41–50 of 118 posts
Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that.
Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.
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…
IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed.
A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison.
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…
After doing that for a couple of years, I realized this is what I love to do, so dropped out and went full-time. I didn't start a business or have an entrepreneurial spirit either, but I love problem solving and love getting good at it, which really helps in tech. Since I can demonstrate my value, no one thinks much about the lack of degree either.
As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my only fear is on what's next(on my career). b Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that. Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.
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…
They have more experience with lots of deeper CS topics, but I have yet to work with/for a real company where that's the limiting factor.
I'd also say that the dropout method is much less viable for professions other than programming, but that's because there are relatively few hardware startups looking for cheap high-skill workers and because other fields have had vastly longer time to formalize a body of knowledge. We've been building airplanes for 100 years, bridges for thousands, but single page applications are MAYBE double digit years old. College doesn't help if there's nobody with experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.
https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Dropouts+Thrive+in+T...
https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Drop...
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…
NASA decided they needed honeycomb composites to insulate fuel tanks, but could not come up with the correct engineering to build them properly. Hired surfers to solve the problem.
http://www.sciencechannel.com/video-topics/space-videos/moon...
The Apollo space suits were designed and constructed by Playtex, a garment manufacturer.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/neil-armstrongs-spaces...
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…
people in power vote with their wallets. [...] If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. Measuring skill/ability doesn't only produce a measurement - it produces a measurement with certain error bars. Imagine two candidates for a job: Candidate 1: "skill somewhere between 4 and 10, probably 8, salary required 5" Candidate 2: "…
As long as the inventor seems smart and fanatical enough, and the idea is a good one that addresses or transforms an enormous market, it may be worth a few million bucks of portfolio money to see what he can do with it.
During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically, those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a bachelors degree were having a hard…
The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.