RE: I’m a high school drop out who ended up spending a decade programming, operating and maintaining industrial robots.
What did they hire you for in the beginning?
Why were they willing to take a chance on you (no college degree )?
How many college grads are working with you now?
How much on average does the job pay in the USA?
Thanks, your answer will be helpful to a lot of folks in this thread.
“Why were they willing to take a chance on you (no college degree )?”
I can answer that one: Skills.
How many people can program C/C++/C#/Java/SQL, etc? Very few. It’s not that hard but so few do it.
To get a first job, create a project for yourself or with some buddies, put it on a resume, the Dice/Monster ‘recruiters’ that do word searches to find candidates find that person and they get interviewed. Interviewers do not ask where a person went to school. They only ask technical questions about programming. Get enough answers right, get hired.
Actually, computer programmming, I mean, ‘Software Engineering’, is one of the few career fields that do it right to a large degree. They don’t care where you went to school, they only ask can you do the job.
I hired in as a temp to do basic assembly linework but had experience in industrial painting. When I was hired full time I went to the paint department and showed an interest in the robots and started learning whatever I could.
When a job came up for back up supervisor I applied and got that job which came with more intensive training in the robotics operations as well as all the other paint room processes (fluid and air pumps and regulators etc). When my boss broke his leg and was off for several weeks it was up to me and they ended up making me a full supervisor.
I never made big bucks (about $40,000 in a good year). There were a handful of degreed techs who made another 20K per year. Aside from that the only degreed people in the shop were engineers and front office people.
In my opinion, trained skills are secondary to common sense and basic logic and unfortunately both are severely lacking in today’s 20 somethings. They walk out of college and know how to do one thing in a perfect environment. Unfortunately, factories are not perfect environments. You have to work with assholes, design flaws, damaged equipment, and any number of other out of the ordinary issues and you have to do it on the fly.
We had a new engineer come into the shop with lots of ideas but no clue about how the real world worked. He finally got mad and quit because we didn’t have 20 minutes to spend painting parts his way. We had 26 seconds.