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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them.

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.

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I'm exactly the person this article is talking about. Dropped out after a year, helped build a startup for two years afterwards (the dropout was unrelated to the startup). You're right, I'm completely unqualified to help make a space shuttle, but because of the on-the-job experience I got writing code for the startup (plus the architectural decisions I had to plan, implement, and handle fallout from), I'm more employable than a lot of my college graduate friends. And the ones who are more employable are so generally because of extracurricular experiences, not coursework.

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.

You are probably largely correct. A couple of counter-examples. They are from the Apollo program, hopefully they qualify as roughly equivalent.

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...

"but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle."

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.

Because many of the skills necessary to make a space shuttle are the same skills necessary to make non-space shuttles.

There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.

Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg, Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k followers on GH.

Respectfully, that doesn't apply to regulated industries.

I feel like this is sort of absurdly wrong. I don't think it's really possible to convey a lot of EE knowledge like accelerators, magnetics, and RF on Github (not easily anyways), but that's just as much if not more of a "tech qualification" than any software ability is. There's also a lot of software I've worked on that you can't open source, but is rather technical.

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.

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