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

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

#61

Post by nirvana »

CyberFonic wrote: post #13

Given two equally competent candidates, the one with the degree is usually the one who gets picked. A person who has a degree but isn't passionate will often get passed over, except in the most bureaucratic of organizations. The problem with autodidacts is that many don't know what they don't know and keep re-inventing stuff. Going to university exposes you to people who are heaps smarter than you and hopefully that…

The thing is, you take two people from the same graduating class and look at them four years later, one who went to college and the other who worked, and they won't be equally competent. One will be a new graduate and one will have 4 years experience. People will pick the experience (which is more valuable) every time.

>The problem with autodidacts is that many don't know what they don't know and keep re-inventing stuff.

That's kinda silly. Autodidacts know that they don't know a lot and they search it out. They expose themselves to a lot and they seek out the smart people-- much like Steve Jobs communicating with Jim Hewlett. They don't need a university to "expose" you to things. People talk about finding new stuff at university like its some shocking and unique trait. IF you've got a local university that has some good stuff- like a particularly good department- autodidact will often go there just to learn that thing because its good, not because they need it.

>exposes you to people who are heaps smarter than you and hopefully that provides motivation to learn stuff thoroughly

Go work for a good engineering team and you're surrounded by people who are heaps smarter than you, and very highly motivated to solve difficult problems.

But I think the phrase "hopefully that provides motivation to learn stuff thoroughly" is very interesting. Autodidacts have the motivation to learn stuff thoroughly. I think most people don't. They need college to motivate them?

There's nothing more motivating than building a business.

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

#62

Post by nirvana »

keiferski wrote: post #38
nirvana wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me guess, you're in college? >If you don't have a college degree, it's highly unlikely that you will get into a reputed company, assuming any company is willing to hire you. That's just silly. I have worked for Microsoft and Amazon, and HP and lots of other reputable companies. Google was pursuing me like crazy for months until I finally told them in no uncertain terms that I had no interest in working there. >So…

Let's be honest now: if Google was pursuing your for months, and you've worked for Microsoft and Amazon, you aren't the average college student. Most people can't get a job for 50k+ out of school. And that's not even mentioning the fact that this is limited to consumer tech companies.

My point is this: Getting a job for $50k+ is easy when you've got four years of development experience behind you. That puts you ahead of the people just out of school.

I can't speak about non-engineering professions. Its quite possible that the college degree prejudice is much more entrenched there. Doesn't make it any less arbitrary and silly, given the low (really, with only a few exceptions) level of education that colleges provide.

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

#63

Post by nirvana »

greapfr wrote: post #22

I don't know how much it matters 10-15 years down the line, but it can matter very much 2-3 years later. I know people (mostly front-end developers and designers) that have been totally fine without a degree, but I personally have had a terrible experience. My story: I dropped out of MIT to stay at my summer internship. However, the company tanked (this was at a finance company, summer of '08), and my team was pretty…

I think either you were dealing with really prejudiced people, or you were turning them off in some way and they were using the degree as an excuse because they couldn't mention the real answer.... or your resume was just too thin.

No doubt that first 4 years (when others are in college) you have to work hard- its not easy, and in many ways, college is the easier choice, as not much is expected of you (By comparison).

Those 4 years you probably want to keep any job you get and work your tail off to impress them. You can't yet be choosy.... but after those four years you will have paid your dues while the college graduates won't have.

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

#64

Post by nirvana »

emmapersky wrote: post #24

For any non-american who might, at any point in their future, think about moving to the US for work, a degree is virtually essential. The standard work based visa requirements include an equivalent to a 4 year US Bachelors degree (eg. 3 years in the UK), or 4 years of relevant experience for every missing year of college, i.e. 16 years! I advocate staying in school anyway, but this is something to consider.

This is a good point. Government jobs are very arbitrary this way (mainly because government is embedded in the college industry.)

But its a filter often applied when looking at immigrants. Its a shame, really, because someone with a decades experience in software development wanting to move to your country should be welcomed with open arms (and also should be the zero experience farm worker, because frankly, people build an economy when they go somewhere to work.)

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

#65

Post by hedgie »

DanBC wrote: post #35
hedgie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." there are certain areas of software engineering where a real understanding of the subject takes years of focused study. for example, understanding encryption requires graduate level math courses to even read some of the standards produced or understand how the algorithms work.…

> there are certain areas of software engineering where a real understanding of the subject takes years of focused study. for example, understanding encryption requires graduate level math courses to even read some of the standards produced or understand how the algorithms work. i have never seen this happen outside of school simply due to the time restrictions of having a job preventing the full-time study necessary…

he had graduate level training in number theory at oxford, which is the basis of public key encryption and the algorithm he invented. it's not an edge case, it supports that you can't skip graduate level training and do this work.

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

#66

Post by hedgie »

nirvana wrote: post #42
hedgie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." there are certain areas of software engineering where a real understanding of the subject takes years of focused study. for example, understanding encryption requires graduate level math courses to even read some of the standards produced or understand how the algorithms work.…

>there are certain areas of software engineering where a real understanding of the subject takes years of focused study. Not many, and people who go into these areas spend those years doing that concentrated study as part of their job. The distributed systems work I did years ago for a startup made me one of 12 people in the world with that level of understanding at the time... now years later when distributed system…

"You're completely wrong. College doesn't even get close to teaching the state of the art."

encryption is basically pure math. if you don't have a solid understanding of graduate level math you can't even follow the state of the art. knowing how encryption is broken takes EVEN MORE, with advanced statistical methods being added to the mix.

"state of the art" encryption is really decades (or century) old mathematical problems. shit like padding is new, but the core of the algorithm has been studied for years by mathematicians - the fact they haven't solved it in that long a time is why we even use it for encryption

"And the really state of the art stuff- you don't get in college anyway as an undergrad and if you're a graduate student you're reading the same things that people doing it on the job are reading."

wrong. you can't even read the mathematical definitions of some encryption algorithms without graduate level courses.

i work with people who are "experts" in the area and have been doing it for 20 years with an engi background. due to never learning the math i have to translate for them and i'm horrified at the shit they end up doing. they don't know why or how the algorithms work so they end up picking the wrong ones for the wrong reasons or implementing them in insecure ways.

anything that relies on pure math this much (like algorithms for stock trading) isn't something you learn on the job.

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

#68

Post by rodw »

nirvana wrote: post #49
rodw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." That's simply not true. Your co-workers and colleagues may not know or care. Your boss and her boss may not know or care. (Although to be candid I suspect more of them both know and are at least a little influenced by it than you seem to think.) But if you're working in a…

You're just spreading FUD. And it simply isn't true. I'm not projecting here, I've done this very thing. I know. I've worked for several organizations with more than 10,000 employees. I was not being silently discriminated against because I was rising faster than my peers almost all the time. The market forces companies to do this because if they don't treat their employees well- particularly their employees with abi…

You're not seriously asserting that "nobody is ever going to care, or probably know, that you don't have a degree", are you? Literally nobody? Because the "FUD" I'm spreading is simply stating that somebody, somewhere, will both know and care.

Your sample size of one doesn't change anything. Without looking it up directly, I'm very sure that if you compared the earning power, net wealth, or pretty much any financial metric you care to name of "people with a 4-year degree" to "people that dropped out of a 4-year degree program and never earned a degree" you'll find that _on_average_, dropping out negatively impacts your earning potential.

That's not to say that that outcome is driven by an actual difference in ability or intelligence or drive or merit or what have you, nor that the outcome for people that drop out of college with the intention of creating a web startup is necessarily the same as the outcome for everyone else.

Like any statistic, that doesn't predict the outcome for any particular individual. You can drop out of college and become Steve Jobs or you can drop out of college and become an actor waiting tables in a NYC restaurant still waiting to be "discovered" at the age of 40. But in aggregate, those that earn a college degree do better (by some measures of "better") than those that do not. To state that it simply doesn't matter whether or not you have a college degree contradicts the data.

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

#69

Post by anotherthrow »

nirvana wrote: post #53
keiferski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah man, you've really got some deep problem with college - you've written half a book on this page. Step out of the black-and-white world where college = follower and dropout = leader. It's perfectly possible to go to college and not be a "coasting weak success." For many people, college is a good experience. An experience worth 100k in debt? Probably not, but that's an extreme example. Maybe college wasn't for you…

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem Part of the reason I have written at such length is that the quality of the arguments for the other position are so very, very poor. And oft repeated.

Sorry, but a pet peeve of mine is people claiming 'that's a fallacy' on the internet, without much grip on the kind of reasoning or underlying argumentative structures are work.

Suppose I have good reason to believe you are unreliable in your testimony. If so, it's perfectly reasonable for me to assign low credence to your claims.

The other guy was basically suggesting we have a good reason to believe you are unreliable, as they were suggesting the effort you've gone to is indicative of a motivation that would make you biased, and therefore unreliable.

The correct response is not to engage in claims of fallacies, but to provide further reasons to believe your claims the audience can accept, or suggest you have other motivations. You've gone for the latter option here, but I have to say your option is not as it stands very persuasive.

This is not to say your claims are false. But it is to say that more work is needed to make then suasive.

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

#70

Post by DanBC »

hedgie wrote: post #65
DanBC wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are certain areas of software engineering where a real understanding of the subject takes years of focused study. for example, understanding encryption requires graduate level math courses to even read some of the standards produced or understand how the algorithms work. i have never seen this happen outside of school simply due to the time restrictions of having a job preventing the full-time study necessary…

he had graduate level training in number theory at oxford, which is the basis of public key encryption and the algorithm he invented. it's not an edge case, it supports that you can't skip graduate level training and do this work.

Ah, yes. I made a mistake. I thought he'd been recruited from Cambridge before he finished his degree.
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