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College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

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Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#81

Post by thoward »

Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer. Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned over six figures.

I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women.

I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry.

To what extent are these trends linked?

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#82

Post by commandar »

mullethunter wrote: post #50
ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

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…

This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees. Four years ago it happened again, a…

>losing two years of credits to study business.

This is interesting to me because I'm a little younger than you, but considering a similar path. I feel like finishing a degree would be useful, but I'm at a point career wise that I don't know going back to do CS or similar would be worth the time and cost.

I've been toying with the idea of a business degree for a while now. The kind of shops that want a degree just to get past HR usually aren't overly particular about what the degree is and I'd be adding new skillsets instead of supplementing the ones I've already developed over the course of working professionally for a decade plus.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#83

Post by [deleted] »

stephengillie wrote: post #33
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.

The WSJ lost their ability to influence me, and any value they had to me, when they prevented me from reading their articles. Paywalls are damage. If it's an important enough event or public opinion, I'll hear about it from some other medium - another news company, another HN article, Imgur, Facebook, Twitter, coworkers, etc. It's the Redundant Array of Independent Information Sources.

[deleted]

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#84

Post by spitfire »

VLM wrote: post #31
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…

"but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle." Why would I desire the ability to make a space shuttle if I don't want to make a space shuttle? I mean there's casual interest and amusement, sure thats cool, daydream about making a space shuttle for five minutes, but accumulating mortgage size debts on a whim would be highly unwise. Especially if as a young kid you get a different whim every week or so.

Because many of the skills necessary to make a space shuttle are the same skills necessary to make non-space shuttles.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#85

Post by ericabiz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

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…

I think it's less true now than it used to be. I fit your profile, Chuck; I dropped out of college in my sophomore year (2001) when the startup I was working for got bought out by Sun Microsystems and Sun made it clear that they would only hire full-time employees. I figured "one of 6 people working on the back end of Sun.com" would look better on a resume than a college degree in 3+ more years, so I took the risk.

Of course, back then, Sun would have never hired me had I not tagged along with an acquisition, and when it turned out I hated working for a large bureaucracy, I couldn't find another company that would even call me back despite years of programming experience plus the "worked on the back end of Sun.com" that I thought would be so beneficial. This was in the middle of the dot-com bust.

Back then, Google refused to even look at people without college degrees. Now, the article says: "Many tech companies welcome young talent, and don’t require employees to have a college degree. Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and others offer internships to teenagers; Facebook last year hired an 18-year-old intern for a full-time position."

Times have changed. For me, starting my own business was realistically the only choice I had in the early 2000's as a techie--other than moving back in with my parents, which I didn't want to do! Now, it seems like the same companies that used to view dropping out as negative are far more likely to give dropouts interviews and even hire them. As a dropout, I'm glad to see this change.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#86

Post by justinpaulson »

If you want to do real engineering and solve hard problems, stay in school. If you want to build a flashy media app or a social network, drop out.

There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good setting for that learning process.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#87

Post by Bostonian »

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…

The class sizes at the most prestigious schools are not growing with the U.S. population, so there must be an increasing number of very smart students who don't get into those schools. Why don't employers cast a larger net to find really smart kids who don't get into Stanford etc.? They could use numerical measures like SAT/ACT scores and high school grades.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#88

Post by Bostonian »

meatysnapper wrote: post #72
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 are exactly an IQ test of sorts. Getting in is all that matters. I'll make the argument that a college CS degree does very little to prepare you for practical software engineering or being a good programmer. I do not have a CS education, but I know many people that do, from top schools. They are productive, but I would never consider them to be "A" players. Someone who passes the IQ test and then g…

It's an IQ test with a lower threshold if you are a great athlete, the child of an alumnus, especially one who donates a lot, or an under-represented minority. I think there is an opportunity for employers who use IQ tests without the added noise the college admissions process imposes.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#89

Post by Futurebot »

I'm very glad to see that many of the more prestigious companies have loosened their restrictions and are willing to consider skill and experience, rather than formal credentials. Early in my career, this was definitely not the case. Heartening. There are still some less-than-ideal things people who don't go / drop out should be aware of, though. I wrote about some of them here:

https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should...

Still, this is a heartening development.

Re: College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

#90

Post by rpcope1 »

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.

I feel like this is sort of absurdly wrong. I don't think it's really possible to convey a lot of EE knowledge like accelerators, magnetics, and RF on Github (not easily anyways), but that's just as much if not more of a "tech qualification" than any software ability is. There's also a lot of software I've worked on that you can't open source, but is rather technical.

Really Github might be able to tell me if you can roll webapps, but for more sophisticated things, when I have been doing hiring in the past, it's really not been a great indicator. Some of the better developers I've met don't spend every waking hour programming (and don't want to), and don't contribute on the regular to Github projects.

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