101–110 of 118 posts
Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.
Or you could automate that as described [1] here:
[1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...
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…
Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.
There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google the article title and click the top result for wsj.com. Or you could automate that as described [1] here: [1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...
I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't have any mention of it on my resume.
I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to drop out.
I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I did take were so easy they were a waste of time.
I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way better experience I'm sure I would have had in college.
With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.
“It’s almost a bigger risk to stay in school and let people like me drop out and start things before you have a chance,” he says. That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset. College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. B…
> I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Can you speak about what your experience was like? I'm currently working as a backend developer in new york and I'm planning on starting a CS degree at CUNY Hunter this fall, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences with working and going to school at the same time.
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…
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth...
Three spring to mind: Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/11-Million-College-Grads
"Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success"
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Can you speak about what your experience was like? I'm currently working as a backend developer in new york and I'm planning on starting a CS degree at CUNY Hunter this fall, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences with working and going to school at the same time.
I had my first job at 18 working on the development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was working about 30 hours a week and going to a local community college for about 20 hours a week. It was a good experience. Ultimately I dropped out because it didn't seem like I was learning much (I was already doing C and assembly language programming, and even training other programmers at my job) and it was too expensive (…