College Dropouts Thrive in Tech
wsj.com
wsj.com
The problem is - opportunity cost.
Yeah. It was the late 90s before I got anything but a desktop support job. If I had gone to college rather than getting a real job in '97-98? I would have been looking for my first real job in 2001-2002. I would have been so screwed.
As it was, I had a few years to prove my competence, and with some help from some contacts (okay, okay, my dad's contacts) I stayed fairly well-employed through the bust.
Part of me kind of wishes that I took some time out later, after I had established myself, to go back to college. Mostly for social and "personal enrichment" reasons. but I totally don't regret getting a job right out of high school. I think that made the difference between me and my brothers.
The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.
This is interesting to me because I'm a little younger than you, but considering a similar path. I feel like finishing a degree would be useful, but I'm at a point career wise that I don't know going back to do CS or similar would be worth the time and cost.
I've been toying with the idea of a business degree for a while now. The kind of shops that want a degree just to get past HR usually aren't overly particular about what the degree is and I'd be adding new skillsets instead of supplementing the ones I've already developed over the course of working professionally for a decade plus.
The problem was that for awhile after the bust you could only get jobs if you were senior, and even then you might be taking junior/intermediate jobs (and pay) even though you had senior experience. If you were intermediate + a degree, you might make it over the line, but intermediate and no degree, or junior and no degree, not so much. But honestly, the biggest selector there was still your resume.
So yeah, there was definitely a shakeout, but it mostly involved that boom of people who'd joined between, say, 1999 and 2001 and didn't have any significant credentials, learned OTJ or otherwise. If you had at least four or five years under your belt and a "Sr. *" on your resume you were much more likely to survive the bust.
There were also a burst of companies around then (Google primarily, and a bunch of follow-ons) that heavily selected on college graduates, and those from the Stanford+Ivy set. That loosened up relatively quickly, though, and if you knew someone internal and could get past the recruiters and had a good resume, you could still overcome that.
I do think the next time a bust comes around, Github portfolios will probably mitigate some of the education issue. The point is to make it clear you're the best bet of the bunch, no matter what the context is.
(edit: typos)
In my experience, a "regular" or below school doesn't help at all. Hell, my side project employed some people with 'regular school' degrees. Of course, a rich person's school helps a lot, but now we're back to contacts.
The big difference I noticed about the crash was that my attitude... the combination of being cynical, honest, and the fact that yes, I will tell you if you are making me do something stupid, but I'll still do it, usually... my attitude works really well during the down times, and not nearly as well during the good times.
During the good times, as far as I can tell, there is a premium placed on yes men and others who are willing to drink the kool-aid, and those people? those people are absolutely destroyed by the crash.
But yeah, I still kind of prefer working during the crash. It's not any harder for me to get jobs; and I know it's shitty of me to say it, I certainly wouldn't wish a crash upon those people, but it's way easier for me to hire good people for my side projects when the economy is down.
The late 90s were full of "I've used a computer so I'm a tech" type people you're talking about--they got their jobs because they had a buddy who got a job, and it was easy to get your friends placed in the next desk.
But you generally knew who you partied with at work and who actually got stuff done, and those people were not the ones who got recommended into a job when times were tight. The jobs were still there to some extent, but proven people were pulled into them before they even hit a recruiter.
Of course, back then, Sun would have never hired me had I not tagged along with an acquisition, and when it turned out I hated working for a large bureaucracy, I couldn't find another company that would even call me back despite years of programming experience plus the "worked on the back end of Sun.com" that I thought would be so beneficial. This was in the middle of the dot-com bust.
Back then, Google refused to even look at people without college degrees. Now, the article says: "Many tech companies welcome young talent, and don’t require employees to have a college degree. Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and others offer internships to teenagers; Facebook last year hired an 18-year-old intern for a full-time position."
Times have changed. For me, starting my own business was realistically the only choice I had in the early 2000's as a techie--other than moving back in with my parents, which I didn't want to do! Now, it seems like the same companies that used to view dropping out as negative are far more likely to give dropouts interviews and even hire them. As a dropout, I'm glad to see this change.
That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset.
College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. But it's a great experience for most people, and education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits.
I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Either path is fine. I'm glad I went to college, even though it didn't directly prepare me for my career.
I completely agree (despite being a college dropout) and it speaks to my thought that we've been selling secondary education the wrong way. "Go to college and get a good job!" seems to be progressively becoming "Go to college and have a lot of debt!" Perhaps we should be selling it as "Go to college and get a great education that will benefit you in countless ways no matter what vocation you find yourself in."
It's not just the number itself, it's about training young people that being tens of thousands of dollars in undischargable debt without capital collateral to back it up is a normal thing.
The four year equivalent would be a state university, which have the same issue for quality. They're definitely cheaper than the private universities, though.
College is good just for the experience at that age. Certainly I had points where I thought it was "fake" and isolated -- but guess what, working in tech can make you isolated too!
It's just a different experience, and I totally get that many people cannot afford it. I probably have spoiled peers, but most of them were in some kind of school well into their late 20's, often into their 30's (Ph.D.'s, medical school, general listlessness) Compared to that, 4 years in college seems pretty moderate.
If I had been working for 15 years in tech without even going to college, I would have probably had a crisis by now... not that I haven't had mini-crises, but I think going to college actually does give you some perspective.
FWIW I also still read academic papers, which I don't think I would do if I hadn't gone to college (I never got a Ph.D.). So it did help me learn how to learn.
Can you speak about what your experience was like? I'm currently working as a backend developer in new york and I'm planning on starting a CS degree at CUNY Hunter this fall, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences with working and going to school at the same time.
I was a Linux support guy at 18, moved into sysadmin roles for a couple years, then quit my job to go to college. I was supported by my parents so I did not work my way through college the way you likely envision.
I did, however, work part-time as a sysadmin all 4 years (20 hours a week), but it only funded some living expenses, not my education.
Also not what you're looking for, but, while I was still young at 21, I thought I'd have a huge leg up on all of them 18 year old youngins. Turns out we all liked pretty much the same music and the cool kids were still cooler than me, and the guys good with the ladies were still better at it than me!
I majored in information systems and am still doing the same work today, 10 years later, but I love it and wouldn't change a thing. I wasn't ready for college at 18, and I got a lot more out of it and was more sure of myself at 21 when I enrolled.
I rarely think of college as improving my career, but of course my degree from a relatively prestigious 2nd-tier private school doesn't hurt my resume.
I pursued a professional services track upon graduation and it took me about 1 week to say "fuck this", and 2 months to quit and go back to sysadmin/ops work. If I had no previous work background I wouldn't have known that my new role wasn't right for me -- at least, not so quickly.
A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn (Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to give programming a go as a career.
My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them).
With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters. I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.
I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these freelance opportunities?
After doing that for a couple of years, I realized this is what I love to do, so dropped out and went full-time. I didn't start a business or have an entrepreneurial spirit either, but I love problem solving and love getting good at it, which really helps in tech. Since I can demonstrate my value, no one thinks much about the lack of degree either.
I think that's interesting. Probably the hardest time I've ever had getting a job (seriously, I went to like five or ten interviews. It was terrifying) was actually fairly recently, in a bubbly time, when I was trying to get a job after running my own company for a few years. I mean, granted, I was also really, really depressed and I was applying for 'devops' jobs with a lot of sysadmin experience, but still, I've never had a hard time getting jobs I wasn't qualified for before.
One of the jobs even cited something about how I wasn't a good cultural fit because I was used to running my own business.
I thought that last part was really funny, because I always thought of "cultural fit" as a codeword for "white" - I mean, it could also have been "he seemed really depressed" at that point, but eh, whatever.
I did end up getting the first actual sysadmin position I interviewed for, so the whole lesson could just be that "devops does not mean sysadmin with programming chops" - but like I said, never in my life have I had a hard time getting tech jobs I wasn't qualified for.
Still, I think that if you run a business and fail, you are much worse off, in the eyes of your next employer, than if you are a tech monkey for a large company and you get laid off or whatever.
I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.)
Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity.
If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years.
It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else.
So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one?
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakar...
Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...
I find these last three questions several orders of magnitude more important than whether you made a B or C at Alabama Tech back in 2012. Nobody cares about that stuff. We can rent out deep-dive knowledge if we need it. What we can't find is hard-working people who can make machines solve problems for other people in a group format -- while being fun to work with.
people in power vote with their wallets.
[...] If you want to be a neurosurgeon,
you must finish medical school. But the
tech dollars funding programmers are
saying something else.
Imagine two candidates for a job:
Candidate 1: "skill somewhere between 4 and 10, probably 8, salary required 5"
Candidate 2: "skill somewhere between 8 and 10, probably 8, salary required 9"
If I'm hiring a programmer, I might take a risk on candidate 1 as they're great value for money, and in the worst case I can always fire them and revert their commits.
If I'm hiring a neurosurgeon I'd go for candidate 2 for sure, because you can't revert dead patients.
As long as the inventor seems smart and fanatical enough, and the idea is a good one that addresses or transforms an enormous market, it may be worth a few million bucks of portfolio money to see what he can do with it.
'Liberal arts education' has become a code word for drinking to excess five nights a week and cheap casual sex with classes you can just show up to occasionally and pass. Actual literal liberal arts education is available in very few places but might be just as valuable as STEM for those who really get it.
"MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test"
That is in very little dispute. To investors and employers, elite university admission is an IQ test and graduation is a test of social class values -- it's a test of whether your family is stable and wealthy enough to support you financially, emotionally, and socially through four years and not interrupt you by needing you to support them financially, medically, or as free child care. Smart people from stable upper middle class families are valuable employees while the practical stuff you'd learn at MIT, especially in CS, is very easy to pick up on the job.
"Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school."
Note that those are non-market jobs. You can't pick your own Supreme Court; you have to deal with the one politics subjects everyone to. You can't pick your own neurosurgeon just because he's good; you have to take one of the ones the state licensing board, state courts, and insurance companies choose for you. And people with political power like to support the process of educational hoop jumping for various reasons -- some of them good.
Customers, entrepreneurs, and investors risking and spending their own money are more interested in results than pedigree. That's why the lightly regulated software industry sees so many dropouts succeed. Dropouts do well in construction trades, agriculture, and other less bureaucratic credential dependent industries, also.
Industries like Wall Street, where the primary source of income is scamming politicians, pension fund managers, regulators, and the public, depend even more heavily on pretty credentials than regulated industries like law and health care. Ivy league degrees are really valued on Wall Street because perception is so much more important than results.
IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed.
A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.
The fundamental difference I believe is that because the Internet is so new(relatively) and ever changing that you don't need experience to build software.In fact,experience may hold you back at times. Also,most of the software is not critical. Someone's life doesn't depend on it. However, human bodies and laws remain fairly stable and can affect life/death and thus,experience matters. You can't trust a college dropout to become a great neuro-surgeon without having performed several surgeries even if their IQ is in the top 0.01 percentile.
"English/Art/History/Philosophy" are humanities subjects that also happen to part of a liberal arts curriculum.
I'll make the argument that a college CS degree does very little to prepare you for practical software engineering or being a good programmer. I do not have a CS education, but I know many people that do, from top schools. They are productive, but I would never consider them to be "A" players.
Someone who passes the IQ test and then gets battle-tested at some startup, even if it's a few years of cobbling shit together, is more valuable than some PhD student who cannot engineer their way out of a cracker-jack box.
I'd hope I could interview people well enough to do better than just looking at people's schools but if I were an HR drone without the ability to assess people's technical abilities I'd probably go with the MIT dropout over the Alabama graduate.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Con...
It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.
Really Github might be able to tell me if you can roll webapps, but for more sophisticated things, when I have been doing hiring in the past, it's really not been a great indicator. Some of the better developers I've met don't spend every waking hour programming (and don't want to), and don't contribute on the regular to Github projects.
Why would I desire the ability to make a space shuttle if I don't want to make a space shuttle?
I mean there's casual interest and amusement, sure thats cool, daydream about making a space shuttle for five minutes, but accumulating mortgage size debts on a whim would be highly unwise. Especially if as a young kid you get a different whim every week or so.
They have more experience with lots of deeper CS topics, but I have yet to work with/for a real company where that's the limiting factor.
I'd also say that the dropout method is much less viable for professions other than programming, but that's because there are relatively few hardware startups looking for cheap high-skill workers and because other fields have had vastly longer time to formalize a body of knowledge. We've been building airplanes for 100 years, bridges for thousands, but single page applications are MAYBE double digit years old. College doesn't help if there's nobody with experience.
NASA decided they needed honeycomb composites to insulate fuel tanks, but could not come up with the correct engineering to build them properly. Hired surfers to solve the problem.
http://www.sciencechannel.com/video-topics/space-videos/moon...
The Apollo space suits were designed and constructed by Playtex, a garment manufacturer.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/neil-armstrongs-spaces...
I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women.
I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry.
To what extent are these trends linked?
The smartest guys on the whole seemed to go into industry or start their own companies.
I unfortunately was not smart enough for academia, and as a man have not found a rich woman willing to subsidize my lifestyle.
Can we get a mirror up?
There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good setting for that learning process.
I also think that framing all hard problems as engineering problems is an engineering-centric view. Depending on the product, sometimes designing the user experience to be seamless is just as hard as building the technical foundation.
Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap, how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor thought enough of him to not send him down.
At one industry conference in Brighton the other year when his name got mentioned 1500 people collectively groaned.
https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Drop...
The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-...
[EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using https://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]
Paywalls are damage. If it's an important enough event or public opinion, I'll hear about it from some other medium - another news company, another HN article, Imgur, Facebook, Twitter, coworkers, etc. It's the Redundant Array of Independent Information Sources.
Bright Mom. College is a important rite of passage.. maybe thats why im kind of a grown up child
I wish parents would start transitioning their children sooner. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make some big mistakes in high school with respect to driving, money, relationships, and responsibility in general. It's a lot cheaper to make a mistake when your parents are around to help you learn and recover.
...in other words, all of childhood is a built in transition time. The teenage years are supposed to be the runway for takeoff into adulthood. Delaying that process into adulthood is much riskier, IMO. This is part of the reason I'm concerned about teenage employment rates being so low these days.
I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't have any mention of it on my resume.
I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to drop out.
I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I did take were so easy they were a waste of time.
I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way better experience I'm sure I would have had in college.
With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.
Few notes about Gates and Zuck: I don't know why people (media in particular) made such a big deal out of dropping out or rather taking a leave of absence/gap year).
They could've always go back if things didn't work out. Dropping out of college is not akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It is just NOT
Also: The both came from money. It is easy to say I want to whatever-I-wanna-do when you have a trust fund ready for you. Having very successful parents/families -just in case you were wondering helps...
Jobs is a more peculiar case because he didn't have anything. But he got lucky and came upon the other Steve who was/is a genius-mastermind.
Third: why the measure of success in tech so extreme? Why do you have to make billions of dollars to be considered successful? In the world today, if you have just a couple thousand dollars in the bank you are living the dream of some six billion other people. I personally would consider anyone who has made more than 1mil out of a business (in profit) to be successful. The rest of it is just the lust for having more for sake of having more.
Last: College is supposed to get people ready for life. its not supposed to be a vocational school or diploma mill. It is sad that colleges today have became both. Denying the personal gain that university provides for pupils and the spirit of college amd liberal arts education itself is no worse than denying global warming or evolution.
You can become a programmer and make a buck without going to college but chances are you will not be an enlightened individual without attending a decent higher-ed institution.
(and of course we have people like Ted Cruz to the contrary but I'm speaking for the majority of population)
https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should...
Still, this is a heartening development.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth...
Recent college graduates and recent college dropouts are alike in a few things: they are still getting pimples, and they have tunnel vision because they're barely off training wheels and are on their very first trip around the block.
They can be tremendously smart, talented, and energetic, but at 21/22, whether they went to college or not, they are not very experienced in either adult life or professional life, and that lack of experience is a real handicap.
Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that.
Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.
Typically its B students that run the world.
Gates = 1590 SAT (out of than 1600), Zuckerberg = 1590 SAT, Drew Houston = 1600 SAT, Travis Kalanick = 1580 SAT, Chris Sacca = Doing college grade math in 6th grade. Look into Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Roelof Botha, and many more I am definitely forgetting of the top of my head.
>"Typically its B students that run the world."
I disagree. Any examples?
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/11-Million-College-Grads
"Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success"
Or you could automate that as described [1] here:
[1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...