College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

It really depended on demonstrable experience more than anything.

The problem was that for awhile after the bust you could only get jobs if you were senior, and even then you might be taking junior/intermediate jobs (and pay) even though you had senior experience. If you were intermediate + a degree, you might make it over the line, but intermediate and no degree, or junior and no degree, not so much. But honestly, the biggest selector there was still your resume.

So yeah, there was definitely a shakeout, but it mostly involved that boom of people who'd joined between, say, 1999 and 2001 and didn't have any significant credentials, learned OTJ or otherwise. If you had at least four or five years under your belt and a "Sr. *" on your resume you were much more likely to survive the bust.

There were also a burst of companies around then (Google primarily, and a bunch of follow-ons) that heavily selected on college graduates, and those from the Stanford+Ivy set. That loosened up relatively quickly, though, and if you knew someone internal and could get past the recruiters and had a good resume, you could still overcome that.

I do think the next time a bust comes around, Github portfolios will probably mitigate some of the education issue. The point is to make it clear you're the best bet of the bunch, no matter what the context is.

(edit: typos)

It is just confirmation bias.

I also know people who had no career at all before the bubble. But managed to make one as Project Manager/Product Manager/Other tech support roles. Just because they managed to get jobs before the crash and make a career by moving around to other companies in the country.

They're probably not all that smart. They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking. But I've seen Bill Gate's code, and its bad.

Typically its B students that run the world.

> 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.

I think that's interesting. Probably the hardest time I've ever had getting a job (seriously, I went to like five or ten interviews. It was terrifying) was actually fairly recently, in a bubbly time, when I was trying to get a job after running my own company for a few years. I mean, granted, I was also really, really depressed and I was applying for 'devops' jobs with a lot of sysadmin experience, but still, I've never had a hard time getting jobs I wasn't qualified for before.

One of the jobs even cited something about how I wasn't a good cultural fit because I was used to running my own business.

I thought that last part was really funny, because I always thought of "cultural fit" as a codeword for "white" - I mean, it could also have been "he seemed really depressed" at that point, but eh, whatever.

I did end up getting the first actual sysadmin position I interviewed for, so the whole lesson could just be that "devops does not mean sysadmin with programming chops" - but like I said, never in my life have I had a hard time getting tech jobs I wasn't qualified for.

Still, I think that if you run a business and fail, you are much worse off, in the eyes of your next employer, than if you are a tech monkey for a large company and you get laid off or whatever.