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Comment by anon1m0us | Hacker News Reader

My friend dropped out of college. My girlfriend is in college. I was talking about how she has a few years left and he starts shaking his head. "I just don't get it. So long and for what? To get a job?"

When he dropped out of engineering school he went to manage a restaurant. Made good money. Then started to build a house. Quit that too. He almost had occupancy on it and said, "I'm done. I'm out."

That's also what college is about. If you come to me looking for a job and didn't go to college, why? Did you drop out? Why? Do you not think learning is important? Do you not understand sticking it out until you have accomplished the goal?

Do you give up before you are through?

Not only that, but of course, I meet folks all the time who think "you don't need a degree to be a programmer." Sure. You don't need a degree to put Ikea furniture together either. I don't need programmers. I write programs to write programs. I need folks who know how to think... for themselves and learn and go out and find knowledge they need to solve problems and then solve the problems.

Until they are done solving the problem.

Not until they've given up.

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No, I don't give up when the going gets tough. That's not why I dropped out.

I dropped out because it simply was not feasible to go any farther: I could not juggle full-time undergraduate pure math at Berkeley while working multiple low wage jobs in the SF Bay Area plus all the other responsibilities and commitments I had accumulated at 27, along with the stress of being able to afford my next meal, let alone rent.

I failed math thru high school. Barely graduated. Worked in grocery stores thru my 20s. On a whim I bought myself a trig book and self taught to calculus before deciding to go back.

After dropping out I taught myself to code. Night after night I learned SQL, built shit in Python and node and tinkered with Heroku and AWS and Docker while trying to fill gaps in my CS knowledge by reading SICP and the algorithm design manual.

The job hunt process was pretty brutal and lasted about a year and a half. Rejection after rejection after rejection. Take home projects to work on and technical interviews to study for after work when I was exhausted from super demanding physical jobs that time and time again wouldn't pan out

Finally I got hired into a remote position at a great company, and left the bay for a place where life is slower, cheaper, and less crazy making. Now I'm going back to school on a part time basis at a local university.

There are so many stages between where I was a few years ago and where I am now where I could have given up, and where I think a lot of folks do. You don't really read those stories in manic Medium articles about learn to code success stories, how one guy (with a trust fund and a credit card and a network of ivy league grad friends) learned to code and got offers from every FAANG. I don't blame the ones who give up.

And I think if you have access to financial resources, and have friends who have them too, it's also much more straightforward, or at least less frustrating and painful, to finish school, and get a job that will pay you fairly.

But otherwise it's a tough road to walk, one that's physically and emotionally exhausting, and I suspect the level of commitment involved to walk it isn't too different from that needed to graduate with a degree. I wouldn't know tho -- that's not me (yet)

Thank you for sharing!

Kudos for finding your own path. Your drive and determination will take you far in life, much farther than if you had just went with the flow, went to college, and followed the normal script.

Dropping out of college wasn't quitting for you, it was simply a reality of life. I also was not able to get my degree at first -- it took me 22 years of working my ass off to finish my BSCS, and a few more years to finish my "starter career" in the military, get my MS, and get a job in software engineering like I always wanted.

I've been writing code since I was 10. Everything I learned about software was knowledge I went out and learned on my own time, through my drive to become a better and better engineer.

In the middle of my senior year I got a job at a startup that demanded so much time I felt it was better to pause college, and the hard work I've done since has paid off tremendously. I am going back to school, but there is nothing I regret about leaving initially, there is nothing I am learning that I didn't already study on my own time.

For every story about engineers who dropped out and got a menial job and had no ambition to become a better engineer, there are stories of engineers who had that ambition from the start and the degree became a nuisance. You shouldn't hold it against them until you know why they chose the path they did

I believe the poster you're replying to addressed this point:

> If you come to me looking for a job and didn't go to college, why? Did you drop out? Why?

You, clearly, dropped out because you had an amazing opportunity that you jumped on, not because you decided you were "done with it" and aren't capable of seeing things through until they're done.

I think the important question is "why?" -- for basically any career decision!

> If you come to me looking for a job and didn't go to college, why?

There is an obvious and common answer to this: college is expensive, both directly and in opportunity cost of not working. It's an expense that few people can easily afford without significant family support or loans.

Filtering by college degrees is filtering by family wealth more than anything else (or otherwise someone's willingness to get into debt).

> Filtering by college degrees is filtering by family wealth more than anything else

I assume you have the US in mind? This is less true in the many developed countries where education is free and/or programs exist to cover living expenses during studies.

Unless there is convincing data otherwise it would still be a filter for wealth. If a college degree provides opportunity then the wealthy will arrange for their children to have college degrees.

As an unrelated observation, the effect known as Berkson's Paradox would probably trigger along the way which is an interesting and little-discussed factor in this sort of thing. Two factors for getting in to college being wealth/connections and intelligence/ability.

Link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

> Unless there is convincing data otherwise it would still be a filter for wealth. If a college degree provides opportunity then the wealthy will arrange for their children to have college degrees.

As a counterexample: Dutch universities can’t select for students (for most studies), and annual fees are ~€2k annually (regulated). There will be some bias towards wealthier backgrounds that are more able to invest that money and time, but compared to the US/UK systems I expect it is minimal.

This is not unique, I think systems in the Nordics and Germany similar.

In Australia, our entry to universities is dependent largely on a grade resulting from our schooling. The grade is based on two parts: in school assignments/tests and a large end of school exam block. The thing is that the assignment/test part scales based on how well the average student from your school/class went on the final exam.

Wealthy students get the best grades since their parents send them to expensive schools designed to maximise this system. They then get into the "best" universities.

> Dutch universities can’t select for students

What do the Dutch do if there are 10k spots available in a given university and 20k people apply?

They would probably have their government fund building more univiersities and training / encouraging more people to become professors?

Just like that?

I didn't know that the Dutch had unlimited money. Weird that the portion of the population with degrees (44%) is comparable to the US (46%).

Unlikely that this kind of growth suddenly happens. Growth of +\- 20% can usually be handled (eg booking a larger room for the lectures). So studies can usually grow their teaching base as needed.

Exceptions happen: eg the popularity of CSI lead to a huge boom in people wanting to study forensic sciences. IIRC they were allowed to limit the seats for those studies back in the day.

Similarly, dentistry and doctors have a fixed amount of seats. They have a lottery that is biased based on your high school grades.

Overall I think this system has the better outcomes ‘on average’, but that the true top students are not challenged as much as they would be in a more selective system such as the US/UK

This is true in theory, but I live in a city where tuition to a Top 15 college is $400 per semester, almost nothing.

Yet, people who need to cover their own living expenses have a far smaller success rate, need to drop out more often or need to pause studies to work.

Programs to cover these living expenses exist, but they are limited, and not everyone who is not eligible for these can easily cover all expenses.

This still sounds US related? E.g. many European states will give you a no-questions-asked loan to cover both (reasonable) tuition fees and your living expenses.

When access to education is considered an actual right, living expenses tend to be included in the conversation (as you just pointed out). Unlike merely incidentally affordable education.

Even with education loans, some people can't afford it, because they have to support the family financially now and you lose that opportunity when you're at university.

We've gone from discussing the original point ("Filtering by college degrees is filtering by family wealth more than anything else" is a US centric view: yes or no?) to discussing the efficacy of state bursaries for college education. It's not an inconsequential topic, but it's not the original point anymore.

I don't think the posted is making any discussion of efficacy here, but is simply stating that there are people (non-US) who have to make the economic choice not to attend school, so filtering by degree even outside of the US is problematic.

There are human beings in developing countries, and the problems with filtering by degree are exactly the same or worse. Family wealth, health and privilege dictate whether you even get the chance to afford the price and the opportunity cost of college.

My family could afford neither, and I don’t know what I would do if it weren’t possible to work in my favorite field without a god forsaken degree.

> Filtering by college degrees is filtering by family wealth more than anything else

I'm not sure it's wealth as much as filtering by situation. My family was not and still isn't wealthy. Quite the opposite in fact. I was fortunate enough to be born near a local college so I could live with my parents while going to school, and working 30 or so hours/week to pay tuition.

I definitely didn't have the 'college experience', but I graduated with almost no debt.

I got my first programming job when I was a sophomore in college through people I met there. A couple different companies asked me to put college on hold for a semester in order to work more, but I'm glad I said no. College is not the only path, especially today. But, it was the best path for me.

I dropped out of college. Then I wrote more than 20 books about computer science (and various other topics), maintained a programming language for about 10 years, and finished many other long-term projects against lots of resistance.

Sometimes it is a good idea to give up, sometimes it is not. It is not a function of the individual, but a function of the circumstances.

Definitely can vouch anecdotally, that dropping out of college, is a weak signal, after all the solid content you have published[0].

I read your Practical Compiler Construction combined with Elements of computing systems [2] and that was a great combo!

[0] https://www.t3x.org/index.html

[1] https://www.t3x.org/reload/index.html

[2] https://www.nand2tetris.org

My experience in undergrad was that more often than not people who dropped out did it because they didn't want to put the work into school. An acquaintance of mine told me he was dropping out because school was "too much work". I'm not saying that dropping out of college is a bad thing, but the reason why one drops out of college is telling.

Dropping out of college can actually be a very smart decision. There's an opportunity cost to being in school, and if you can do what you want to do without it, better to not waste all that time and money and get maybe get the other benefits elsewhere.

I've hired dropouts who had a good reason, and were otherwise qualified. I'd do it again. But there are plenty of people who drop out because they can't make it, because we idolize founders who dropped out, etc. And it's not automatically an admirable thing if you don't know why you're dropping out.

Yes, success on your level, without college, is possible. However, your experience is very much an outlier. Someone that is internally motivated, has goals & direction (even if they change) will often find a way to a professional career. That is not the situation for a vast majority of students though. I think if someone gets to college and says, "I know what I want to do, and it doesn't require this", then there's no issue with getting out of there. Heck, you could always go back. Most students I see leaving college though have no direction and immediately enter low paying jobs with few better prospects on the horizon.

On the other hand, colleges do need to really rethink their education model. I fully believe in the value of a core or liberal arts education, it provided useful analytical & communication skills, but there needs to be a significant pivot towards more concrete marketable skills. At the community college level, there is an excellent degree type for this: The Associates of Applied Science, or AAS. It has some, but reduced humanities requirements and focuses much more on career skills of the chosen area, all of which have specific, immediately accessible job opportunities. The really unfortunate part of this degree, however, is that is very hard to build upon later at a 4 year school to finish a bachelors if you so choose: the credits either don't transfer or transfer as electives, not requirements towards a degree. Again, a major pivot is needed for traditional 4 year schools.

Marketable skills are easy to learn, it's the thinking behind the learning that is tough to get. HOW to think is much more important. And I'm not at all sure that that can be taught.

'Common sense ain't so common' is a trite aphorism, but very true.

I think "how to think" can be taught at least a little bit. In mathematics you learn a very formalized method of finding (usually) the single correct answer. In the humanities, with textual analysis, you learn a different type. But it does take practice, and adequate instructors. And of course the average person will never come to it quite as well as someone with the natural aptitude. I occasionally teach a course in informal logic, which is a sort of cross section between rhetoric and logic as applied to both argument construction, deconstruction, & analysis. I definitely see students progress along the way, starting with clumsy stumbling and proceeding to address new novel problems with decent aptitude.

I didn't give up, the school I was attending had completely crap computer science program. The networks class was a HTML/CSS and PHP website. The other schools in my area for computer science is better but way too competitive, as in, could only accept 100 students a year, a school of 20,000 people attending. The only way for me to get going in learning is to learn on my own based off of online courses, tutorials and projects. What I did on my own was better and more relevant compared to the school I was going. I'll show my dedication to completing a problem by the projects I've completed, certificates I've achieved and the online courses I took on my own time. If anything, that should say to a hiring manager that I took responsibility of my own career and went above and beyond, that's an employee you'd want imo.

Why leave college? Could not afford it, did not enjoy it, thought more could be accomplished outside of it, etc.

There are many reasons beyond just weak character for why someone would not go to college and it's not up to you as an employer to make that judgement call on someone's personality until you've dissected their real reasons for leaving.

This is something that takes a lot of time, way longer than an interview has to offer, so it's best to not make assumptions.

> Did you drop out? Why?

Did you not drop out? Why?

That's a genuine question I have of any interviewee. What was their thinking behind studying for 3–10 years at universities vs developing themselves through other avenues?

For someone with a master's degree, I'd like to witness their critical thought process. Their problem finding skills. Their ability to research outside their own field. Nothing would be a bigger red flag of mediocrity than someone who has spent several of their best years having gained no more than what mere vocational training would.

I never consider having a degree a "plus." It is only a plus if one has something to show for it.

If you think about it, formal education for many professions works a bit like a cast system.

It acts as a social filter preventing a large number of people from persuing a given profession that they otherwise could do just because their parents couldn't afford to rent a flat to their kid in another city for several years.

I don't think that there is any relation between the type of education that someone has (online vs formal) and a personal characteristic like perseverance.

There could be many people that could not afford formal education, learned online and are still perseverant. The two things are unrelated it just sounds like prejudgement.

This only applies in places like the USA where college is expensive. In places where is not expensive, the barriers are much lower. Perseverance is important and can be measured, in part, by how people go about completing long term projects like getting a degree.

It's not just the price of the tuition. For example, in Europe a lot of the tuition is very cheap, but if you don't live on the same city as the college is, many can't afford to pay to have a child to live for years in another city, plus pay the frequent trips home, and all the other expenses that come with it.

I think there is some truth in both what you and GP are saying.

Speaking from personal experience, my team has hired college dropouts who have turned out to be some of the best learners and problem solvers we've got. I have also interviewed candidates who seemed to be under the impression that their Ivy League degree entitled them to the position despite having no experience working on "real-life" projects to speak of. Candidates should never be discounted on the basis of not having a college degree. If they've got a strong application, the interviewer should be able to determine the rest of these more qualitative things over the course of a conversation.

On the other hand, if done right, college can be a place where some very intense, sustained personal growth can take place at a level which cannot be rivaled by supplanting it with e.g., taking a series of online courses. Taking advantage of the resources around you (seeking mentorship, research experience, forming study groups with colleagues, doing co-ops, etc.) can help put you far ahead of a person who pursued a self-study route in the same period of time. I agree that it is unfortunate that college is financially unviable for a lot of people who have a lot of potential. However, I don't necessarily agree with the people who allege that college is nothing more than paying for a piece of paper so that you can get a job.

> I don't need programmers.

But lots of people do need programmers.

These "is college necessary" posts suffer the same problem as "why are programmers making 200K right out of school" posts. The job title covers everything from hacking out WordPress plugins, to leading a team building an MVP, to building large distributes systems, to designing the software that goes into medical devices and autonomous vehicles.

Some programmers really do need a CS degree with at least a few years of math and a couple years of physics. Sometimes programmers need to know a minimal amount of PHP and JavaScript. The job title captures a huge range of actual jobs.

> Sometimes programmers need to know a minimal amount of PHP and JavaScript

I'd say that covers the majority of programming jobs. The problem, though, is that the are a vast number of people who can meet that bar and salaries are bound to collapse to reflect that at some point. What happens to them then?

> salaries are bound to collapse to reflect that at some point.

I don't don't, I've been hearing people make this claim for a decade now. Hasn't happened yet.

Quite the opposite, people keep saying this, yet salaries continue to skyrocket.

Maybe basic programming skills are just really valuable, and when people learn them, they become able to do much more productive work?

I don't know about that. I think salaries for web developers without some differentiating skill set have collapsed, or were never really that high to begin with. The average salary coming out of my undergrad's CS dept is about $60K.

Programming salaries are now very bimodal.

"I don't need programmers. I write programs to write programs."

I call BS. I'd be impressed if you could even write metaprogram to answer your own interview questions.

I remember reading about a guy who wrote a neural network to solve FizzBuzz in an interview which is as close to metaprogramming as it gets, I think.

He didn't get the job though.

Their loss. Think of all the programmers he could have replaced!

Joel Grus wrote that as a joke :-) https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

This is actually a very fun tensorflow tutorial. Thanks for linking to it!

Not all people are like your friend, not all colleges are like your girlfriends, and most importantly not all career trajectories benefit highly from a college degree. My wife for example, her degree gets her a poverty level salary in the states, whereas in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, she makes near 6 figures. Going to school for CS, and having to take all the other dumb shit that will never, ever help you in any real world CS job, is why the alternatives are coming to a rise.

Interesting - can you let us know what degree is that? I would think in general, it is the reverse.

My guess would be something related to teaching?

I guess this line of thinking might be reasonable when hiring young people, where college is still a recent memory.

I dropped out of college. There were a number of reasons, but really it just boiled down to the fact that I was not a mature adult at 20 years old. I was enjoying my life and my freedom living alone (arguably too much!). I don't regret any of it. I started learning to code about 3 years later and worked my way into doing it professionally.

At almost 40 now it feels absurd for me to be judged based on my 20 year old self. I know I'm biased here but, if anything I feel like the college you went to and the number of years attended say just as much about your level of privilege and rigidity of your upbringing than it does about your character.

I did one year of uni and found it to be too slow paced and overly pedantic about meaningless rubbish. I decided to just apply for a job since I already know programming pretty well and I got the job and things have been going pretty well ever since

Of course one can do this. On the other hand you'll be forced to learn stuff you'd have skipped otherwise.

Those contents can be an asset in your professional career and that alone justifies to study.

It's not necessary to study CS to become a programmer or even a good software developer but it can certainly help.

If I continued with uni I would have had to learn all the stuff I learned in the years of working full time as a developer.

I'm not convinced you learn any faster at uni than you do on the job. Uni seems like a good way to get started if you have nothing but if you have the chance to take a job that seems to always be the better option.

That sounds like a very different experience than the one I had with studying CS because it had not much to do with the things I learned and needed at work as a Software Dev.

It was about stuff like cryptography on a theoretical level and learning some assembler to understand the basics on a lower hardware level.

That's just two examples of things I'd maybe never have learned just by working at the company.

I didn't say it's faster but then I'm not a big fan of things that move too fast - as neuroscientists know learning works with restructuring the brain and that needs some time.

And I'm happy I didn't start this journey with university because then I might have quit. I learned to program before in a funny way just like you learn how to play with any toy. Think that might have helped to start studying and for me it was a good combination I think.

In the end it's your choice and you'll find your way - I can just say how my path looked like and what was good about studying for me - it doesn't have to be the same for you of course.

College/university is supposed to be about getting an education. For most people it isn't. It is about getting that piece of paper and its clear they learned next to nothing.

I take graduate degrees seriously, because people tend to take those seriously and focus on the education more than the paper at the end. I don't take 4 year degrees seriously at all. If all you've proven is that you can survive with minimal effort for four years before losing patience then you certainly have more potential than the lowest side of a bell curve, but you haven't proven you bring added value.

Graduate degrees are pieces of paper too. Masters are shameless money grabs. Most doctorates will kick you out with a degree if you sit around long enough.

This doesn't make any sense. Just like you demoted the master's curriculum and all it's requirements to pass the classes on the way, you can say the same thing about the doctorate. You put in a few more years of minimal effort before losing patience to become a professor or having any kind of tenure.

There you go. You haven't proven you bring added value.

As someone who’s getting a Master’s at the moment, trust me, it’s just a marginally harder Bachelor’s degree, year 5 or 6. The main difference between it and Bachelor’s is that people are older on average.

I only have a 4 year degree myself, so perhaps I am giving graduate work greater esteem than my experience allows.

As one of my friends said about their teaching qualification, “P.E. teachers get the same PGCE as everybody else.” There are plenty of other degrees that don’t teach anything valuable and exist purely to provide ammunition in the argument “I should be paid more.” The average MBA student is not held in especially great esteem by their professors either.

Doing research is by all accounts difficult and draining to a ridiculous degree but if you did well in undergraduate coursework graduate coursework is more of the same.

>Not only that, but of course, I meet folks all the time who think "you don't need a degree to be a programmer." Sure. You don't need a degree to put Ikea furniture together either. I don't need programmers. I write programs to write programs. I need folks who know how to think... for themselves and learn and go out and find knowledge they need to solve problems and then solve the problems.

I've found university to be somewhat of a bad predictor for whether people think for themselves. It is however from my experience a good predictor for following instructions and follow-through (which, as you mentioned, is not unimportant).

If I see somebody with no degree, but experience, he might also have follow-through though, and often more resolve to solve problems themselves.

I had a university education myself, and while I think it's not strictly necessary for programming, it does give you a good overview of related fields (mathematics, algorithms and maybe others) that often come in handy as part of solving a problem more elegantly or efficiently. And self-taught programmers often don't touch on these topics and have a big blind spot there.

College, for me, was never about becoming educated. I am in a constant state of becoming more educated. College was about getting a job. As soon as I got a job, I dropped out.

College for me was simply a means to earn a living. I am more interested in building my startup but the reality is that unless you have funding out of the gate or a well connected group who will fund you, then it is not realistic. I studied accounting simply because I knew it would be stable and consistent. Once I got my BA, I was out of there ASAP. Forget getting a masters degree, experience is more important once you have your foot in the door anyways.

I did drop out. Learning is important. College is not the only way to learn. I acquire the knowledge necessary to accomplish my goals.

I wouldn't hire; work with; or work for somebody who doesn't know how to manage the risk of Type I/II errors in their heuristic.

That signals to me "lazy thinker".

For folks who don't know what Type 1 and 2 errors mean:

> In statistical hypothesis testing a type I error is the rejection of a true null hypothesis (also known as a "false positive" finding or conclusion), while a type II error is the non-rejection of a false null hypothesis (also known as a "false negative" finding or conclusion). Much of statistical theory revolves around the minimization of one or both of these errors, though the complete elimination of either is treated as a statistical impossibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

Could you elaborate? How can type I and type II error risks be managed?

The theory is ROC curves [1]. The practice requires that you play devil's advocate with yourself - figuring out ways to disconfirm your own beliefs.

I usually start with the question: 'What data would convince me that I am wrong?' If I can't answer that for myself - I know I have a problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

The replies to this post are amazingly defensive. Did you not get the theme? WHY is the theme. You folks stating your specific case seem to have a "why", and a need to defend yourselves even though you weren't specifically attacked.

Relax, you have done well. You have a good "why". Now consider someone who doesn't have a good "why" and also doesn't have a college degree to at least prove they can complete something. It's not a perfect indicator, but it's an indicator.

Self-taught here. I dropped out of college because I was already making 6-figures and I just didn't feel like doing the school work any more.

I make top-tier money outside of SV, I get to go to all the cool conferences, company-paid international travel. Most of my vacations all the flights are free thanks to the miles.

I might finish school one day, but it's mostly for the piece of paper and 0% for the knowledge. if WGU had a linux-track I would consider that as the path of least-resistance.

I'm on the other side of that fence.

Went to college, did my best until proper graduation. Dug my way into FP and semi advanced topics at the time. No job because I'm not mainstream (and barely insterested by REST and similar).

On the other hand some gigs can accept barely educated juniors, train them for one thing, they get a cute career and raises along the years and by the time they get to my age they're comfy and set (potentially, not every life is bluesky and easy)

There's no clear better path. Even if you consider college academic education, yes we had good classes (DB normal forms, optimizing compilers, computer graphics etc) but we also spent half the time on obviously horrendous 2000s OOP that led the world at the time and will soon be forgotten. So it's not even great on that side too.

>> I need folks who know how to think... for themselves and learn and go out and find knowledge they need to solve problems and then solve the problems.

So, is going to college and earning a degree the only way to do that? In fact most of the college education is not designed with the idea of inculcating learning as a skill, in fact college may be a bit late for that skill and as a consequence/side-effect earn a degree.

Should we reject someone who still can give you the signals (thinking, persistence) one could be looking for, but hasn't attended or dropped out of college?

There could be more optimal ways to learn to think, and solve problems and being reasonable enough in not giving up. Going to college, incurring debt, doing things where the dead end is a degree is not optimal.

> If you come to me looking for a job and didn't go to college, why

How about "because it is really expensive, and not everyone is provided enough to pay for it, or take out the debt, and there are other ways of learning that stuff".

Person have to understand how college help in life

When person do not has clear target or reevaluate target when already in college, dropping is a kind of damage control

And it is ok to drop when you understand that it is a waste of time or effort

And we assume that college, profs and etc is good, which is not always true

I dropped out because I was interested in more advanced topics than the ones my 3rd world college offered, often times I ended up introducing new stuff to the class and lecturing and it just wasn't worth it for me. I had to work to pay for my studies

I didn’t drop out because the going got tough, I dropped out because I needed to make money and was finding I didn’t learn well in a typical classroom. I ended up working tech support and climbed my way up into a Dev role in under 2 years.

Alternatively: fail early and fail often.

Weird comment. You can get a college degree just for showing up.

Do you have a PhD, or did you give up? Do you have a high school degree, or did you give up? Do you still work at the first job you ever had, or did you give up?

I wish my Computers and Society professor got the memo that you can get a degree just for showing up. Could have skipped that 20 page paper on software patents.

I basically just went to courses and put barely any hours outside classes and got my paper. That's what's meant by just showing up.

You wouldn't have made through my program that way. Projects were half the grade in moat classes. And you definitely weren't doing those well enough to pass in barley any hours.

I'd already been working for years as a programmer before I went back as well.

Dunno where you went to school (liberal arts college?) but most programs are NOT like that, my degree required 30+ hours a week on assignments outside of class.

I found the material and tests straightforward but you absolutely needed to put in significant time to complete the assignments.

Quite possibly one of the new crop of for-profit schools.

If it's an unaccredited school, then I sure I can see that.

> You can get a college degree just for showing up.

Highly depends on the college and major. My CS degree had a ton of out of class homework assignments and projects not to mention the need to study to pass the tests preventing you from coasting by. Add onto that the fact that at least 10 of my math and cs classes were bell curved based and Cs are the minimum passing grade so if you try to coast by, you will need to retake a bunch of classes or switch to an easier major as everyone else is working really hard to not be in the bottom (i had to retake 3 classes myself).

Total agreement. College is largely about trading money for status. I have a comp sci degree from a good school, don't see what the big deal is, if I had to do it over again I would have skipped it and just hustled my way into a programming job at 18.

“I don't need programmers. I write programs to write programs.“

This statement seems deliberately obtuse.

The statement seemed anything but obtuse to me; to me it highlights one of the bigger problems that people who hire have, finding someone who is able to "meta up", someone who sees not just problems, but classes of problems and how to systematically classify problems and derive suitable systems that can solve those problems in a generic way. In other words, write programs to write programs (an obvious case of which is a compiler).

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