I'm thinking of going back to school either summers or online. I was wanting to do something in computers and I was wanting to get some advice on what to go into. Should I go online? MIS? Programming? What would be a good area? I'm opening a winery as well but is there a computers program for business that is less business and more computers? I'm a fan of puzzels and I enjoyed C++ with a 100. Any constructive advice is welcome. Thanks.
My undergrad was in art, my day job was IT, and I had at least hobby level programming experience, so I figured I'd go back for Computer Science--since so much stuff is graphically-oriented, I thought the art and technical would be a good fit. After a year & a half of chasing stray semicolons and scraping by in programming classes I switched to an MBA program. The degree I took was called "Management of Innovation & Technology" and it was marketing with a focus on tech startups and entrepreneurship. I learned a bunch of kick-ass stuff ranging from leadership to accounting to information systems to how to make an awesome marketing plan. The challenge is, start-ups don't have money to hire MBAs a lot of the time, so unless you were going into business for yourself it was a kind of hard sell. But for your thing a good MBA program might be the way to go.
With spelling like that, hopefully you don't go into anything spelling related. As for programming, I read an article on Yahoo! a couple of weeks ago that said computer programming is a career path that is on the decline in N. America. Reason being: Indians can do it for much much cheaper nowadays. What IS a growing career path, however, is software engineering. I think the difference between the two is one actually creates the software and maps out what each piece of software does and how it is suppose to function. The Paki programmers then implement the plan. Anyways, that's my
Well that's an intriguing viewpoint. Because I could never program for shit, but I could always write a kick-ass algorithm.
Sadly, Scorp is at least marginally correct in his assessment. However, any professional computer geek worth his/her salt should be able to do the software engineering part. Frankly, I do not differentiate between the two because the programming is basically just part of the whole picture with regard to how I learned things. If you're going to go for programming, learn something Object-Oriented. It's the future. Older sequentially-based languages still have their place, but that will fade as time goes by. Something you may want to consider...IT-related jobs are most prevelant in bigger cities. Sure, there are work-from-home opportunities and some jobs in smaller towns, but they're not as numerous and/or easy to find.
I only did CS for a year or two at one college--and 8 years ago at that--but they didn't even teach anything but OOP. C++ & Java with a little C thrown in just for code optimization. I couldn't tell you what was after that first year of courses because when it got to the assignment where you had to reduce the number of operations to do math by monkeying with binary addition and manipulating stack locations I realized it wasn't my cup of tea and changed to an MBA.
Yep, programming is definitely being outsourced. Unless you're the government, and simply pay a bunch of Indian and Pakistani coders to do your work here in the U.S. while they do nothing but smell and hate each other and we have to eventually come up with solutions ourselves, only to have the project taken away from us because we're not supposed to do that kind of work because the government is run by a fucking bunch of good ol' boys and standard issue fucking morons. .... So yeah, golf course management.
OH! OH! So you guys got that school. And you've got the vineyard. And you've got land. Check out McMenamin's Edgefield. It's the old county poor farm and they turned it into a hotel, a pub, a restaurant, gift shop, movie theater, spa, golf course, and vineyard. That said, it isn't like that was the first thing McMenamin's bought. They were up and running, had a pretty solid business model and cash flow before they launched the Edgefield. And they're close to a major metropolitan area.
