Dear Mom, I'm Dropping Out

I did a year of college and dropped out and began my career at 20. It’s definitely possible to have a good career as a software engineer without it, but it definitely put me at a disadvantage in some situations. Only one time that I explicitly know of professionally but it also caused some problems with feeling insecure.

If you’ve already gotten a job at FB just make sure the offer isn’t contingent on completion of degree and you’re probably fine. But be aware there might come a time where you’d wished you had finished.

There are a lot of comments here that echo my sentiment.

Simon, I am a Canadian founder. I got my first job offer in the US (San Francisco) at 25 years old. I took it right away. It was not FAANG, though I was interviewed there many times: not once was I given an offer. My degree was in Biochemistry, not CS. I probably would have been over the moon to get an offer from FB. So I can understand how you feel.

However; I think you should consider finishing your degree. The job offer from Facebook will always be around -- or some equivalent. If you can get that at 20/21 you can get it at 21/22. The only time where I'd recommend somebody drop out is if they're committed to a project that is either clearly a business or has the potential to be one and they're pursuing entrepreneurship. I know a number of founders that have pursued this route and are quite successful. That said; college is really a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I wouldn't trade my time in college for anything, even though coming to Silicon Valley at 25 years old made me feel ancient. If you focus your last year on personal growth, hacking, friends, your network, building relationships - both at McGill and around Silicon Valley - you'll be even more set up to succeed post-graduation.

Re: the FB offer. The ugly truth you're glossing over is that working at FAANG can -- for many -- ultimately be just as boring as coursework in college. If you want to get into startups and like the energy surrounding them, my recommendation is use your last year of college to (1) kick college's ass and get that degree so immigration is easier and (2) start a badass side project.

That's my $0.02 but YMMV. Shoot me a DM on Twitter if you feel like chatting.

Buried towards the bottom of the essay is the fact that the author has accepted a full time offer from Facebook. So yeah, the last year of college (and a degree stamp) is meaningless as long as he plans to stay in the tech world.

This is what I think my father must have meant when he said, "I hope you never visit SF because if you do you'll never leave."

If I were 21ish and had gotten this far, I absolutely would have made this choice, and it absolutely (for me) would have been the wrongest choice I could have made in that moment.

The credential matters, and is worth 10 fold the value of that checked box on interview applications. To the people whose opinion Simon likely cares about, it proves you can stick with something that's unpleasant long enough to see it through to completion. Completing college (or not, as it's something I haven't done) sticks with you in conversations, in social interactions, and in the minds of others.

If you ever want to do anything besides bootstrap your own startup all the way to product/market fit (not as easy as you possibly think right now), not finishing college will create a little nugget of, if not doubt, then "prove it now" mentality in the heads of the people whose opinions you care about (both professionally e.g. investors and personally e.g. friends).

If you're 20 or 21, your primary advantage is time. You do have the time to finish up college, and then do all of these things. You can do both, and pretending like you can't is just giving in to that underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

Simon, I hope I'm wrong, but this is a mistake. You will regret this.

> [...] what would be the use of credentials issued by a university thousands of miles away that still taught PHP for web development? Would success in the far more complex task of building startups from the ground up not be credential enough? [...]

I'm reminded of the recent post about the 22 year old who said they had failed: "Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn."[0]

Of course, dropping out and starting a career at FB (or similar) is hardly a bad move. Who can say if it's the right thing to do or not? It's hard to discern a positive motive, though, when 95% of the reasoning is why college isn't great, and the bit about Facebook or throwing startup ideas at the wall to see what sticks barely passes as a footnote. Generally the best decisions don't come from focussing on what you don't want to do.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28575317

Have to say this because I've seen this attitude become pathological: You don't have to be "killing it" all the time. There's no rush. Time isn't running out.

Finish school. Slow down. Think about what you want to do.

I want to chime in with a bit less negativity. Universities can really be a bit behind on CS compared to industry, and it's really hard to teach a lot of the practical stuff. You can absolutely get a lot more out of industry experience than school in that field, and the author seems well posed to do that with their intrinsic motivation to do this stuff.

All the information is online these days. Universities are good at teaching things for two things: they guide you through the field in the right order and teach you what's important, and there's someone pushing you to do your work with deadlines and such. (Of course the value of universities is not just in the teaching/learning bit.) If you have the motivation for 2, and you have a good guide/job to do 1, then a unviersity might not offer you as much value.

There's a flip side to the sunk cost fallacy:

I might not fly around the world to pick up a $100 bill. But if I'm standing right next to it, I pick it up.

Let's say this kid is right that 4 years for a McGill degree isn't worth it (though it is). That's not the decision now. The forward-looking cost is only one year, not four years.

Pick up the $100 first.

Also, a lot of the "college isn't worth it" arguments are for English degrees from West Podunk University. A CS degree from McGill is a completely different animal. One year? Worth it.

I think this is a bad idea. The author is clearly self motivated, so why does he want to start a full-time dev career so early? College is basically the best time in most people's lives to explore ideas that they have. College students are smart enough to build something significant, and have enough time to do so. I know so many people who have atrophied motivationally at Facebook and other big tech companies. The ones that haven't devolved into general apathy are more focused on climbing the corporate ladder or making more money, not anything truly fun and inspirational. Personally, I would love the opportunity to go back to college and have the time I need to explore my ideas.

"I realize that I’m in the final stretch of college now, but I just can’t bear to waste another second bogged down by things my brain screams are irrelevant when I think (dare I say know) I can replicate everything college can give and hopefully more."

I had to double check that this was no satire, as this is remarkably ignorant. Ironically it demonstrates that no, Simon does not "know", what a classical general education is and what it is supposed to provide, specifically when delivered in an environment that considers academic knowledge and research as valuable as ends, not means.

Dear Simon, a four year education at a credible institution is neither about resume-packing skills nor partying to build a network...

I can't decide if such misplaced self confidence is more demonstrative of generic individual hubris based on no actual world experience,

or an indictment of the conversion over the last decades of four-year college education into a de facto half-million-dollar glorified boot camp,

but either way, what a shame.

I think its okay to drop out because you have your own ideas you are excited to work on. You can always go back to school and finish your degree if you need it for a visa.

Don't drop out and work for FB though. I can tell you are fired up and excited to do things - but big corporations like FB will suck you dry and you will get nothing in return.

While I did computer engineering and not computer science, I frequently come back to how useful of an intellectual foundation my college education was. It's basically a whirlwind tour of humanity's greatest hits in a given domain. While it's hard to tell which ones are going to be a big deal for you, there are certain collections of skills that have been super useful to combine in the past, so getting the whole cognitive standard library under your belt is a great use of time.

While I thought I'd be focusing 100% on discrete math in my computing life, I was really happy to have been exposed to gradients and convolutions when neural networks came to prominence. I've also recently gotten interested in power electronics and have been really grateful for having previously been exposed to several varieties of transistors and having had half a semester of thermodynamics. Not to say that this background was really enough to be productive, but it was really nice to already know that these subjects exist and be familiar enough with their broad outlines to not have to completely bootstrap multiple fields at the same time.

I'm a little salty about this though because, at the time, there were a ton of classes that I thought were boring and useless. I was wrong (at least about the uselessness) about for vast majority of them.

Ok, so some straight talk.

Follow your dreams, but after you get the degree. A degree now days primarily is a signifier of two things: you have the the patience and discipline to stick through it and do well, and you are able to conform. The biggest benefits conferred by a degree are the networking you will do while at a good college, and being able to pass hiring gatekeeper checklists. This is doubly so if you plan on doing any kind of research.

There are still places that will block you if you do not have a degree. The person that does it is an initial screener that is just looking at a checklist and nothing more. This probably (possibly?) does not apply if you have software engineer at a FAANG company on your resume.

Who am I to comment? I basically did this, but went the corporate route. I dropped out to work in the corporate world, rather than startups. For family reasons I am unable to move to SV or NYC. After a career spanning 25 years I am making roughly $180k salary, not counting benefits, in Maryland.

I have worked my rear off to get there, and I am in the process of going back to get my bachelors...because there are positions where the division head has to sign a waiver for me to be hired to the project in that position, because I do not have a degree.

There is a caveat..I am in a somewhat degree-obsessed are, defense consulting. Still, I urge the OP to reconsider.

I think the author has some unresolved anxiety issues that therapy might address better than dropping out would.

When I was 17, I registered to oDesk (now Upwork) to get freelance gigs using my moms card to withdraw (I was already doing small wordpress jobs and some PHP stuff through word of mouth). At some point the High School work was distracting me from my freelance work (1000$ is A LOT of money for a 17 year old in Romania). Now I am 26 and earning 3000 Euros a month freelancing as a React + Solidity dev. My college graduate friends sometimes ask me for money.

I did get rejected from a lot of jobs for not having a degree but I never had a month where I made less than 500 euro (minimum wage here), capitalism and demand prevails every time.

The important part of a degree as a Canadian is TN. Makes a heck of a lot easier to get into the USA.

My most recent job (for a well established fintech company) actually verified my diploma with my university, and even asked me to correct a small, related detail i had mistakenly put on my resume! This kid will get background checked some day and start regretting this.

I was really worried about this person reading through this post (felt like a lot of negativity and short-sightedness) until I came upon the fact he had a full-time job offer at Facebook. Still worried, but not as much.

A common thread in these endless discussions is what a shallow and reductive view the pro-dropout people have of university. This guy thinks the biggest dig against McGill is that they teach web development (!) with an old stack, and he "knows" that he can "replicate everything that college can give and hopefully more".

I hope Facebook can pay this kid in Dunning-Krugerrands.

What a lot of early dropouts don't seem to realize is that the normal university experience in is very tail-loaded towards the tough, interesting courses. You can blitz through a couple years of basics and fume about how slow stuff is, or that the Intro Programming is in the "Wrong Language (TM)", but most of what I remember being good were 300- and 400-level courses. As you specialize, you also pick up a lot of these courses, relatively speaking.

There's also a lot to be said for, I dunno, all the other courses that you could be doing at a university for intellectual breadth. It's not a vocational school.

Oh well, he has a starter job at a tech company, which will probably be for life. That's how that works, right?

Is this a repost? I seem to remember seeing this a few days ago.

tl;dr - dropped out to work in red hot job market.

I mean, so, just looking at one of the courses this person has singled out ....

https://writeofpassage.school/#pricing

I'm not sure what to think about dropping out of college to spend $4-$7k on a course about writing? That is definitely getting up to the level, at least, of what some college courses would cost.

As far as dropping out just generally goes ... what's the rush? Especially if you're close to being done in any case? People shouldn't write off the utility of the credential itself, regardless of their own personal feelings on the subject.

Kid's being dumb, especially if he was at McGill and is Canadian. e.g. Have fun getting a US work visa to work with all those cool people without finishing your undergrad. The friction from the same degree/visa issue cuts you out of taking jobs in Europe. Any company bigger than a startup that has an actual HR department won't give you P&L responsibility because if something goes wrong they are exposed to the accusation you weren't objectively qualified, and even though it's bullshit, it will keep him out of most management roles, and reduce his bargaining position on every job he does. Even if he fails and uses his tech skills to take a government job, he's going to spend his life working for (and likely antagonizing) the long tail of people who only barely graduated, and that was their high water mark. This isn't 1995 where you can "learn computers" and become a valuable asset. Most of the skills he has, he is - or will - be competing against offshore shops, and even against them, he will be competing globally against people who have mobility between countries (facilitated by degrees) to enter and leave his market as they please, with a lot more talent and leverage. When he wants to go do a quick masters in something he finds interesting, he's also shut out, even if he could probably teach anything he becomes interested in.

Maybe he does a series of startups and one hits. Maybe he's lucky, or brilliant, but the opportunity cost of 4 years in your early 20s is insignificant compared to the same time in your 30s and later. The feeling of this kid's parents isn't sadness or disappointment in foregone dreams, it's awe at how stupid he is being while still managing to dress and feed himself unassisted.

Dear Kid - you're making a staggeringly poor quality decision, go back to school.

Must be extraordinary to hop to New York City for a month, then fly to SFO as a young person, with not a (mentioned) care in the world about running out of money.

With the above context, I think we can agree the risks for this person is low. If things go badly there's a landing spot.

This kids a middle management wet dream for easy abuse labor. Is willing to drop out of secure education for in-secure work. No long term fin capital from years worked to weather a rough employment period. No further education tickets to class him as a threat to taking managements jobs.

Basically lining himself up to be a slave to the system.... He will make a good cog in the machine.