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How do I computer job?
TL DR
Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
Hi, and thanks in advance.
Background
I'm currently a college student, about to graduate with a BA in philosophy, and planning on attending law school next year. I am also unemployed, recently laid off from my backbreaking-but-rewarding-in-a-masochistic-sense landscaping job due to unseasonably slow business. I have been unsuccessfully trying to find a job for nearly a month.
Question
What sort of tech-oriented jobs are easiest to break into? I'm looking for something that wants results as opposed to a lot of degrees or certs. I managed to pull in one gig doing a server swap in a McDonalds after closing for $20/hour, which was great but only a one-time thing.
I was thinking about website design or something along those lines, since I'm always on the damn internet anyway and figure I would be quick to pick it up. What's the new hotness in markup language? XHTML?
Any and all feedback appreciated.
Background
I'm currently a college student, about to graduate with a BA in philosophy, and planning on attending law school next year. I am also unemployed, recently laid off from my backbreaking-but-rewarding-in-a-masochistic-sense landscaping job due to unseasonably slow business. I have been unsuccessfully trying to find a job for nearly a month.
Question
What sort of tech-oriented jobs are easiest to break into? I'm looking for something that wants results as opposed to a lot of degrees or certs. I managed to pull in one gig doing a server swap in a McDonalds after closing for $20/hour, which was great but only a one-time thing.
I was thinking about website design or something along those lines, since I'm always on the damn internet anyway and figure I would be quick to pick it up. What's the new hotness in markup language? XHTML?
Any and all feedback appreciated.
TL DR on
0
Posts
(He hastened to add that he didn't want to be mean, and that he could completely understand why somebody who spent a lot of time on the internet would be attracted to something like web design as a potential income source).
Levity aside, though, he's right. Web design is an incredibly complicated, constantly-evolving field, and there's a country mile of difference between looking at a website and thinking "I can recognize that this particular site is both attractive and functional" and sitting down in front of Notepad and coming up with an entire attractive, functional site from scratch. Web design draws on traditional graphic design, colour theory, programming, database architecture, typography, user/behavioural psychology, business communications... there's a whole lot more to it than meets the eye. It's also a very expensive field to break into: the Adobe Creative Suite will run you a couple thousand bucks, and if you go the ASP.NET route, certification and licensing can get pricey in a hurry. Other expenses will include typefaces (for example, the Arial family of typefaces costs about $1000 US to use commercially - the version you got with Windows isn't licensed for that), books and trade publications, studio-grade monitors, calibration equipment for those monitors...
Now, you're probably thinking "Whoa, what the hell, I was just talking about slapping together a $200 site for a local business or two!" Which is fair enough, but even then, some of those expenses are unavoidable - if you're doing this for money, you need to be working with licensed software and fonts, or else you're setting yourself up for a potential world of trouble - and the skills required are still the same. It is a tough industry, in every way. Even really good designers have to struggle to find the right balance of aesthetics, compatibility, and usability; the odds of amateurs getting everything right are incredibly low. (There are some really god-fucking-awful websites out there, especially ones done on the cheap for local businesses).
If you're absolutely dead set on doing this, by all means, knock yourself out - there are some great tutorials out there, sites like smashingmagazine.com and w3schools.com have a ton of information. But unless you're the Amadeus Mozart of the online world, web design is not something you're going to be able to pick up in a weekend. Or in a month, for that matter. A year might be long enough for you to be comfortable with the basics, but you'll still be a long way away from being able to do anything with it professionally.
Anyway, not to derail, but is the typeface thing really an issue? I thought these personal licenses covered distributing rasterized images or printed documents using the fonts, even commercially, you're just not allowed to distribute the font itself... which you're not doing in any way for most websites.
It's WAY too complicated of an issue for me to get into in any depth, but Kate has requested that I address it, and I pulled my lazy ass all the way over to my computer, SO!
Spoilered to minimize the threadjackage toward the OP.
But here's the thing. Let's say you have a pretty normal batch of default fonts: Arial, Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, so on. None of those fonts are any goddamn good for print use (they're all engineered to look good at 11px to 15px), and they're also horribly, horribly incomplete. My copy of the Helvetica Neue family has eight or nine different weights of the font, extended and condensed versions, and italics. The copy of Arial built into XP comes with two weights, and no narrow or extended options. Some of the MS fonts don't even include a proper italic if I remember right, they're just slanted a bit.
So to tl;dr this a bit, it's legally murky as to whether or not you have a right to use bundled fonts commercially (I'd personally say it's unethical), but it's pretty clear that the free fonts included with your PC are woefully inadequate for serious design work.
Anyway: is there some free or low-cost certification that basically says "knows about computers" so I can find jobs when my resume is nearly devoid of computer-related material, or should I just be putting stuff like "proficient with Windows, MS Office, hardware and software troubleshooting..."?
Nah, not at all, and my intent (by proxy) absolutely wasn't to make you feel bad, I just know first-hand that it's a very demanding, competitive field, and I hate people jump into it thinking they'll pick it up in a few weeks only to feel like they've wasted their time (or worse, decided they're quite good at it).
When I was a young pup, A+ was the way to go if you wanted a low-cost piece o' paper saying "I'm absolutely qualified to work on your computers". I'm not sure if that still holds true, but it's well worth looking into.
Interesting. Thanks for the info!
I checked out the site, and it seems I could ace the test with minimal effort. Now I just have to find $170
Thanks a lot for the feedback, by the way.
Any web design is going to take not only a good understanding of HTML (XHTML is really close to the same) but also a healthy understanding of programming server-side scripting to create dynamic pages.
PHP is the gold standard, ASP a close second, and Ruby on Rails is the framework for professionals.
Learn PHP with... Cake I think its called? After you get a grasp on basic HTML.
Don't fudge your way though with a Dreamweaver point and click method.
Get down and gritty with the actually script of it.
Build webpages straight outa Notepad.
And if you're going to learn PHP, again, start with something that does't give away things. Go with a program like Notepad++ to start with. It'll help you learn the basics of it quicker.
Once you're in a professional setting, start using professional programs.
I'd say you might have some luck trying to get in on an entry level helpdesk sort of deal. Oftentimes it seems like those jobs are willing to give you some on-the-job training on how to troubleshoot things.
Another thing you could do is volunteer somewhere to get a bit of tech experience on your resume. That should make it easier to land a job. For example, you could volunteer at a senior center computer lab.
I'd say CSS is a part of HTML. I know it's not really, but to quote Bash.Org
<nero> HTML without CSS is like a gun without ammunition
<nero> you can beat people to death with the butt of a gun, but bullets are so much more efficient
That about sums it up.
Depending on how you're thinking of going, MCDST might be valuable as well. It's similar to A+ in skill level, but is more complex and demonstrates skills relevant to working with end users in a support environment. (Rather than A+, which demonstrates familiarity with PCs)
(You can actually use the A+ exams to replace one of the MCDST exams)
You seem to like the idea of web development and you may be able to do that freelance. You'll need a decent portfolio for most customers, though, and imo, it's usually more hassle than it's worth. You'll also want to learn how to program to do any sort of truly modern, dynamic website. PHP, as has been mentioned, is pretty much the standard for ameteur web developers. Personally, I'm not a fan of it. I'm a Perl guy through and through and earn my living doing web development in Perl. I do not recommend having Perl as your primary dev language as the demand is low - I know of 4 companies that are local or semi-local to me that use it for their primary dev language, the only one with more than 15 or so people in the US is Sourceforge, Inc. Today, if I were to pick a high level interpreted language I would probably go with Python. For corporate, professional web developer jobs, most of that stuff is done in ASP.net using C# (and some vb.net) or Java. I see very few web dev jobs listed for the interpreted languages, not even PHP.
The most important thing at this stage is to figure out what you'd like to know and bust your ass learning it. Then learn everything you can related to it.
The more I hear about web design, the less feasible it seems. I'm not looking to learn a new trade, just to improve my existing skillset and use it to generate income while I'm in school.
I think I'm going to ask for the money to get my A+ certification for x-mas. This thread has been very helpful.
Basically you may want to cram a little to make sure.
I spent five months submitting resumes before I just went to a staffing agency. They have me a two-week gig for 80 hours, and my boss asked me to take a full time job after the first week. That was a little over a year ago.
Get a temp job, bust your ass, show you're worth something. It's much more effective than dropping off cover letters.
Oh, and if you do drop off a cover letter, make sure you check it for grammar better than you checked this thread title.
Edit: Damnit, poonburger.
You'll likely get most of these through local 3rd party recruiters such as Tek Systems, Apex Systems, Robert-Half, etc.
Something like geeksquad is another option, but honestly, a little bit harder to get, I think.