Why I canceled my college subscription

The problem paul is that this same level of criticality isn't enforced uniformly. Many, if not most, of those same people who doubt anything that comes out of Harvard, MIT, or CalTech as Democratic propaganda will cite Rush Limbaugh as a reputable authority on virtually anything. CalTech says that a certain nuclear facility has problems, Limbaugh counters by saying, "If that was the case why are most of the people in the nearby city still born with 10 fingers. Clearly those at CalTech are lying."

I don't know if Wiles did or did not prove FLT. I've seen the proof, don't understand it. Do I believe it -- I believe that a good faith convincing effort has been made. For most things I know in life that is also what I believe. I haven't confirmed really anything about the periodic table or much about quantum physics our sun or even more basic things like the gravitational pull of things not as large as the Earth. I do generally believe what others have told me (and the fact that they "say" they've done experiments), especially if they have a history of telling me things that are consistent with other things in my life.

And to be clear it's not about people claiming to be smarter than you. It's about people who have consistently shown that they know more than you do about a specific topic. Of course if you must prove using standard levels of scientific proof everything all over again then I'd love to see your lab where you've done this work. It must be huge.

Josh, I applaud you. Don't let the people in this thread, your parents, or anyone else tell you differently, either.

I dropped out of college when I was halfway through my second year to take a full-time job in tech. I left that job less than a year later and started my own tech company. I ended up selling that business for $1.1 million when I was 26--when most of the people who graduated high school when I did were still in school!

Running your own business, especially a tech company (when you're already geeky), is some of the best education you can get. My parents cut me off financially when I dropped out of school. My mom told me it was "the worst decision I'd ever made."

But something strange happens: When you are forced to succeed, you often do. You make ends meet. I consulted building shopping carts and CMSes for customers in this new language called PHP (4.0 had just come out!) for the first couple years of running my business. Those clients became my first hosting customers, and then my tiny little hosting company beat the odds to become a Silicon Valley success story.

Now I'm doing it all over again with another startup. We have 4 full-time people here in Austin, TX. Three of us have no college degrees. But I'm pretty confident things will work out even better this time.

So avoid the naysayers, find your role models, and be driven to succeed. Start your own business, learn sales and marketing, and then hire the guys right out of college and have them work for you. (They're good folks.) And never look back.

(Here's my full story [written as of 2009]): http://www.erica.biz/2009/the-end-of-an-era/

Don't.

College should be and can be intellectually wonderful....a place to play with all kinds of deep computer science theories and really push yourself beyond the latest technology fad and stack. What are you diving into beyond your classes? Have you raided the library and net for books on information theory, parallel computing, machine learning, linear algebra, digital signal processing, etc, etc, etc? Have you found a set of fellow geeks who are doing the same - who'll push you to the very limit of your abilities?

As you develop and grow as a programmer (I'm still doing that after 20 years) you'll find again and again that really top-notch programming and problem solving is far more than the technology. That's where the real fun programming problems are - and companies will pay you a LOT to solve those problems.

BTW I did pretty much drop out of college and eventually go back. I was the classic undergrad geek who grew up hacking and programming way before college. Like you, I was bored with the course material and making good money in my part-time programming job. Now I've a computer science PhD and I've been a research scientist in world class universities.

Or putting it much shorter: You've got brains, invest your time in college to push yourself beyond just the course material. You'll make much more money in the longer term and you'll have a far more satisfying and intellectually rewarding software development job.

BTW as an alternative to dropping out, if you can (and its what I did for my undergrad) I suggest finishing your degree by night or part-time. Its hard though.

"Limbaugh counters by saying, "If that was the case why are most of the people in the nearby city still born with 10 fingers. Clearly those at CalTech at lying."

See. you're biased. You are talking about the left and the right. Not anti-intellectualism (which described above is actually anti-elitism). The left will never admit Rush is correct, even when he as scientific proof/facts to back it up.

"It's about people who have consistently shown that they know more than you do about a specific topic. Of course if you must prove using standard levels of scientific proof everything all over again then I'd love to see your lab where you've done this work. It must be huge."

You need to look at who is funding the study/research/scientist to really give you an idea if you can really believe it without further research.

Global warming is a good example of this. There is so much government money wrapped up in it (billions of dollars), I seriously doubt we will never know if it's truly man-caused or not (why would anyone go against it when their funding/tax dollars in many European countries gets cut).

A friend of mine has his phd in epidemiology. She really opened my eyes up to the biased nature of research studies.

2) Deficiency in the "science" part of Computer Science (Algorithms and Theory)

This usually isn't readily noticeable to a student who thinks they aren't learning anything, but in a few years, this will be among the foundations of your skills as you move up the software value chain. Short of starting your own software company, where you'd better hire someone (or have co-founder) who does know this, its very important to have a solid understanding of algorithms and theory. Reading one or two books isn't going to give you (unless truly exceptional) the foundation that several well planned CS courses can.