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Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

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Re: Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

#121

Post by jegutman »

nsxwolf wrote: post #78
dtparr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At my age a degree is completely irrelevant if you have the skill set. This is a dangerous thing to say without any qualifiers. It depends on the industry, economic conditions in your area, type/size of company you want to work for, etc. I've known a couple individuals who had the skills and 20+ years of experience who lost jobs at floundering companies and weren't able to find anything relevant due to a lack of a…

But that's madness! You'd be great for this job but we can't hire you because you don't have a piece of paper? How long can these self inflicted meaningless restrictions continue?

I know it's crazy that companies with 10k+ employees want some agree of conformity (read: predictability) out of their workforce. It's not the CEO of these organizations saying "we can't hire you because of this piece of paper" it's a hiring manager saying that. Many large companies are working harder for alternative methods of identifying talent, but it's hardly and easy problem and if you need to screen 2x as many employees to find 10% more good hires that may or may not be worth the tradeoff depending on how productive your employees are in general.

Re: Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

#122

Post by alex_g »

Why limit it to careers for people not going to college? What is the benefit of that over, say, having all type of careers whether a degree is necessary or not? It seems like a really well organized product you have, but you are limiting its potential.

Re: Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

#123

Post by rifung »

joshmn wrote: post #110
rifung wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar position. Also 24, and didn't finish college. I haven't had trouble getting jobs, but I still have to answer the "So why didn't you finish school" question no matter where I apply. I ended up just leaving my education off my resume but I still seem to get asked often.

Well, honesty hour: why didn't you? My reason (maybe for inspiration?)... If someone expects me to read a book and apply concepts from it, I'm going to have a terrible time. Not because I can't read, but because I won't. I don't learn by reading a book. I learn by doing. Georgetown was first — more traditional school. That didn't last long. Thought that somewhere more "in my niche" would do things differently. Nope.

Mostly because I didn't want to spend my parents' money on it when I felt I had learned enough to get a job. I also decided I wanted to double major in Math but since it was just for myself I didn't feel like it was fair to my parents to delay my financial independence

I'm the opposite of you, I actually really enjoy learning from books. But then again, I typically like learning about theoretical concepts so that may be why books are fine for me; I just think about them, play with them in my mind, and do exercises if they have any.

Re: Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

#124

Post by volaski »

xiaoma wrote: post #103
volaski wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying go to college and forget about money. I don't know if you're saying this based on what you heard over the shoulder but I actually do know a thing or two about buying citizenship and green card with money. It is FAAAAAAAR easier to just go to college than become rich enough not to care about these things. Most college grads will never accumulate enough money in their youth to buy green card from count…

>I don't know if you're saying this based on what you heard over the shoulder I've spent half my adult life living abroad and have met many people foreigners in many countries including the US who have gotten great visas without a college degree. And money isn't even the only way. Becoming an expert at one's field is also a great route to a visa, and it pays a whole lot better than being just another person with a de…

> I know multiple foreign nationals without degrees who have held engineering or even engineering leadership positions at YC companies.

You may be either talking about an O visa case (or H1B with all kinds of evidence that the person has irreplaceable qualities, which is difficult on its own right, basically you need to prove that you are as worthy as college graduates). Neither of them are easy. Sometimes even if you are covered on The New York Times you don't make it.

Don't just throw these things online as if it's easy to do this just because you saw some YC company do it. If you look around there are tons of other much more talented but unfortunate people who couldn't make it and had to go back to their countries.

These types of misinformation literally hurt people who are not knowledgeable about the matter. I can sense you have no idea about this just based on how you write about it. Are you a foreigner who have gone through the US visa application process? If not, don't say it's easy.

Re: Show HN: Careers for people not going to college, built with Meteor

#125

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

joshmn wrote: post #100
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If money is an issue, I totally second the idea of 2 years community college plus 2 years of university. In my case, I went to a state university (which was a UC, so not too shabby) and no one ever questioned "graduated 19xx from UC San Diego" on my resume. No one cares where you went for the first two years (possible exception: Graduate school? No idea). Though honestly people don't care at this point whether I went…

If no one cares where you went for the first two years, why not take the cheaper option at the expense of the "college experience"? I never got said college experience obviously, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. But in terms of value, spending 1/5th of uni/state school per semester and getting the same thing? I'll take it.

I'm actually in total agreement, but let me argue devil's advocate for a moment:

* I've known people who bonded with lifelong friends during their first year in the dorms together. When you've all been separated from your family for the first time and as a group are thrown together, often even sharing rooms, there's a very strong psychological bond that can form. I'm still in touch with my first UCSD roommate; we both were transferring in as juniors and they matched us up. But if they hadn't matched the two of us, I might not have bonded with anyone as well; I've long lost touch with rest of my first year "roommates" (we shared an apartment).

* When you transfer in, you often need to take the special unique prerequisite classes for the new school. There were several classes I took as a junior with a lot of freshmen.

* If you are talking about the option to get into a prestigious school, the people you meet there are potential connections that can accelerate your career at various points. The longer you go to the same university, the more of those connections you'll meet. I went to a UC, and it does rank in the top 20 (I think it even hit #7 recently in some report?), and so it's a great school, but it's not a prestigious school, so I don't know that it counts. I had the option to transfer to Berkeley instead (I was accepted), and in retrospect I probably should have, if only for the prestige.

That said, I'm honestly not clear that university is an absolute requirement for success today, at least in software development. I'm not quite ready to tell people they shouldn't go, but neither would I tell them they should.

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