Dropping out is probably not for you • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#141

Post by dlo » Tue, Oct 25, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

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…

There was a course back in college that alone required 30 hours per week. And it was only the third most difficult course or so in the program, which was computer science.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#142

Post by ericbrunstad » Tue, Oct 25, 2011, 10:38 PM UTC

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…

You should try going to CMU School of Computer Science. Being a student at CMU is a lot harder than working at a certain large tech company I interned at, for example.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#143

Post by wanorris » Tue, Oct 25, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

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…

I have a Philosophy degree, and there was definitely an opportunity cost associated with getting it. If my goal were to optimize my life in terms of income generation, it would have been a mistake.

Happily, that hasn't been my goal in life, and I wouldn't trade my philosophy degree in for the world. There turned out to be plenty of time to go back to school and learn the technical skills I needed after I figured out that programming was what I wanted to do with my life.

Having said that, I would be somewhat reluctant to counsel anyone to take a career-path-agnostic approach to college in the current climate. Times are tough, decent jobs for people without demonstrable technical skills are scarce, and college is even more breathtakingly expensive than it was 20 years ago.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#144

Post by philwelch » Tue, Oct 25, 2011, 11:59 PM UTC

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…

As far as I can determine, a university education in the liberal arts does little to nothing to refine the quality of one's thought and mind. Someone intelligent, talented, and motivated enough to gain anything from a liberal arts education would undoubtedly achieve most of that on their own for the proverbial $1.50 in late fees at the local library. And someone who isn't will gain nothing but a now useless credential. Most 18 year olds would gain more perspective from two years in the Peace Corps or military than from a liberal arts education.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#145

Post by mannicken » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 12:10 AM UTC

I'm 20. I dropped out of high school, studied for a couple of years in community college and am taking classes and workshops at an art school right now (no accredited degree). For me this provides a solid compromise between the extremes of fascist discipline and anarchist chaos.

The first extreme relies completely on papers, degrees, and the value of adderalled-up memorization of facts and focusing your life on passing the tests. Life isn't about passing tests and I didn't want to go that route. So I dropped out of high school.

The second extreme is an anarchist, 'fuck the power' immature, spontaneous chaos. It disregards discipline, it ignores the beautiful life-rhythm of doing something everyday. It glorifies chaos and disorder, and ultimately for me it would probably lead to jail and homelessness. I decided to ignore that, since I realized the value of discipline and the value of education in a classroom (but not for a degree).

I have very little interest in the opiatish dream of a 'start-up that will make me filthy rich' too. Hence why I avoid startups. In fact I am skeptical of everything that alludes to 'becoming filthy rich'.

I am not a typical successful dropout like Bill Gates (yet) nor do I think I will be, and I'm not a stereotypical dumb lazy fry-flipping dropout (yet). As an experiment to test my discipline and knowledge, I decided to spend a year working in a full-time IT job, and I have spent exactly one year there.

So yeah, I'm that other guy :) Your mileage may vary.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#146

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 12:51 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #9

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.…

I agree with you. Students have more disposable time than any other segment of the population except the unemployed/out of school. If a person in school cannot build and sell something while still in school, then dropping out isn't likely to help. Getting an MVP build and finding those first critical customers (if they even exist) should be perfectly feasible while still going to class.

[deleted]

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#147

Post by steve-howard » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 1:10 AM UTC

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 work with PhDs. I assure you that nobody is immune from imposter syndrome.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#148

Post by amandalim89 » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 1:43 AM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #117

amandalim89 wrote: post #110

Peter Thiel doesn't seem to think dropping out is such a bad idea. He set up The Thiel Fellowship to give 20 students Under 20 $100,000 to get their business ideas off the ground and quit school. http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/25/peter-thiel-pays-kids-100k...

That's a common misconception about the Thiel foundation. Their main point is that they think that going into a multi-year debt in order to get an education is a losing proposition for many people and that because of that you might be better of dropping out. The 20 under 20 program is for exceptional people, see #5 in the linked article.

No doubt Peter Thiel means well. Thiel Foundation is a non-profit organization. Today it announced Breakout Labs which aims to fund very nascent research proposals — opportunities that are too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#149

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 2:05 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #9

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.…

I agree with you. Students have more disposable time than any other segment of the population except the unemployed/out of school. If a person in school cannot build and sell something while still in school, then dropping out isn't likely to help. Getting an MVP build and finding those first critical customers (if they even exist) should be perfectly feasible while still going to class.

Time is rarely the limiting resource for a startup - attention is. Students (at least ones who want to somewhat keep up with their schoolwork) do not have more disposable attention than most working people. As a student, you need to balance your attention between 4-5 different courses, all of which have their own deadlines and assignments and new concepts to learn, and you'll probably be distracted by parties and girls and campus events and a social life. As an entry-level worker, you will probably be given a well-defined task to do and can focus on it, and once you go home, you don't need to worry about it.

I found it much easier to launch side projects once I got out of school, because I could leave my work at work and didn't really care about it anyway. I don't think I reached a level of distractedness equal to my college career until I made senior engineer (and hence have everyone asking me for advice) and started dating, 5 years later.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#150

Post by FD3SA » Wed, Oct 26, 2011, 5:56 AM UTC

Eliezer wrote: post #105

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 ;)

As an autodidact (I never dropped out of anything, I just didn't go to high school after 8th grade) allow me to say that I have never, ever wondered how successful I could've been if I'd gone to college, nor yet suffered from impostor syndrome.

I would go as far as to say that, to an autodidact, structured education is akin to Chinese water torture. A Steady, predictable flow of bland facts hammered into your skull, while you cannot change flow rate, the subject or the scope. Also, you cannot escape.

I avoided the natural sciences throughout my entire secondary and post-secondary career, as I feared the catastrophic effects structured learning would have on my inherent passion for those subjects. The joy of reading Darwin and Hawking, and the resultant awe of the universe, could not have been manufactured in a structured learning environment.