[Parasite]

I have been working in IT at this company for 13+ years. We are not currently hiring graduates for anything but tech support. As said before, this is a way to get your foot in the door and transfer to a better position. Right now we are hiring people, but only those that have very specific experience (or at least say they do). We went through a phase of hiring .Net people, and now are on the phase of "Portals" or "SAP Portals". It is whatever is the latest and greatest thing whenever you graduate.

We are shipping most of our real work of programming and development off to India. There is not much need for them here. The thing to get into is in the writing of application specs and being clear about what is needed in that application. My Masters in "Software Engineering" points to this but has helped me little in this job from the BS degree I needed to get it in the first place.

When I first started I was making almost 30K, slowly rising, and recently even slower than inflation, to about double that. A computer degree is not really needed here, just a degree. We have had PollySci, Language, and even my own Physics graduates get hired.

Advice I would give would be to yes, get a degree. Shoot for something that is just beginning or looks like it might get hot and head there. medical, biomed, and nano tech look like good bets. They use computers too.