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Comment by daegloe | Hacker News Reader

I was recruited to join Microsoft a while back. At the end of the 8hr day of interviews, the VP formally offered me the job. However, he made a point of mentioning his concern that I dropped out of college, twice. Being a cocky young buck at the time, I in turn pointed out that the founder and (then) Chairman of his company, Bill Gates, was a dropout. He explained to me that there were exceptions to every rule, which was why he was extending the opportunity, but in his experience, college was akin to bootcamp. If I couldn't get through 4 years of doing what I was told, how could he be sure I would do what I was told at Microsoft? I drove back to the hotel, phoned the internal recruiter and declined the offer.

He was on to something, of course. But I'd already known that I march to the beat of my own drum.

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I had a coworker once who was a college drop-out and had exactly all of the flaws that the VP warned about in your story. He was highly intelligent, and could have made a great software engineer, but his focus and work ethic were terrible, and his work suffered for it terribly. He was exactly the kind of person for whom everything was easy their whole life, then they finally reached a level where blind intelligence alone was not sufficient, and has no persevering skills to fall back on.

I hit that same crisis my sophomore-junior years of college, but powered through it and finally learned the skill of hard work (which most other students had already mastered by high school).

I've had the same anecdotal experience with a coworker. Brilliant engineer and amazing mind for engineering -- but not reliable in the slightest with a terrible work ethic.

Can I ask how you got over it?

I am going through the same thing, except I was in a hard high school program but ended up in a university with an easy Comp Sci program. I am a senior, and the graduate class I am taking this semester is the first time I have been mentally challenged by the Comp Sci department. Because of this, I tend to "give up" easily in other things that I am interested in but are harder (mathematics), or I am not motivated to build apps for fun and portfolio, even though the ideas and the languages come easy to me.

Set a schedule and force yourself to spend, say, forty hours a week worrkimg on schoolwork. And be honest with yourself and don't allow cheating. Once I forced myself to spend a lot of time studying, the easiest thing to do was to simply spend lots of time reading the textbooks, getting assignments perfect before turning them in, and handling all of the optional/extra credit portions of the programming assignments.

The biggest difference that I've noticed between myself (a college dropout) and my degreed coworkers is that they tend to just accept mindless repetitive tasks that are a waste of their time. (Ones that are like a lot of academic busywork based on rote-learning). I can't stand those types of tasks and naturally try to automate or remove them.

Some of my best successes have come from that, and from seeking out other areas in the company where people were doing that. HR was laboriously manually retyping and reformatting job listings although they were using a system with an RSS feed that could pull them in automatically. A half hour (or less) of coding permanently eliminated one of their daily drudge tasks so that they could focus on other things. No one asked me to do it because no one ever even thought of it, but they loved it.

Sometimes it's not worth automating or simplifying something, but it's usually worth considering or trying. Degreed people seem to have a 'this is the way I was taught' or 'this is the way it's always been done' mentality. That's not the way to innovation and big victories.

Degreed coworkers are great for quality control though - meticulous code reviews. And they seem to be usually better at organizing/planning (although not always as good at dealing with unplanned events).

Best is a mix of people that work well together despite their differences.

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