I've thought about this question for a while, if I would recommend college or not. Ultimately I've come to realize it has loads more to do with the personality of the individual than going to college or not. Some people are fit to be entrepreneurs, others are not. Some people are good at taking orders, others at giving them. It's not completely black and white, but generally a person leans one way or the other. The given person can change to the other side, though I would say that is less common.
All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
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Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#32I didn't learn any of those things in college. Maybe you just picked up the wrong things or are you just ignorant of what you really learned? I learned a good basis in information theory, maths and software engineering. Besides that I learned to analyze, research, work together on and write about software development processes. I also met many people who were interested in the same things as I am, and many people who…
Where did you go to college?
University of Twente, The Netherlands :)
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#33[deleted]
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#34[deleted]
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#35This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off the bat: "1. Plagiarism is bad. Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you…
Most open source licensing requires 0 citation. If I copy your formula or recipe, I don't need to cite a thing - you don't own the copyright to your own formula. I could sell your work if I wanted to do so. Plagiarism, as it affected my grading, was copying without attribution. Attribution is rarely required for most licensing, except where it is. These sorts of distinctions are lost in the collegiate machine.
The BSD license would like a word with you:
"Redistribution of source code must retain the above copyright notice ..."
Or how about the Apache license:
"You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,"
Maybe the MIT license:
"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
and so forth.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#36I started school when I was 23, mainly due to pressure from my parents. I was working full time as a VoIP tech however my mom kept pressuring me to get my degree.
I'm 29 now, have worked full time until I was 26, and started my own web development firm at 27 (hired my first two full time employees in 2012).
I'm a few months away from being done with school, and I can honestly say it has been the most worthless investment in my life. Everything I have learned in my positions as a IT Admin to Dev has been on the job.
School has just been a lot of wasted time doing fill in the blank work that I could have spent learning things or bettering my business.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#37I understand what you are trying to say, but this article is silly from many points of view. I don't want to answer with wise-ass comments like "you went to the wrong college" and such, so I'll give you a couple of arguments: - College isn't only CS. - Pure (computer or not) science isn't 'working for someone'. It's 'learning how to do (computer) science correctly', hopefully. - Plagiarism is not what you are saying,…
"So, if you quit college for the sake of being an entrepreneur when you are 19 and then you fail, you lost the chance of getting 'more' ready through college." I hear this a lot (frequently even about passing on college for lucrative, if short-term, opportunities), but I don't get it. This isn't amateur athletics where you have to worry about losing your eligibility and wouldn't be able to get in without an athletic…
Oh, I agree with you. Since I wrote a lot I didn't want to be so detailed, but basically I meant that I hear a lot of 'college is useless, I can learn by starting a company', and I disagree about the fact that you are learning the same things.
Of course you certainly learn a lot by starting a company, it's a matter of making sure you are choosing that over college for the right reasons, and not 'only' because you feel like you will be the next twitter in a year, which most likely won't happen.
I think that there might be a more natural order in going to school first, then starting a business. But it's not necessarily the unique or the right way. It's what I think.
Ultimately it depends on the person. It's just hard to judge well about college when you haven't really gone through college, and I think that starting too early could be worse than starting a couple of years later. Just my opinion.
It's not like there won't be any opportunities after college. So I just feel that I would expect a strong reason to feel like I can't wait anymore. But if the reason is that one thinks that in college you don't learn anything but working for someone, then I think that's the wrong reason. That's all.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#38This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off the bat: "1. Plagiarism is bad. Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you…
Most open source licensing requires 0 citation. If I copy your formula or recipe, I don't need to cite a thing - you don't own the copyright to your own formula. I could sell your work if I wanted to do so. Plagiarism, as it affected my grading, was copying without attribution. Attribution is rarely required for most licensing, except where it is. These sorts of distinctions are lost in the collegiate machine.
I think you may be confused as to how OSS licenses work, and to a larger extend the OSS community. I'd recommend you read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". On the specifics of license, I guess good ol' Wikipedia works just fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license.
Now your teachers didn't focus on entrepreneurship because statistically speaking, most people who go through college (or any kind of education) will work for somebody else.
I'd add to this that school is, in most cases, not about learning practical skills. It is about learning how to learn, developing mental tools and acquiring a knowledge foundation that will help you work with others.
Debatable approach to education, maybe. But beware of thinking that everybody want or should be prepared for the career path you seem to be in favor of.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#39This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off the bat: "1. Plagiarism is bad. Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you…
Most open source licensing requires 0 citation. If I copy your formula or recipe, I don't need to cite a thing - you don't own the copyright to your own formula. I could sell your work if I wanted to do so. Plagiarism, as it affected my grading, was copying without attribution. Attribution is rarely required for most licensing, except where it is. These sorts of distinctions are lost in the collegiate machine.
[deleted]
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#40Apparently I went to the wrong college. Note, I still _am_ in college, but nonetheless part of our learning was independent readiness. In my first non-basic programming class, my professor taught us alongside our Operating System class how he built computer kits and sold them. We were taught legalese in the field, and the power of performance. My school is very small, and our department is even smaller. We have very…
I've heard great things about the Stanford school of business, and the entrepreneurship program specifically, but it was outside my purview and budget. I'm certain there are outliers to what I wrote, but I feel the majority of schools are just creating employees, and that's....sad.
The small class sizes are surely a boon to be had. I have a good direct relationship with all of my professors, and they monitor my progress closely. If I ever have issues, I'm meet personally with them to straighten them out.
But to be perfectly clear, the best thing I could ever ask for is the ability to see my professors work live. One of my professors was a high-up manager for a very large insurance company, and the other was a good friend of Edsger Dijkstra, among others. One is an immense source of advice in practical software engineering, and the other can usually teach me a pattern to solve a problem in ten-times less code and more efficiently.
And, due to the small size of my school, my semester-ly tuition is less than $2k. It might not look like much on a resume, but I've hit the jackpot of schools.