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Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

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Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#11
I just graduated high school (2 months ago) and got a few offers right after I graduated.

I'm currently doing a summer internship in Silicon Valley and plan on staying here for at least a year and improve my skills as a designer.

I've been offered a few great full time offers already, but still exploring my paths to make sure whichever decision I make, is the right one.

I plan on going to college (that's definitely something I want to do), but I'm on the same boat right now, and want to take advantage of the offers on the table right now that might not be there after I get out of college.

Any advice for me?

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#12
post #6

I know a lot of people in their 30s and 40s who don't have a college degree. They make no less and have no fewer job offers because of it. Go to school because you enjoy learning something(1), not for better job offers. In the technical realms nobody is going to care about that. It's more important to show that you can do good work. (1) and honestly even if you want to go to school just because you're curious about a…

Conversely, I know lots of people in their 30s and 40s who don't have a degree, clearly make a lot less and don't (and didn't when they were younger) have access to many, many job opportunities because of it.

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#13
Take the money and practical experience. Give yourself solidly to whichever job offer you except, but don't work 70+ hours a week. Work a highly productive 50 to 55 and take the difference to learn new skills. Always have a side project that is helping you master a new domain within CS and related fields.

Spend less money than you make! Save and invest. Put some into a retirement account but also build up a healthy fund for going to college. Set a start date for college. Fall of 2016.

With your experience and proven skills working PT freelance/consulting while going to college should be easy. Work your way through college freelancing about 10-15 hours a week during the regular term. Travel internationally during the summer while still working some remote projects.

Consider a double major combining CS with statistics or computational linguistics or something in the liberal arts.

Also if you find that you really love university, then just keep going and get a Masters.

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#15

I don't really have any advice here, because I'm in a somewhat similar situation myself. But I'm curious about what your skillset and CS knowledge are, since I'm trying to decide whether I should go back to college or continue working (I'm a little worried about how hard it might be to get a job in the future). I'd definitely appreciate it if you could describe your skillset and CS knowledge, so I can get an idea of…

I know about basic data structures and know about order of growth. That (and intelligence) will get you through most CS-y interview questions. Otherwise, the reason I get these offers is because 1) I'm skilled in something that is in particularly high demand (Ruby), so people are more willing to excuse inexperience (but I get rejected often anyway), and 2) I apply to a lot of companies/startups - you only need to hav…

Thanks for the response. That's interesting to know. What are these interview questions like?

Are they basic questions about lists, stacks, trees, and graphs (and the corresponding algorithms)? Or are they puzzle type questions that you're just naturally good at?

Also, have you mostly had success with startup companies? I'm slightly worried about a bubble in the startup space, though I really have little idea how valid my worries are.

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#16
post #5

This is just my personal experience but I was in a similar situation. I dropped out of high school to do web application development. Tried going to a technical college to get some kind of degree while working full time and I eventually had to choose work or go to school. I chose to work. I was making $100k+ by the time I was 19 and kept advancing my career steadily. To this day probably 90% of the jobs I've applied…

I feel like it's a little odd when you say that startups make up the other 10% that care about a degree.

Conventional advice on HN seems to be that startups are the kinds of companies that don't care as much about the degree. What are the other 90% of jobs you've applied to? Are they also at tech companies?

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#18
I'm mostly wondering right now whether there is a bubble in the startup space. I don't think I understand the market very well right now, and I'm not sure whether most startups are profitable or just being funded.

Does anyone have insight into whether there's a significant bubble in parts of the industry? Of course, this is hard to evaluate without some concrete data, and I'm not sure if any such data exists.

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#19
Well do you want to? Will you enjoy it? Will you indeed build a network that everyone is always talking about? Some people just thrive in an environment like that and can use it to their advantage. It gives them leverage. They're work it. If that kind of resonates with you then there's no doubt going to college might make some great things happen.

Otherwise I'd just cut every corner possible and get the diploma in like 2 years.

Personally schools just make me feel sick. And truly sick too. Since leaving school I've never been sick once. No need to skip school I guess. Oh and the whole "college is nothing like HS, THIS IS THE REAL DEAL" crowd. Gosh. No! They'd tell me the same stuff in primary school about middle-school. By the first year of middle school I was begging my mom to let me home-school myself. Wish had more courage to actually drop out of that.

Got no clue what's financially better. If you can thrive there do go! And leverage the hell out of it.

But whether or not you go do continue academia-level self-studying. There's little excuse not to.

Re: Should I go to college or keep working in Silicon Valley?

#20
What I learned at college: physics, chemistry, optics, lots of heavy duty math - statistics, calculus, linear algebra, numeric computing, electrical engineering (analog and digital), how to write and publish, accounting, algorithms, a bit of management/business, and probably few other things I'm forgetting at the moment.

In my career I have done: computed cancer statistics for NIH, worked on a flight computer, done tons of avionics code, worked on a tank robot, computer vision, machine learning, and so on. Almost none of that would have been possible for me without at least a significant portion of the above skills. Chemistry comes in lowest, but it was still somewhat useful for the cancer stuff. And a tiny change in what jobs I had would have made the chemistry highly relevant (say, computational chemistry - tons of that going on around the beltway where I lived for a number of years). From here I can go most anywhere - finance quant jobs at 250K+, machine learning/big data, more computer vision, or what have you. You can .... write some more rails apps. If you are really good, sure, write the next rails, but I would say your options are far more limited than mine.

It's up to you and what you want to do, and what kind of potential you want to have available to you. University is not for learning a trade (by and large, medical school nonwithstanding); it's an opportunity to take in a lot of subjects at a depth you will never achieve on the job or part time (unless you have an ~170 IQ).

I'm sure people will post counterexamples to the above, and surely they exist; I argue simply that education == opportunity. If you have any kind of mind, 5 years of writing yet another rails app will start to bore you to tears. So, the question is, what will keep you from being bored? Inventing a new social app or such? Maybe school is less relevant. Taking on difficult intellectual challenges? It's pretty darn hard (not impossible, just very hard) to make your way without a strong math/science foundation. Also of note is how many people change their careers. Burn out in writing sw is pretty high. What skills will you have if in 5-10 years you want to be management, that CFO job starts to seem very interesting, and so on?

In short, I found my education exceptionally useful. You won't even be able to get an interview for many jobs, not because of snobbery (as is often claimed), but because there is no way you have the background to jump in and read original research in a new topic and deal with the math and algorithms in a sophisticated way. Only you can decide if that is of value to you or not.

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