How to Drop Out of Design School and Not Become a Worthless Hipster | Hacker News Reader

How to Drop Out of Design School and Not Become a Worthless Hipster

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22 pointsnvk12 comments

What a bunch of drek. Go to engineering school, go to law school, accounting school, hell you want to be a good designer go get a degree in psychology - but whatever you do don't waste a second on a useless business degree. Learn how to actually do something.

Whilst I get that there's the everlasting suit and cargo pants war, a business degree in conjunction with personal design work, or a engineering degree with personal business experiments makes one hell of a combo.

When you're founding a startup, your team needs to have certain skills spread between the members. One is sufficient technical savy to put together a product (engineering, graphic design, product design, programming, etc.), and the other is sufficient business acumen to make people buy that product (market analysis, marketing, accounting, salesmanship, negotiation, planning).

There is this belief often held with engineering heavy crowds which is "Build a better mousetrap, and they will come". They won't. Your potential customers won't suddenly feel a tingle in their stomach leading them to the store in order to buy your mousetrap. That tingle needs careful engineering as well, as well as getting the mousetrap into the stores, handling the payment processing, paying the manufacturers, you get the picture.

Similarily, there's the belief in the marketing crowd that "I can sell you anything, I just need a product". It's equally flawed, out of obvious reasons.

So obviously engineers want nothing to do with slimy business people, and businesspeople want to have at least 3 layers of organization between them and the filthy engineers. So if you can step into both pairs of shoes, you can bridge that gap and you're at a distinct advantage.

The problem is that business school doesn't teach you to close a sale or manage an organization (vital skills, true). Its a place to learn useless business theory and network with classmates (which is only as valuable as the selectivity of the program).

Precisely. Business school is for people who don't know any better.

I agree that there's little offered in those 2 areas in most business programs. Most juicy courses are offered at the graduate level, which is why I'd only recommend business school in undergraduate if the business side of skills is giving you a really hard time.

There are however severak courses that I'd give a shot out of the list Sloan makes public. Sytem Optimization Network Optimization Early Stage Capital Finance I&II System Dynamics A whole slew of Accountig & Law Courses

As you can notice, I left out anything marketing related, current affairs related anything industry specific and anything ethics related.

It's not that I think those are useless, because I agree with you. Business school marketing will teach how to talk about marketing, but not how to do marketing. Current trends are better analyzed by yourself, and industry specific knowledge should be gained directly from the source. Go talk to some people who are in that industry. And if you don't have personal ethics, business ethics isn't going to help you, and if you do have them, business ethics is not going to teach you anything beyond what you have.

Business school covers a fraction of doing business, so you have to supplement it with other sources of knowledge (Marketing? Get your fingers dirty with PPC. Salesmanship? Sell vacuums over your summer break). But if you have most of your trouble with that fraction, get help with it even if it's just formally learning the stuff.

So business school has limited utility, which should not be simply discounted.

And yes, you can study everything on your own. But then why go to college at all?

At the undergraduate level, I feel like you would cover those things and more by going the industrial engineering route and supplementing with accounting classes.

Don't get me wrong--I think those core accounting and finance classes are very important. I personally wish I had taken some more of them while I was in law school (we had them cross-registered with Kellogg), because it's relly valuable, broadly applicable stuff for anyone running a business or dealing with business clients. But a) you can self-teach that stuff as easily as you can self-teach engineering; and b) that stuff is a necessary but not sufficient subset of skills you need to be a great manager and leader.

That's my biggest beef with business school, especially at the undergraduate level. I think a good engineering school serves as a reliable indicator that someone can do the work. But with an MBA, you need to do more to see if the person has more than the corporate finance and accounting skills they learned in school.

* sales & customer service

* marketing

* accounting

are all required for a successful and effective business. Of course its possible to learn these on the fly, but why not sponge up some knowledge without taking the high levels of risk involved in starting your own business.

Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.

The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.

If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement

That actually made me laugh because 90% of the people we see think that is design.

+1 I second that lol

This is basically link bait dressed up in medium clothes (spammy title and "in your face" bro attitude and all).

It presupposes that the end goal is MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE. It views school as an end to the goal, not as a worthwhile four years where you get to experiment and make mistakes, and grow, and try weird shit that would never fly in the business world and get way into some obscure random shit.

It seems to ignore any of the possible soul involved in artistic creation. I'm having trouble putting down why I disliked this article so much, but I can say that if I had enough karma to downvote it, I would have.

There are two major things missing from a self-driven design education. First, going through a rigorously instituted design process which in turn helps develop and mature your criticality. The addendum mentions having a mentor which is useful even at the professional level. Where school differs is that you get strong, unequivocal critiques from people you may not always agree with, but these are often the most discerning and poignant criticisms. The design studios I learned the most from were always from the critics I most disagreed with, because they inherently challenge my preconceptions of ideas. The second things I see as a challenge is not participating in the design studio culture. In school you often learn from your peers, since you are all working on the same design prompt but have vastly different perspectives. It's such an engaging and energetic situation where you see the iteration and problem solving where someone is working on the same problem you are but has an entirely new approach.

These are some of my thoughts on formal design education, but I do think these ideas could be incorporated into an auto-didactic designer curriculum.

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