inside a gated community in the middle of nowhere. Side note - a friend of mine who moved there for a job refers to Cary, NC as an acronym -- Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.

Personally, I love winter and would have no desire to move somewhere like Florida, Texas, or Arizona. Right now, those are the cheapest places business-wise, so jobs move there. But the northern states can play the game too. New York just gave some new businesses a 10 year tax holiday if they locate in certain parts of the state. All the state economic development agencies engage in this kind of poaching. The only problem is that the South is better at it because they don't fund schools and local governments to the same extent. If Michigan and Detroit are serious about this, and can afford it, then the businesses will move back. Executives don't care because they would either stay put or be happy just about anywhere. To them, it's not all that hard to pick up and move.

Low real estate prices, compact metro areas that mean short commute times, etc. are advantages that these states and cities can use. We'll see if it pans out.

I work for a European company in the US. Our work rules are very different because we're a multinational and HR is handled on a regional basis. Every single one of my colleagues complains about the French 35 hour week and their unwillingness to put in crazy hours like Americans do. I happen to agree with the French on this one, and this comes from a lot of experience working in several different work environments.

US workers love to point to the "lazy socialist French" and make fun of their long vacations and very relaxed work style. And at the same time, they don't realize that they live longer, have better family lives, and are generally better adjusted than most stressed out Americans. Unemployment is higher than it is here, but their society isn't structured around crushing anyone who doesn't have a job. As an example, look at how much people complained about continuing the meager unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed people in the US. People were complaining about giving someone who has no hope of getting another job ever a couple hundred dollars a week to survive on. Long term unemployed this time around aren't lazy -- this time, all the old school manufacturing jobs are being thrown out of the economy, leaving people with average or below average intelligence with no hope of anything beyond fast food employment. But that's another worry for another time.

Back to work hours and work/life balance -- I am incredibly lucky in that I have a job in IT with lots of flexibility. Lots of my peers don't. Employers are constantly trying to squeeze every last minute of work out of their existing resources rather than adding more. Mine is too, but less so...I've been trying to get us another head for quite some time now and it's very hard. I have no problem with having a healthy work ethic, and people do need to be motivated. I do have a problem when I see employers taking advantage of people who don't realize they're being taken advantage of. Especially in IT, I have witnessed a lot of "hero culture" employers who demand that employees be available 24/7 even when it's not really necessary. Millennials are especially susceptible to this because they're used to being tethered to social media all day long. I think this is one of the reasons companies prefer younger workers -- fewer non-work demands on their time and a willingness to work crazy hours simply because they haven't figured out that their employer won't extend them the same loyalty down the road. In my opinion, your average employee is deluding him or herself into thinking that their job is super-important, that everyone else is lazy, and that their employer values them immensely. Evidence shows that this is no longer the case. It may have been in the 50s/60s "job for life" era, but unfortunately that's gone for the most part.

I'm also a new parent, and if you don't have experience, it's very hard to explain the drain on your free time that this places on you if you're doing it right and paying attention to your family. I see stressed out parents working for employers who don't give a damn responding to work emails at 2 in the morning simply because their employer expects that of them. I'll _glance_ at my messages once or twice in the evening, but I don't feel pressure to jump in and fix something right away -- unless something's literally on fire, it can wait. My opinion is this -- if something is really critical enough to require 24/7 coverage, then staff it that way. If you aren't willing to do that, then it's not critical. If the US were to adopt a "no after hours contact" rule or 35-hour week, it would reduce unemployment simply because companies would have to hire more resources. Either that, or a whole lot of "priority 1 mission critical" stuff would suddenly become less so.

If you're after a good solid education, state schools do offer the best ROI for undergrad studies. I went to one, and was able to (barely) pay for it myself with a small amount of student loans, summer work and a little savings. Undergraduate education, from a content perspective, is very similar everywhere. I have a chemistry degree, and almost all undergrad chemistry programs are the same -- 2 survey courses, 2 organic chem, 2 physical chem, 2 analytical chem, 4 or 5 different lab courses, 4 or 5 electives (which vary based on what the schools' professors are concentrating on.)

The main differentiating factors I've noticed with private schools are the networking opportunities in and out of school, and the "cushy" factor. Even in a high tax state like New York, the state universities are pretty Spartan as far as accommodations go. Lately, states have been spending lavish sums trying to catch up in terms of sports facilities, etc. but they're still not a Harvard or Yale. Students going the state university route need to understand that they're going to get what they pay for, and likely be ahead of their private university peers in terms of raw dollars in debt when they get out. They need to be self-motivated and mature enough to handle their own affairs -- outside of class, everything at a state university is like dealing with a state agency. You're one student of thousands, and no one but you is going to care if you fail out. As far as opportunities go, private schools do give you a leg up. There are certain jobs you can't even hope to interview for such as white-shoe consulting firms or investment banking, who almost exclusively recruit from Ivy League schools. In my experience, this only applies to your first job or two, however. I've interviewed both public and private college grads, and there's an equal distribution of qualified people in each camp.

Since tuition is going way up at both the public and private levels, students who don't already have the money saved really do need to do a cost-benefit analysis. I probably would have had a better experience at somewhere like MIT or Stanford, just because I would have been studying with more smart people. But, I didn't have the money for $100K+ tuition. Students need to stop and think whether the caché of a big name school offsets the huge expense. They need to think about things like:

• - Do I want to go to medical or law school after undergrad?
• - Do I ever want to work in investment banking?
• - Will I be disappointed if I don't get to work at BCG, Bain, or Booz & Company?
• - Do I want the opportunity to hang out with the children of corporate executives and make those "school ties" connections that public university students can't get?

If the answer to any of these is "yes" and the student has a pot of money, they should go to private school. Otherwise, they should save their money. If a student is willing to hustle a little to get their first job, their accomplishments at that job and the connections they make will carry them through the rest of their careers. They probably won't reach stratospheric heights of corporate power, but talented students graduating with in-demand degrees can still do well.