Re:Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
by gaius on Sunday June 07, 2009 @01:06PM
(#646068)
I totally agree, but those are the "nuclear option" if you will. $100,000 in debt, and spending as much again on an MBA is not to be undertaken lightly.
I appreciate my great good fortune to be graduating into the early years of the dotcom boom... But when the NASDAQ imploded I had 3 solid years experience framed on my CV in terms of "I have done X using technologies A, B and C accomplishing result Y". That's what matters a few years out of college and without it it would be very difficult to "catch up" or even to get a foot in the door.
In my case, I graduated and took a job at what I thought was a startup but turned out to be a slow-growing small business. As Marc Andreesen says, "these are great places to go if you don't want your career to go anywhere either." So I quit and founded a startup. It failed, but I learned enough hot skills to prove to my interviewers that I hadn't spent the last year and a half dicking around. Then I got into Google, and once you have Google on your resume, nobody cares that you spent two years working on JSF webapps for a company nobody's ever heard of.