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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

> Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.

In what sense is that a myth? He is a college dropout. Lots of people had access to computers at that time. True, not everyone, but extraordinarily few of the people that had access to computers at that time went on to found multibillion dollar companies. The idea that the fact that he had access to computers somehow debunks the story of his merit is absurd to me.

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>Lots of people had access to computers at that time.

More or less unfettered access during middle school in the late 60s?: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/bill-gates-got-what-he-neede...

"Lots" isn't a scientific term but I still don't think it fits here. He was probably one of a few people at the time to have a few years of in-depth experience before leaving high school.

I'd call it a "myth of omission". It's technically true but the missing details are very, very important to the whole picture. That doesn't mean he didn't work hard or have a knack for it though.

Certainly everyone else at his high school could have been doing what he was doing. I'm sure this wasn't the only high school like this, though the number may have been small.

I don't think people are arguing Gates didn't do anything to warrant his success, but they are saying that if he hadn't been afforded early opportunities significantly more advanced than perhaps 99% of other high schoolers in the US, or 99.999% of other high schoolers in the world (and I don't think that's an exaggeration - seriously, search for articles about how his HS computer system was networked in with U of Washington ... in the early 70s), that he wouldn't have been nearly as successful.

He went to one of the most elite high schools in the country, and in fact his cofounder went there too.

Bill Gates' parents were board members at other companies with moderate influence in the local Seattle business community. There is a good chance that he would have been more successful than most people at even just selling office supplies due to his connections. It's not like he grew up in the rough part of town and got in to Harvard through a hardship scholarship.

Indeed it was Bill Gates' mother, Mary, who had the clout to introduce Bill to IBM's the president, chairman and CEO John Opel while both serving on the board of United Way of America. This paved the way for Microsoft's deal with IBM.

I've heard so many way below average dropouts from nameless universities or high-schools justify their "performance" by mentioning how Bill Gates was also a dropout without realizing that Gates dropped out of Harvard (!) after already having an excellent education and most likely being above average at all relevant topics for his future career.

The myth isn't that Gates is a dropout but that he's the average dropout, or that being a dropout is somehow a signal of greater things to come.

This comic makes for an eye opening read for many [0]. (Edit: updated link, thanks, it must have been a case of copy/pasta).

[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

To see the full cartoon: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

Bill Gates was both extremely privileged and an intellectual prodigy.

The myth is the usually intended implication that Gates fell into the category of people who for whatever reason couldn't cope with their college, and not somebody who actually had one of his college papers published in an academic journal before taking leave from Harvard to found a company

> In what sense is that a myth?

That Harvard provided a better education than his High School and that leaving Hardvard is someting only loosers do.

Nobody goes to Harvard for the education. They go for the degree. The thing he abandoned was the credential - and that his high school did not give him.

You really go for the connections, which he clearly didn't need.

I've always wondered. Do you think someone studying Medicine or Mech. Eng. at Harvard wouldn't get a higher quality education than what many public colleges provide ?

One of my professors at an ivy would occasionally at the end of a lecture jokingly say something like, "ok here's what I think about all this, this five minutes is what you're paying 30 grand a year for so pay attention, everything else I've said today you could have read in the textbook. Nobody actually uses this algorithm, if you need it you're already overloaded, people just buy more capacity before utilization gets this high."

At the undergrad level I think the main benefit of a high end school is simply being grouped with other high end students and so getting a curriculum tailored for you. As if the Honors and AP classes in high school were only available in a few schools that were selective and more expensive.

I don't think this is completely true but I think there is a lot of truth to it... you go to fancy schools for the other fancy students as much as anything else.

Point being, at the undergrad level Harvard isn't better because it's Haaaard-vard, it's better because their curriculum is more advanced, which they can do because they have sufficient concentration of high-talent students who can handle it.

I can't speak to the quality of STEM education at top-tier universities, but having experienced humanities at a mid-level state school and watched a fair number of lectures for similar courses from Ivies, the main differences seemed to be:

1) The professor might be someone you've heard of,

2) Guest speakers/lecturers are both A Thing and are usually very important people (highly placed in government, NGOs, or corporations),

3) The students are way more engaged, which I think is a result both of actual higher levels of student interest in the material and more of the students having come through a K-12 education that was participation and discussion heavy (see: how most major prep high schools run their classes) so being used to behaving that way, because that's just what one does.

The actual material wasn't really different.

IIRC the consensus is that a Harvard undergrad education is high-quality, but not exceptional. The experience (including the networking, and the access to people and opportunities it grants) is what drives people to its gates.

If you want an exceptional education, with access to the hardest courses available, you go to MIT.

Yes, MIT is a level above. I have an M.S. from a good state school and took a graduate course where the text was SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming). At MIT that's the freshman course text book!

"Lots" is an ambiguous term to use for how many people had access to computers in 1975, especially the type of access that you would let you become proficient at software development. I think you'll find an unusually high number of rich people in that list.

I'm not saying he didn't have advantages. He certainly did. That does not mean he didn't succeed by merit, though. Though certainly in percentage terms there weren't a lot of other kids with the access he had, the absolute numbers involved were still quite large. Most of those kids did not become Bill Gates.

That raises the question of how many in the other side of that percentage (an overwhelmingly higher absolute number) had similar "merit" but not access as Bill Gates.

Because, look, the reason we're talking about him is because he is an exceptional story of a man completely trashing his competition, standing head and shoulders and bottom-hem-of-dad-sweater above anyone stepping toe-to-toe with him. But then, how impressive does that become when you realize that his "competition" was essentially a small subsection of the in-the-know low-tier-wealthy-and-up? In launching an industry-leading, cutting-edge tech company, his strengths were revealed to be in how quickly and differently he thought and how tenaciously he acted, compared to the relatively comfortable people in his extended network (the caveat of a network being that its members must be sufficiently similar enough to engage with one another). Outside that bubble, it probably becomes much easier to find someone who thinks differently and somewhat easier to find someone who is very tenacious. So... do the bell curves of intelligence for affluent West Coasters and everyone else not overlap at all, or what?

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