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College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

wsj.com

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Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#21

Post by kazinator »

wololongong wrote: post #5
kdamken wrote: post #3

Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.

Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.

Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the full text.

The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-...

[EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using https://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#23

Post by convexfunction »

jasode wrote: post #14

Some observations... I just finished Fareed Zakaria's " In Defense of a Liberal Education "[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes…

College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence.

Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#24

Post by jacalata »

kazinator wrote: post #21
wololongong wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.

Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the full text. The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission: http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-... [EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using https://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Looks like…

Its supposed to show the full article if the referrer URL is google. Try limiting the search domain to WSJ? I'm not sure why that wodnt be showing up for you in the normal results.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#25

Post by Nicholas_C »

dopamean wrote: post #13

The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses. That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an entrepreneurial spirit. A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in…

>My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work.

I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these freelance opportunities?

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#26

Post by brighton36 »

imgabe wrote: post #20

I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them. It's great if you can skip college build a new way for peo…

There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#27

Post by dopamean »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #25
dopamean wrote: post #13

The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses. That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an entrepreneurial spirit. A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in…

>My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. I'm a pretty advanced Excel user an…

I was pretty lucky. By time I was ready to try out coding for a living everyone I knew in college had graduated and was working on the street. I leveraged my connections there and it worked out pretty well. It happened mostly accidentally really. I had contracts with several banks and hedge funds and it call came through word of mouth.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#28

Post by sz4kerto »

brighton36 wrote: post #26
imgabe wrote: post #20

I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them. It's great if you can skip college build a new way for peo…

There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.

Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg, Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k followers on GH.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#29

Post by rjsw »

lordnacho wrote: post #18

If you're able to write code, that's relatively easily provable. You'll be found out quite fast by other coders if you can't do it, maybe a few weeks if you can pretend onboarding is going badly. So at a time when there's loads of demand for techies, there will always be some people who are happy to give you a go. Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy w…

Political parties do hire people who just talk a good game [1] so that isn't a great example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#30

Post by humbleMouse »

I dropped out of college at age 19 and I now do consulting pulling in over 5k/month, and work a 9-5 as a java developer (100k+). I knew college was a waste of time when my information technologies class professor assigned us as homework to look at the best buy ads every sunday morning to keep up to date with technology prices.... I am 22 years old now...
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