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Dropping out is probably not for you

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#121

Post by jlcx »

danielrhodes wrote: post #109

"If those three conditions are not met, please ignore the rest of this post, you have already made some bad decisions and the question of staying in or dropping out is the least of your problems." Jacques appears to have a very shallow knowledge into the value of liberal arts. It has nothing to do with a marketable skill (if you want that, go to a vocational school), and everything to do with refining the quality if…

This is a very common argument, and it may have some merit. In the current economic situation, however, with high and increasing college costs, it is probably advisable to find a less expensive way to obtain the benefits of a liberal arts education.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#122

Post by vbtemp »

hack_edu wrote: post #44
super_mario wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you will also NEVER be a computer scientist. You will never be hired by a team building a compiler, or a team building a database engine. You condemned yourself to a programmer title for the rest of your life, doing mind numbing business logic for the rest of your life (unless you decide to go back to school that it). Besides higher education is NOT about learning skills immediately useful for employment. I…

While I fully agree with your point, the guarantee of developing software for a living and NOT building compilers or such sounds actually more attractive. Solving problems and designing systems is amazing but what you idealize sounds myopic and tedious to plenty of amazing and well-educated computer scientists. We don't need to get into the Scientist vs. Programmer debate but software can mean or be most anything. Th…

I agree with both of you. As in politics, the two sides are talking past each other.

I think the dropouts look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, etc, and want to say "Look! You can be rich and successful and influential without requiring some silly piece of paper and a goofy hat!". Therefore, I don't need it!

The PhDs and Computer Science grad students are likely to look up to people like Turing, Church, Von Neumann, John McCarthy (as he's been in the news) etc.., and be satisfied pondering The Secrets Of The Universe and be stimulated by working on extremely pure intellectual challenges.

To the dropout entrepreneur/hacker, the prospect of working in an office proving the lower bound of a routing problem over ad-hoc networks is about as bland as you can get.

To the computer science professor, post-doc, whatever, the prospect of working as some web-app developer or "java engineer" and hustling for customers is completely vapid.

I tend to slightly side with the academic CS types, since many people can teach themselves to be successful hackers independently, few college dropouts are architecting the next generation of internet protocols, contributing much to computational complexity theory, producing the next RSA cryptosystem or homomorphic encryption, or contributing to the algorithms to make higher-resolution images from MRI scans. On the other hand, if you drop out of college, this isn't probably the kind of stuff that would interest your blood pumping anyway.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#123

Post by padobson »

krschultz wrote: post #113
padobson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated with honors from a top 10% university and it cost a heck of a lot more than $25k AND I've now been working for 3.5 years and I haven't hit the $80k mark yet. Only a small subset of the skills that I'm marketing right now did I learn in college. Furthermore, I'm doing better than a lot of my peers. Your numbers are suspect at best. $25k x 4 = $100,000 opportunity cost for college. $20k x 4 = $100,000 colle…

1) I like that you include the oppurtunity cost because people often ignore it (especially when it comes to graduate school), but you can go to school at night and that vanishes. 2) $25k x 4 is both high and low. It's low for 4 years at an expensive school, it is high for compared to going to a community college for 2 years and then graduating from more expensive 4 year place. My girlfriend went to a state school for…

All points taken, except 5). In major urban centers, $25k is too little to save up. But in many other parts of the US (especially where I live in NE Ohio), a single person could save a good amount making 25k a year. People around here raise families on that.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#124

Post by padobson »

sukuriant wrote: post #95
padobson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated with honors from a top 10% university and it cost a heck of a lot more than $25k AND I've now been working for 3.5 years and I haven't hit the $80k mark yet. Only a small subset of the skills that I'm marketing right now did I learn in college. Furthermore, I'm doing better than a lot of my peers. Your numbers are suspect at best. $25k x 4 = $100,000 opportunity cost for college. $20k x 4 = $100,000 colle…

Don't forget some people get free rides through college (I did), so they only have to pay for food for 4 years. Also, 25k a year seems a bit optimistic, IMO.

My parents paid for my schooling, so I had a free ride of sorts too. This obviously changes the numbers a great deal, and should certainly factor into decision making.

$25k a year is $12.50/hr. With proper job hunting, this shouldn't be too difficult to find with a high school education.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#125

Post by TDL »

Much has been said about whether or not to drop out of school (or whether to go college at all.) How about those w/ limited technical skills going back to school to pick up a CS degree?

Regards, TDL

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#126

Post by randomdata »

jtbigwoo wrote: post #88
randomdata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just watched it two days ago, the Social Network shows Zuckerberg working all hours of the day, every day. If that doesn't give people the idea that it requires hard work, I don't know what will.

The words were all about hard work, but the context was not. I bet the Zuckerberg character was drunk and/or at a party in a majority of the scenes he appeared in. Especially if we exclude the scenes where drinking would have resulted in punishment (e.g. during depositions.)

The words were all about hard work, but the context was not.

I'm not sure I agree. They made a point on more than occasion to show Zuckerberg at home on his computer while everyone else was at a party. Even at the depositions, he was working during every available moment. In the one scene he was falling asleep in the lab, so, instead of sleeping, he went home to work on Facebook for the remainder of the night.

I believe he was drinking alcohol during some of the work scenes, but there's nothing particularly abnormal about having a few drinks while coding. I even know of legitimate and profitable businesses who support the occasional drinking while coding days.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#128

Post by thomasdavis »

eof wrote: post #22

Surprised by the lack of support for dropping out. Is a 4 year education and a degree valuable? Of course. Is it worth $xx,000 in student debt and 4 year opportunity cost of doing something else? Rarely. Especially for this crowd. If you are a 19 year old with some programming skills, and you are paying for your own college (via loans or with cash) dropping out is a GREAT idea. Spend the next three years working on y…

I completely agree, 4 years of learning leading technologies in IT will put you far ahead of 4 years of learning possibly outdated stuff. Education is FREE!

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#129

Post by vbtemp »

bozho wrote: post #111
super_mario wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you will also NEVER be a computer scientist. You will never be hired by a team building a compiler, or a team building a database engine. You condemned yourself to a programmer title for the rest of your life, doing mind numbing business logic for the rest of your life (unless you decide to go back to school that it). Besides higher education is NOT about learning skills immediately useful for employment. I…

I don't see why I can't do compilers if I have to. I didn't take the "compilers" course in my remote study, because I wasn't interested. But when you reach a certain level of computing knowledge, you can learn anything quickly. But anyway, I agree that "mental gymnastics", "stretching your mind" and "exchanging ideas" are very important things. And so I found ways to do these things. Yes, it's not the default case wh…

"I don't see why I can't do compilers if I have to. I didn't take the "compilers" course in my remote study, because I wasn't interested. But when you reach a certain level of computing knowledge, you can learn anything quickly"

Well, consider this. Here's an exercise, without googling for a solution (other than language documentation), do you think you could write your own grep? Write a reasonably performing distributed algorithm for routing over an ad-hoc network? Think you could write an automated theorem prover or model checker? How about just a frequency hopping protocol for congested wireless networks?

Some of these are not things that you can learn quickly with a "certain level of computing knowledge". Sometimes research projects like this take years and decades by huge teams and brilliant people, who often have to spend considerable amount of times formalizing and making consistent the underlying theoretical models, which can only then be effectively implemented.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#130

Post by mannicken »

michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Thank you. Excellent article that needs to be read by everyone who's considering dropping out for "a startup". Let's ignore the complexities and focus on crude market value. A smart person with no college degree can probably earn $25,000 per year at 18. We're assuming a middle to upper-middle class background-- no special family connections-- and a reasonable work ethic. With a CS, math, or science degree from a good…

I was earning $80k at 18. No college degree, no high school diploma... Long resume and a portfolio. I worked in UI R&D prototyping field.
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