Fvck school (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Fvck school (2012)

byfat.xxx

28 pointsafshinmeh46 comments

It comes down to this: if you're wondering whether going to/staying in college is a good idea, you need to first examine the quality of your alternatives. Are you an 18 year old programmer with solid skills and a job offer in hand? College might not be worth the time or money, fair enough. Are you an 18 year old with no transferrable skills and a weak network? Do yourself a favor and go to college.

Bill Gates had a good alternative, so he dropped out and pursued it. Mark Zuckerberg had a good alternative, so he dropped out and pursued it. My friend from high school who dropped out his sophomore year and now works part-time at Best Buy did not have a good alternative, and now he's kicking himself.

People who say "college is good" or "college is bad" as blanket statements are oversimplifying the issue. Yes, college is still a decent way to get a good job and it can be intellectually enriching, but it takes years out of your life to finish and is (at least in the US) insanely expensive. Yes, college is insanely expensive and it takes years to finish, but it may end up being a good investment, and you may be personally better off for it in the long run. Individuals need to decide, based on their current position, which would be the wiser choice.

This is a well balanced and fair summary. Of course if you want to go to college for the wrong reason you won't be happy, and of course if you drop out and get a job for the wrong reason, you still won't be happy. It's the [expectation vs. endeavor] that needs to be considered.

Do your time, get your degree it will open doors for you. It might not be the best system, but it's the one most employers recognise. I fear arguments like the one in this post could sabotage young careers needlessly. A friend of mine decided he'd learn more about the real world getting a job than getting a degree, he now works a min wage retail job in his mid 30s.

This. This. This. So many people also lack fundamental skills that you learn formally, with structure, in a formal education system. I would also argue that the learning process in school helps you develop your process for learning later on, which you need to be good at to survive.

>I would also argue that the learning process in school helps you develop your process for learning later on, which you need to be good at to survive.

I couldn't disagree more with this. The way school taught me to learn was one of the most egregious things I've ever had to unlearn. You are taught to remember facts instead of exploring concepts.

"If you really can't see the value in a scientific degree, I think you either didn't work hard enough, pay attention, or go to the right institution." from another comment would apply here. I am learning so much better than I ever could from hacking together solutions from tutorials, reference docs, and examples. At least for me, this is how I learn.

This was the opposite of my experience. Every new class I took offered that professor's way to learn. Every professor had something new to offer me. Some were 'aiight' but some were tremendous new options I've added to my toolkit for learning new things.

You could argue that or you could argue that to truly do well in uni you need to practice the skill of self-learning.

You can learn to self-learn independently. Many who do have made great contributions to many fields. Have a look at the list of autodidacts from history - within our lifetimes even.

If only time was the only thing lost by going through the system. The cost of college was the biggest reason why I personally did not go to school. The cost of not only having to pay back loans, but also the loss of 4+ years of savings and investments. My brothers have both completed degrees; yet I currently make more, have much more in savings, have none of the debt, and have been living independently for longer.

However, I would certainly agree that not having a degree means you have to work much harder to find opportunities and prove yourself. Degrees certainly open doors more easily, but that doesn't mean you can't lock pick them given enough time.

This all comes down to marketing. If you don't have a degree but can market your skills and have a portfolio to show that you know your stuff then getting a job is not an issue. If you can't market yourself then going through an established system that more or less holds your hand through the process is probably ideal.

Also if you get the travel bug, it's a requirement by many governments if you want to work in another country ever in your life: a degree is pretty-much mandatory for obtaining a "skilled laborer" type visa.

Heck, I even did english teaching in Japan and THAT needed a degree (in ANYTHING)!

The only western country where a degree seems to be an obstacle for getting a work visa as a Software Engineer has been the USA. Unfortunately, I wouldn't really bother getting a visa to anywhere else, so it does kind of come back to bite me at times.

To get a highly skilled visa in the EU you need a formal degree.

Blech. "Do your time" is right.

Just about every recent college grad I talk to complains about how miserable their student loans are making them. Things like, "I would leave this job and do something more interesting if I didn't have student loans."

If education was cheaper and didn't cause that misery, I'd be a much bigger fan of it. But it's not, so now all but the richest and most talented hate it.

The problem with these sorts of discussions is that everyone seems to apply their engineering mindset to everyone else's. You may be smart and successful, but those who aren't will end up with student loans and very little to show for it. All because everyone in every inch of their lives told them to go. As engineers, we need to consider them, too.

I'm also in a country with much cheaper universities and interest free student loans. But I got a degree and it opened a new world for me, I couldn't recommend it more. That said an engineering degree is far more valuable than some of the other degrees out there.

Ah! Fair enough. I'm mostly aiming my aggression towards US schools.

I agree with the comments from fny and xupybd here. I'd also like to say that I think his categorical dismissal of a CS degree is pushing it:

> more over I don’t think these successes owe their brilliance to the institution which awarded them their document.

Yeah, their professional brilliance can be attributed a lot to things other than school--programming knowledge itself is more frequently learned on the job or a programming school, but this isn't the point of a CS degree. But anyone who's been to enough theoretic/scientific classes at a University to study something really interesting, or to meet a truly amazing professor will say that they owe a lot to the institution for adding to their mind new ways to think, see things, and learn things. If you really can't see the value in a scientific degree, I think you either didn't work hard enough, pay attention, or go to the right institution.

It's not all about your job. If all you're concerned about is a job and programming knowledge, by all means, self-teach yourself or go to dev bootcamp. University is about intellectual stimulation (for lack of less pretentious terminology). This is the reason we've been going to universities for hundreds of years now, and maybe they're not perfect, but if you go for the right reason you definitely won't regret it.

For "softer" subjects, I couldn't agree more, but good luck playing with rockets, brains, buildings, and quanta without school. For the "hard" subjects, a student gains a certain expertise and rigor in an academic environment needed before she can create her works of art.

This is so true. Thanks for pointing this out.

There used to be a not-quite joke that the UK's art colleges produced the UK's top pop talent.

It was a not-quite joke because it was true. Art schools were much better at producing creative musicians than the music colleges, because they taught creativity and experimentation, not just mechanical technique.

>a student gains a certain expertise and rigor in an academic environment needed before she can create her works of art.

It's more usual for students to learn a stock set of academic techniques and philosophies, which are really just there as a form of social signalling that qualifies them for tenure or adjunct track professorships making academic art.

Unfortunately academic art values theory, technique, and philosophy over direct expression, so it's rare for academic art to have much of an audience outside academia.

CS has a similar problem. I think it would be incredibly valuable for everyone doing a CS degree to combine with it a non-technical creative minor, preferably working on a collaborative project with someone with an arts background. It would highlight how brittle code is, and how attempting to model an open problem domain with relatively trivial code constructs can miss a lot of important detail and subtlety.

I agree. Just so long as we don't mandate a degree for everyone.

A friend of mine works in non-tech recruiting. Just about every job they post requires a degree. Their understanding of the world now leans towards the idea that getting a degree is more important than life itself.

It's pretty bad when your HR person, a recent psych grad, doesn't know what bipolar is. My friend tells me tons of stories like this all the time..

I dropped out after two years of college and don't regret it even for a second. These days, I'm:

-Doing data analysis with pandas on parking tickets just because it's fun and it helps people.

-Freelancing for HFT firms and doing low level performance tuning.

-Playing the drums.

-Suing Chicago's mayor.

-In the running for an amazing security engineer job.

-In the works to start algorithmic trading.

-Helping setup a giant LAN party as one of four cofounders.

A huge part of me thinks that if I'd continued college, I wouldn't have had a chance to do even a single one of these. My mental model would have just been too hyper focused towards Getting Paid to allow the mental flexibility to say "I can do/learn that!" in most scenarios. I seriously don't consider myself particularly smart/intelligent - most of what I know these days is just learned through hard work and genuine curiosity, which college hugely inhibited.

One of the other comments mentioned that degrees open the door for you. Yes they do, but the places I've seen and worked at where that matters are incidentally the worst I've worked at. Self education goes a long way as long as you teach yourself how to learn before you start learning. Employers are often very impressed by that quality, so it's still definitely possible.

That said, many folk don't like the fact that I didn't to go college. There's often a lot of animosity with mentions of student loans and knowledge depth over width. "Jealousy" comes close, but it's more seething and exclusionary than that.

College is useful if you want to learn things, but often a quicker and more holistic way to learn is to skip college altogether and teach yourself and save your future self from asinine student loans. This goes for folks who're able to get their student loans paid, too. Maybe especially, since you have the money to get an apartment to learn your desired subjects, but also about life. :)

(edit: if this sounds arrogant, please let me know. I'm trying to better myself and humility's a strong one I need to work on.)

I think you're focusing too much on school being a way to "open doors" or get a job. If you go to school for another reason, namely just to be impressed by professors who are insightful and brilliant, to learn cool things, and to expand your ways of thinking and learning... you wouldn't regret it.

You should be impressed by professors from all sorts of colleges from all sorts of fields from all over the world already :). The internet's a beautiful thing. So many free lessons and academic papers to choose from.

Sure, but I see value in having it structured by the institution. And lectures aren't all you do in school, mind you. You work with peers, you go talk to the professors, you even become friends with them. I used to spend entire evenings in a professor's office just talking about things not even connected to the class I was in. Even the TAs were brilliant people to meet. The combination of all of this is indispensable to me, and I wouldn't have done it any other way.

This is actually one of the reasons why I and a lot like me advocate not going to school. There aren't enough non-judging peer groups focused on learning. The ones I've tried looked into tend to avoid the uneducated cranks. Having this sort of network will allow those who can't afford it and large sets of immigrants to have access to information they wouldn't normally have. I come from a largely hispanic area where many of those undocumented recently got the chance to get jobs, but they're still not able to get state assisted education and can't go to higher education.

You'd be surprised how many professors you can talk to. I've had some very, very interesting conversations with professors over email, in person and over the phone. All it took was reaching out. A lot of them don't mind talking so long as you show genuine interest and have enough background to back yourself up.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't work though. The majority of "good" software jobs don't just want anyone. The average person can't do all the things you just listed. The average person can't market his/herself without a degree effectively.

I feel like we all know success stories, but I would say I have worked with a lot more phds than I have people without a degree. Does that mean that everyone needs to get a phd? No. You can be successful with any level of education, but it's unwise to advise any student to go for this without being exceptional.

EDIT: I have worked/am working at 3 companies, a non-profit, Tableau, and Intentional Software. I'm 21. I'm a student. Across the ~100-200 engineers I've met, I've been the least educated.

Just curious, if I may.. how old are you? My generation was told without question that we need to go to school. Parents, family and teachers all repeated the same thing over and over again. Yet, the folk my age I've talked to all say "Holy fuck, my degree is useless."

More of what I'm suggesting is that it's entirely possible to learn depth in a subject without the need for school. I get what you're saying, but with a lot of the dynamics of college education these days, it seems that college is an even greater risk than not going to college.

I know and have worked with an almost equal amount of phds and nongrads. They all say the same thing - "I'm not sending my kid to college. What a waste of their time and money."

Replying to your edit -

It sounds like you're an exception and a smart person, then. No sarcasm there.

The problem with being exceptional is that you tend to think of everybody else as exceptional, so the ones who'll naturally fail don't really have a fallback. One fallback can be self learning, but the crazy culture of "College dropouts only work at Best Buy"[0] prevents them from being able to get back on their feet.

(Of the 1,500 or so engineers I've worked with, I've only known one other person with less education. He dropped out of high school and started worked directly for Wolfram ;).)

[0] It's funny how earlier I was accused of using myself as anecdata earlier, but that same user emphatically agreed with someone who used their friend's dropout failure story as evidence that college dropouts will fail. It's so one sided... Editedit: oh, it was you. Yeah, check it out. It's kinda funny.

I just meant that despite the exceptions like you that are doing awesome, the typical high school educated person makes less than a college educated person.

Hahah sorry, I'm not crazy smart or exceptional! I work really hard, and that's it. I mean to say that for most people, they aren't like you. They can't succeed like you. I got incensed over the article and wanted to tear it down because I'm so disenfranchised with European "dream education" and see anything against conventional us education similar. Anyway, I think you made the right choice presented with what I have. You seem to have had the skills to make it without a degree, and that's amazing. I'm not sure I would have made it without having UW get me noticed by companies and tell me what I need to know. I feel like most students are more like me. Anyway, I don't want to tear you down in a fit of passion. You seem like a cool, successful, guy, and best luck with your court case and even more with drumming (I'm in marching band at my uni hahah).

One decision opens one door while closing another door. No human being is able to say which decision is better because they only lived one branch of their decision tree. What you've listed out is all nice, but you are forgetting same could be said if you chose to NOT drop out. You probably would have succeeded even if you didn't drop out--in different ways. On the other hand, those who fail do fail regardless of what decision they make. I would say the reason you're living a life you're satisfied with is not because of the decisions you made but because of how well you dealt with consequences of your decisions.

I'm not necessarily saying that school is useless and that my choice was the best one. I'm saying that there are alternatives that work but are never talked about. I'm saying that "I didn't go to college", shouldn't be a taboo as it so often is.

Wider selection and a fallback that doesn't cause major life consequences is all I'm asking for for others. 18 year olds are smart enough not to make the good decisions, but they often don't have the wisdom to make the right decisions.

"Here English should be understood as a stand-in for any field which could be held in dialectical opposition to Computer Science: anthropology, criminal forensics, art history… Pursuing knowledge in this way, much like learning a new language, not only introduces you to, but installs you within, new diverse cycles of thought and promotes a creativity which I think is essential to excelling, dominating, or “winning” at Software Development."

I think I agree with him. In my university, most of the staff was kind of dilettants - I always reasoned that it's because a good teacher should master his subject and once you master it, you probably won't want to settle for 1/5th of the regular wage...

diametrical (FTFY) #GN

I really liked learning in school. Many of my intellectual interests today would not be so if I didn't learn, for example, a bunch of stuff about linguistics. I don't know if a college education is worth its cost these days, but I think there is a lot of value in it.

There will always be time to work, and to be good at your job. School can be more than that. Pretty much everyone shits on college these days, and I certainly understand why, but this shouldn't be looked at as anything other than conventional wisdom at this point. It's not a cutting-edge take or anything of the sort.

If you drop out you'll probably learn more but life will get harder.

School is a wonderful soap bubble and the trouble is not so much "drop out or don't" as much as it is "do we have a place for aspies in our English programs?"

Computer Science departments are not a safe compromise. The conflict @fat is trying to articulate is between those with a place in the school system and those without.

As a (former) non-U.S. CS student (although I still haven't officially dropped out) from a European country (but not a part of the EU), college was a huge waste of time in my case.

There were a couple of hints all over my two years in college, but the biggest one was when I managed to convince my professor that our college FTP server is not secure by showing her a Wireshark packet in which I have submitted the password to the FTP server and convincing her that the server replied to my connection with a password (which, of course, doesn't make any sense what so ever).

Plus I was not able to convince the college staff that a self-signed certificate in our online learning platform is not a good solution. And I found one security exploit in the custom CMS they were using (privilege escalation just by tweaking the URL).

When I got to the point where I had a server administration course taught with the Windows server explicitly, I've decided to freeze my education.

I got into a good tech internship and now I finally have the chance of actually learning something useful (Python / Linux administration / a bit of front end programming / whatever is necessary since it's not a tech organization, but a journalistic organization with a highly skilled tech team) by actually doing some interesting things.

College is a huge waste of time. But then again so are a lot of jobs.

If you don't care about college because of all the bullshit and dumb people, just wait until you enter the workforce!

Probably best to go ahead and go for most ambitious people. Besides, those years are a lot of fun if you do them right. It's not a great system and certainly not the best way to learn, but for the foreseeable future it is the most sure path toward increased financial success. But I do understand your frustration... I barely got out myself because of similar experiences (in a different field but same type of nonsense).

> the biggest one was when I managed to convince my professor that our college FTP server is not secure by showing her a Wireshark packet in which I have submitted the password to the FTP server and convincing her that the server replied to my connection with a password (which, of course, doesn't make any sense what so ever).

This stuff has no place in university whatsoever so I am not sure what you were thinking or trying to prove.

Before I went to university I did a lot of UI and web design with very light programming here and there.

In school I studied computer science because I knew I liked computers and I didn't know what else to do.

Being around a bunch of intellectually serious people (not in my program so much, more the musicians and literature and biology students), I pushed myself to develop a perspective as a scholar and an intellectual. I ended up studying opera for a year and doing a minor in psychology. Both of those experiences, plus the experience of being pushed hard in some key computer science contexts (particularly programming language theory) were immensely formative for me. I can't imagine doing what I'm doing now (designing platforms for software development) without all of those experiences.

I could've easily skipped school and just gone straight into industry. I was already earning $15/hr doing web design in high school (~1998).

I'm not sure where that would've led. If I have to guess, I would've probably ended up a web dev in Boston and I would be a very wealthy WASPy family man in the suburbs now at 34.

As it is I am an artist and an intellectual in California. I am actually "in the world" in a way I don't think I would've been if I hadn't been pushed through the intellectual ringer for so long. But it turns out the world is a bleak place compared to the relative safety of where I started. I think I've gone much further towards making something of myself but I am much less happy than I would've been. The Tree of Knowledge allegory is much weightier and more frightening to me now that I'm older. As a child knowledge seemed like a silly thing to villify.

It's so hard to say what would've been though.

Frankly, school is going to be such a small drop in the bucket of what your career will look like, that it shouldn't much matter whether you go or not. Your success will be determined by a continued habit of learning forever thereafter. This overemphasis on the importance of choices made in school devalues that.

Yup. I find it strange that this comment is at the very bottom currently.

Anyways, I've been a freelancer right after a somewhat prestigious CS school, and I've never needed to show my degree.

That being said, I did learn some concepts that I doubt I'd have gotten too far into had I not been forced (OS, compilers, AI), which give me the edge when I need to learn more in those subjects in my gigs.

Also, I feel it gave me some confidence in what I do – an ego boost, if you will. Some may not need it, but I always have that degree to fall back on, if need be.

Overall, I don't regret it.

I am a junior at a target CS school in the US. I'm currently studying in Europe at Sweden's KTH, reputed as one of the top engineering schools in Europe/Scand. I loathe all the "EUROPE IS SO MUCH BETTER!111!!!!!" posts everyone makes because I always feel like it's out of touch and hip to say to. The culture here in Sweden is way more relaxed. This is definitely NOT a catchall, but a catch-some, sort of statement, even if I do interact with mostly Masters students from across Europe, probably >50% of my classmates. It's not as rigorous here, and it's not as if the students are still "killin' it!" because I have been in exclusively project classes, and the projects presented have been pretty mediocre. Most students aim to pass. Few students in my MASTERS LEVEL classes (bear in mind it's 4/5 year students unlike in the US) have NEARLY the chops of any kid in my undergrad CSE program, and I've been in 4 groups now with around 30 students and obviously talk to many more. I'm frustrated because everyone hates on this system, but it's allowed me to perform so much better technically than any of my classmates here that I've interacted with. Also, His comment that "you may need to reinvent the wheel sometimes" applies to so few. I am going to be designing REST APIs or similar for years, I bet. I am going to need to know reasonable HCI for years, I bet. So many people don't learn the right idioms. The right design patterns. Every internship I've had has "man, sucks that we taught ourselves this technology instead of learned formally" or "man, this stack was built by non-engineers and is an un-maintainable monolith." I can't take these statements seriously. You can learn programming by yourself. You can be way better than I'll ever be through self teaching, but I feel like this is similar (but to a much less extent) logic to, "Bill Gates dropped out of college!!!11!!!!", and it's just NOT true for MOST people. The comments before me are SO right that it's career jeopardizing.

I find that relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0

That brings up a pretty good point. Are there any schools currently teaching these types of curriculum?

I think that the singer said in some other video that he made some influence - not directly this kind of curriculum, but an improvement towards that.

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