Dropping out is probably not for you

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 think that getting someone to pay you for your work is the hardest. Deceptively hard.

Agree. That's why I think people aiming to make money from software should look more to advertising income. Much easier IMHO ;) Anyone can make a good income with a little effort.

I dropped out of uni after a year, with no idea what I was going to do. I dread to think what I'd be doing if I'd stayed. Probably some corporate drone at a bank.

Oh, I don't know about that. I don't want to get all Kanye about highed ed, but I never understood why university teaching methods are so dependent on the final exam. All the work students do throughout the year is worth very little compared to the final exam. Its a system, imho, that encourages skipping class and binge studying.

It rewards people who can cram well and have good memories, but punishes those who do good work and who aren't good at last minute cram sessions. I've always thought it borderline cruel, especially when the workplace doesn't reflect this. I rarely jerk around M-F and stay up until 4am on Sunday to perform some big task. Its all about rationally addressing problems, breaking them into chunks, and performing those chunks. At universities, its all about irrationally fucking around and doing a last minute cram to get by. I can see why so many talented young men and women would consider dropping out to enter the startup workforce, especially in a down economy that isn't hiring and the sudden realization of having a huge loan debt for the next 10-20 years.

I remember more than a few classes that were structured as 90% final exam and 10% everything else (or more typically 80/20). I never felt this was fair to the student and only encouraged lousy study habits, procrastination, and cheating. Its almost as if the American college experience is one big exercise in not doing things the proper way.

I feel this made me a worse procrastinator than I already was and that it took me several years to shed these bad habits.

>"I think I have a simpler test: Do you have a customer?"

Hopefully, a person's optimism and lack of experience still allows them to distinguish between actual customers and possible customers [Hint: until money changes hands a person is not a customer].

One thing which struck me after reading the article was the difference between today's typical customers and those of Jacques' younger days.

Although today's base of potential customers is much bigger due to the expansion of computing devices into the consumer market segments, their expectations about software costs approach $0.00.

Conversely, back in the day, the smaller market expected to pay real commercial money for software - i.e. one typical customer could sustain a person for a year whereas today one customer won't even get you fries off the $0.99 menu after the app store takes their cut.

Would army service not be similar to getting a degree, in that you are focused on a daily bases on core learning? It sounds as if your service experience has been as valuable as some schools.