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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

#131

Post by xibernetik »

webwright wrote: post #45
edw519 wrote: post #3

The simplest test of whether or not you should drop out is this one: If you have to ask someone if you should then you shouldn't. I think I have a simpler test: Do you have a customer? Of all the things that you need to do to start a successful business, I think that getting someone to pay you for your work is the hardest. Deceptively hard. I've seen it all too often: Good technical skills. Check. Good design skills.…

This. Passing college is cake. It requires very few hours of time compared to a real job-- it's a GREAT time to spin up a side business to see if you can generate/find demand for what you have. It's also a great time to experiment with co-founders. That said, necessity is the motherhood of invention and failure isn't going to sting THAT much. It's not terribly challenging to un-drop-out of college is it? Finally, I s…

This depends on your degree, university, and year of study. 30 hours/week of class is pretty normal in my program, and I've seen schedules with 40 hours/week. The rule of thumb thrown around is 1 hour in class == 1 hour studying on your own: 60 hours/week. There are definitely design project classes which eat up a disproportionate amount of time on top of that, so that's pretty conservative for some years.

Funnily enough, the time that I have to experiment with side project is during the summer months when I have a full-time job.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#132

Post by conductrics »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #114
conductrics wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this kinda like looking back after running a search algorithm and saying "look at all of those branches that were explored that had nothing of value in them, what a useless waste." You have to explore in order to learn. College helps one learn both how your actions affect the external environment but also the internal one - your goals, utility function whatever you want to call it. What is 'needed' will be a fu…

No, because there is no reason to search through all the branches beforehand. A lot of things can be learned later on, as you need them. Even if there was a need to search through the branches early on, I could reasonably predict that medieval literature was a waste of time. But 9 semesters of humanities were required by my college, so I crammed for exams and forgot about it after the fact.

I guess it all depends on one's discount rate. Now that I am older I wish I had taken a few more 'waste of time' classes - esp in the arts.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#133

Post by gaoshan »

Definitely not for me. I need a good project manager AND a good business manager on hand. Learned this after some lean, depression filled, years.

Once I admitted this to myself and acted accordingly my income shot up from poverty levels to middle class levels. Now that I have kids and all of the uncertainty and financial hardship that can impose, I'll take what I've got. I'll never be rich but I'll still be happy.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#134

Post by dasil003 »

lurker17 wrote: post #101
dasil003 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your back of the envelope is dubious. Where are they paying 22-year-olds $80k? Only at soul-sucking corporations and over-funded startups with no fiscal responsibility. Also, the person with the capability to get a CS/Math/Science degree (from a respectable program) will likely have other potential that fall somewhere between the typical dropout and Gatesian success. I think the strongest argument to stay in school i…

Many people at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others have retained their souls along with their $80+K new-grad salaries.

In other words, the pick of the litter can get that much.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#135

Post by aik »

"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."

I could be mistaken, but I'm convinced that over 80% of people in college would not qualify.

If I'm mistaken, then I am saddened even more due to the existence of so many that could put forth so little effort for something they truly wanted to do. When I attended college I would not have qualified.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#136

Post by WalterBright »

xibernetik wrote: post #131
webwright wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Passing college is cake. It requires very few hours of time compared to a real job-- it's a GREAT time to spin up a side business to see if you can generate/find demand for what you have. It's also a great time to experiment with co-founders. That said, necessity is the motherhood of invention and failure isn't going to sting THAT much. It's not terribly challenging to un-drop-out of college is it? Finally, I s…

This depends on your degree, university, and year of study. 30 hours/week of class is pretty normal in my program, and I've seen schedules with 40 hours/week. The rule of thumb thrown around is 1 hour in class == 1 hour studying on your own: 60 hours/week. There are definitely design project classes which eat up a disproportionate amount of time on top of that, so that's pretty conservative for some years. Funnily en…

At Caltech, the usual rule was 2 hours of study per hour of class. Sometimes it was a lot more than that :-)

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#137

Post by mml »

mml wrote: post #31

As a dropout, I can tell you this: if you do drop out, you are choosing the hard way. Later on, even if you're wildly successful, you will wonder how much more successful you could have been if you'd finished. You'll also suffer from the impostor syndrome, and it will likely haunt you for the rest of your life, regardless of the outcome. Young smartasses have a way of becoming old maintenance programmers ;)

I should point out that all in all, it worked out great for me. I'll get around to framing my GED someday...

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#138

Post by ChuckMcM »

All this talk of dropping out or not reminded me of a characteristic I've come to recognize in folks with Phds. There is an assumption that if you don't have a Phd like they do its because you could not get one, not that you chose not to get one.

I think some of that flings back on people who drop out of college. Work, regardless of company size, is, to put it simply, work. That sounds circular of course but really the key is that if you can't find the motivation to get you through college then where are you going to find the motivation to get you through the 'last 10%' of a project which is what takes 90% of the effort?

As pg pointed out, and Jacques does too, if you're wondering if you should drop out then you shouldn't. You've got bigger problems and you need to deal with those. If on the other hand getting school stuff done is hard because your business is growing in leaps and bounds and you don't have time for both, that is a completely different story.

Work can suck at times, that is why you don't see travel agents advertising "Bankok Work Vacations." But getting stuff done rocks. You have to see the goal, if only in your minds eye, to get past the stuff that is lame and irritating.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#139

Post by schleyfox »

I psuedo-dropped out* a week ago. I think the thing that really stuck out in my case was that all of my family and friends responded with a sincere "congratulations!" when I told them about it.

* I've scraped enough credits together to collect my CS degree in May with my peers, though I do miss the english lit classes I was taking.

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