I hope young people reading that article realize it's talking about someone winning the lottery. There's statistically zero chance that will happen to you, so you'd better work on your exams than code through the night and fail them.
The second time around he gambled a bit, but he also put in the work to give his app the right amount of polish, struck a partnership with a marketing company, found a way to haggle with Parse, etc.
Sure, I won't dismiss luck as a factor, luck is always a factor when it comes to games, about a third of it probably, but the chance of someone just getting lucky from their game is, well, statistically zero (and probably the most offensive thing someone could ever tell you).
Statistically speaking, the chance of creating a successful game is slim, the chance of creating a successful startup (or even a small company) is slim, the chance of getting promoted to a really high level within the company is slim, the odds of a lot of nice thoughts happening within our lives are slim. The thing is that these odds are just averages, it's definitely within the realm of possibility to beat the averages. Having a rich uncle helps, but not nearly as much as having a better strategy than average, developing better partnerships than average, putting in more work than average, and being more determined than average.
And I will agree that you really shouldn't choose exams over app, but I can kinda relate with the kid, when your family loses their home and is struggling to make ends meet with their downsized apartment, thinking about acing your exams just isn't something you think about. Survival is on your mind and sometimes you come up with some pretty crazy ideas to make that happen.
There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process.
That's also a part of learning, and a part of the advantage of having a teacher. Sometimes, you need to do things you don't like in the short term, that will prove to be an excellent thing in the long term.
Now i'm not saying someone shouldn't code in their spare time. Just don't trash your exams for it. Keep a balance. Maybe in a few years you'll realize you'll want to become a doctor and save lives rather than create video games. Keep the doors open.
This is an important point. Let's face it, kids are socially stupid and inexperienced. They don't know what they want, what they need, what's good for them or even what's out there. Their worlds are small. 15 year old me would eat pizza every meal if it were my choice.
Allowing for the freedom of exploration is important, but so is a little bit of steering.
Well I should agree with both of you.
Many success stories must be taken with a grain of salt. Some of them are truly like winning a lottery. Also making idols out of college/school dropouts is not very healthy for society over all.
I agree that today you can make descent money by making web/mobile applications, but do not think that you will be a millionaire or be hired by google/facebook/apple/etc within a year.
But if you are passionate about something you should (or even must) pursue it. IMHO marginal cases should not be idolised. I have seen too many people who believe that every one can code, though ignoring that software development requires great knowledge and education (formal or informal).
There's a lot of thinking that math is a fundamental part of software development. That was true when the problems were coming up with abstractions that required specific solutions. That hasn't been the focus of development, for decades. Welcome to the world of data processing and presentation (the vast majority of time and effort is in UI).
I've found it much more useful than my calculus classes, personally (although calculus is also useful to know for most of these industries).
Yes, those are specific industries, but that's quite a few specific industries. There's probably others that could benefit from it as well.
graphics, machine learning, cryptography, data compression, optimization, physics, simulations, genetics, traffic flow analysis, economics, audio processing, control systems, vision...
My school does not require any math for the CS program, aside from very basic discrete math (very very basic). While I wish we did more math, the people that graduate get jobs and seem to do just fine without the math background.
I mean, they're not working at Google, Facebook, or the NSA (though a lot go work for the CIA for some reason), but it doesn't seem like it sucks for them.
A (long) while ago, one of my coworkers spent months putting together an enormous framework for processing some data. It was really well done - simple API, good error messages, verification at various steps, and reliable results. It was a little slow though. It was pushing 1 hour to complete a cycle, which was bumping up against other processes. A senior guy had a look at it, noticed that we could encode the data as a vector and apply some linear transformations to it, then decode afterwards. Thanks to lucky cache hits and BLAS, it took about 25 seconds to run.
Personally, I'm going to spend some time after graduation teaching myself math. I think it can be incredibly helpful, even if it's just to improve my thinking.
[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...
The problem is everybody thinks they have the "passion" (and the "good idea").
(where by "everybody" I mean, a hell of a lot of people who should be studying instead, not literally everybody).
There are plenty of people "chasing their dreams" but a lot (most?) of them will have to settle for less because of the way the world works.
I am reminded of the following story I experienced in my first year chemistry class. The class was being taught by the head of undergraduate studies for science and he asked us (a room of 500 students) how many people wanted to become chemists and maybe 20 or so people put up their hand. How many people want to become physicists? Maybe 30 or so put up their hand. How many people want to become doctors? A good 400 people put up their hand. He then said "only 20 of you will make it to med school, I hope you have a back-up plan."
The problem is that we only hear about the success stories not the vast amount of people who fail. That isn't to say don't follow your dreams, but be realistic about them and have other options available when things don't go your way.
And you always can do both. I know a lot of people that goes to University and develop software in their spare time.
Chasing your dreams is great. Doing so at the expense of schooling, especially when it's possible to do both, is a gamble at best.
Is this sarcasm? I suppose if you fail and have to retake the class, then you can "retake" the exam, but that closes a lot of doors when trying to get in to a good college. And most likely if you're "not dumb", you'll end up with a C on the exam and pass the class with a low grade, rather than outright failing it. In which case you would not be able to retake the exam.
If I'd read this "pre-teen" (when the article said he started) I'm pretty sure I would have been like, "that's what I'm going to do".
I remember a friend and I had grandiose plans for a Harry Potter themed MMO. We never got past the 'loading' screen because, y'know, we were ~12 and having a loading screen seemed like a prior job to having anything to load..