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Comment by corpMaverick | Hacker News Reader

Just a word of caution.

I see people in FB advocating against college and academic knowledge in general. (E.g. Einstein flunk math(not true), Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish College, etc.)

Sure, If you are really, really smart like Gates, Zuckerberg, or Micheal Dell and you have a killer idea. Don't waste your time in college. But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice.

Also if high school was too hard for you, and you don't like school any way, don't waste your time in college and learn a trade.

This woman seems very mature and motivated. She is growing without going to college. So it may be the right choice for her. But it will not be the right choice for most people.

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> Sure, If you are really, really smart and you have a killer idea.

And you're very lucky. Selection bias. Don't forget that for each billionaire like Bill Gates or Zuckerberg there are thousands of people who worked just as hard and/or had even better ideas, and who just didn't happen to get rewarded.

Gates and Zuckerberg were born into wealthy families. So definitely do that if you can.

This. Thank you very much for pointing that out!

We don't know which percentage of said individuals' success was due to sheer luck and which due to outright competence. For all we know, the former may very well be beyond 99%.

That's a bit black and white. I think in reality, if you have this kind of intelligence and will power, you will succeed anyway, eventually. If your luck is worse, perhaps relatively smaller number of people will hear about you, but it does not mean you'll be much worse off.

>But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice.

I just don't think this is true anymore, given the financial burden of modern academic education and the fact that they teach so little useful skills

programming is increasingly a trade, and can definitely be self taught better than any college will teach it.

the rest of the education may have other value but IMO not worth the time + money + opportunity cost

>given the financial burden of modern academic education

In many countries they have figured out that equal opportunities in access to higher education are a crucial thing to have. That's why my M.Sc. cost me grand total of 5000 EUR over 5 years.

>and the fact that they teach so little useful skills

I wonder why you feel this way. Can you elaborate on that? Do you think university is obsolete?

I'd be happy to elaborate.

Only speaking from my experience in the US but many CS or IS graduates do not have the real world knowledge to excel in a job squarely in their field. They learn 90% of what they actually need on the job.

My uni's CS degree required a ton of math that is irrelevant to 90+ % of development jobs, lots of language and liberal arts classes that are also useless in the field, etc, etc...

at least here, uni is a total money grab. very expensive, not a whole lot of practical knowledge imparted.

I'm not OP, but in my experience, university nowadays is less about learning how to think and more about memorizing for tests. The bar for passing tests is low too, and it selects more for persistence in study than competence in study. They don't even teach to be competitive anymore, because they don't want to hurt feelings.

That's not my experience in the slightest. I imagine your experience will vary a lot depending on location and area of study. I would be wary of making blanket statements from your own (limited) experiences, though.

I didn't make a blanket statement, that's why I said "In my experience." Even if just 10% of universities are like that nowadays, that would dilute the value of a degree pretty considerably.

That would be lazy teachers. I enrolled university 11 years ago or so, and I almost exclusively had teachers that would stop me dead in the track during exam with "I'm convinced that you know all of this stuff very well. Let's talk about this <something related to the topic at hand>".

The value of a college education isn't purely economic, but the salaries of graduates are still, in aggregate, higher than those of non-graduates.

I'd argue that the exonomic value is in the opposite direction.

is the salary of a graduate higher than those of someone without a degree who has been in their career 4-5 years already? plus the huge cost of uni weighed against the 4-5 years worth of salary accrued during that time?

i think this is trending towards that gap being smaller as a generation disillusioned with the value of college moves into upper management

speaking from my experience only, and with regards to the US only as I'm not familiar with the situation in other countries

Outside the US a college/university degree can be worthwhile, in Germany my yearly costs for Uni are about 400$, of which 50% are spent in the Uni's Mensa for Food.

I think in general that if your country's government properly supports education you should go for a College/University/comparable path. Otherwise go for autodidact.

> programming is increasingly a trade, and can definitely be self taught better than any college will teach it.

The "self-taught vs. university taught" distinction is disingenuous. Until we learn to program human brains, everyone is self-taught.

Good instruction and a high-quality peer group definitely increases the rate and quality of learning.

Some jobs are accessible to some people with a bit of self-guided learning (been there done that). But that's not a good model for everyone. And more importantly, not all programming jobs are accessible via this route. Lots of people can teach themselves web programming. Considerably fewer people can learn to build a safe self-driving car or sophisticated numerical analysis software.

So here's my assertion: if you can learn to become a web developer without the help of a college education, then you can learn to build much cooler stuff with the help of a college education.

Whether that matters to you, both in terms of fulfillment and in terms of (possibly low) salary differential, is entirely up to yo.

+1!!

Also, No one mentions the importance of making it to Harvard and having those networks!

IMO, in the US, the value of college education is purely to build a network of people and tap into that resource when growing a product, or own career.

Not sure how colleges are in Stockholm, but I’d assume colleges everywhere end up giving a network to its alums, however good or bad the network may be.

I'd like to add to this another word of advice. I'm only a hobby/shareware programmer with no experience in the software industry and it also depends on the country, but generally speaking in many countries and many professions not having an official degree can mean less long-term career chances and a risk of earning less money than less competent colleagues with fancy degrees for the rest of your life.

My general advice is to get a good degree for your dream job and to work on a portfolio that illustrates that you're also practically good at it at the same time. Don't fall prey to the false dichotomy trap.

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