Dropping out - how does it affect you later in life?

'cause if you aren't super successful or hardcore at it, you will reach a point of diminishing returns of things. Your peers in other professions will catch up to you in term of pay when you are 30~40. You will lose time to families, and trade that loss for more requirement for financial responsibilities. Also when it's 30~40 time, you end up facing who you really are, and some people'll have to accept the fact that they were probably better off with a degree. But truth be told, people second guess themselves all the time. The most important thing is still figuring out what you are truly passionate about, and go for it.

If you're an engineer, and you drop out and you work for 4-6 years, nobody is ever going to care, or probably know, that you don't have a degree.

My personal experience was that I got a hell of a good job when looking for a summer job, and I just kept at it. I'm in my 40s now, and in my career, not having a degree has NEVER been the slightest problem. I was in such demand that I started limiting how many interviews I'd go to-- and I'd end up going to 5 interviews and getting 4 offers and a callback (on average.) More than once, a year or so into a job it might come up that I didn't have a degree and people would be surprised, but it was never a problem-- I never put on my resume that I had a degree, I never lied.

If you're an engineer, and you have talent and 3-4 years of work history, there's no detriment to not having a degree.

I don't know about MBAs, etc.

I think a lot of people go to college and maybe they aren't' autodidacts or naturally talented and for them, they have to be trained to be programmers. I know that's not the case for me, its a talent and I am mostly self taught.

But I think a lot of people with degrees develop a prejudice against those who don't have them.

They don't want to think that they wasted those four years and all that money-- and for many of them, they probably didn't (certainly that's the case for any of them who couldn't program before college-- it wasn't a waste.) But for someone like me, it would have been-- since college CS courses were pretty much a joke compared to where my ability was. (I did go to college for a couple years, but studied Physics. Much more challenging, though the money is in programming.)

So, no, I don't think anyone worth working for gives a damn if you have a degree, if you've got several years of programming experience.

Also, working with someone just out of college (not a programmer) has led me to discover that college doesn't actually train you to be an employee-- the first 2-4 years out of college is when you really learn the skills to be a professional. College is not worthless, but it is not at all, the only route.

For some people it would be a waste of money and time, and for others totally essential to being able to solve hard CS problems. Only you can know which one you are. It is certainly not a panacea.

I personally would probably give a little more weight to someone who is self taught, but of course, I wouldn't discriminate someone with a degree. I think its wrong of people who do discriminate against those who don't have a degree-- engineering is about having the skills and the mind. Look for Attitude, mental Bandwidth and the ability to communicate. Those are what matter in hiring.

When I dropped out it was for an "offer I couldn't refuse"- I went in looking for a summer job and got a hell of a gig. I was working (as peers) with several people who'd just graduated from college.

None of those people have had the success in life that I have.

Small sample size, of course, but they were more conventional people and are still working for companies, some tech companies, and are generally employees. They haven't taken the risks I have, and haven't had the failures I've had, but also haven't had the rewards either.

I am actually really curious to know more details about what you do.

For example:

1) Are you a developer? If so, do you ever find yourself missing the knowledge about low-level computer science? Let's say, how operating systems and filesystems are built under the covers, the internals of database systems, various algorithms that help solve problems quicker, etc. Do you see yourself working on problems that require this sort of knowledge in the future?

2) Are you a designer? If so, do you find yourself missing knowledge about various theories of UX that you wouldn't know even exist unless you'd learn them from a professor? I am not a designer, so I can't speak the vocabulary, but I am sure there's a significant amount of theoretical knowledge in the field that is not useful right away; so, I wonder, do you ever come to a point where you actually need that kind of knowledge?

Thanks.

If you are not smart enough, it would be smart to stay in school few more years and get the badge. It would be really dumb to be dumb and also not go to school. Not to say, smart people do stay in school, but I would think that's not for the badges.