[ask hn]How many of you are dropouts?

> the truth of life is that having a Masters degree opens 100x more doors than not having it

This is true in some industries but not all. In the world of programming, it is perhaps true for your first couple of jobs. After that, if you have done well, it is basically irrelevant.

If you have access to an excellent CS program like Stanford or MIT, then that is definitely worth it, and any university is good for making social and business connections which can be very valuable later on.

But from a strict getting-a-job perspective - well, I hire programmers for a startup, and I don't place too much weight on a degree. I've seen people with CS degrees who were absolutely useless, and absolute top-notch developers without a degree, and vice versa. I will look at their work and their personalities over some long-ago half-forgotten theoretical knowledge every time.

Obviously you are a technician and not an HR manager ;)

Unfortunately I assure you nothing changed in the 90s or 00s WRT teaching yesterdays fads, tomorrow.

Maybe its better in the 10s.

I did the night school / online thing nearly a decade ago after having been in the field a little longer than yourself. What I enjoyed the most was variety. Some schools don't have many electives, avoid those.

I got an associates degree when I initially got started. 99% of hiring managers consider that toilet paper if not used toilet paper. That's "OK" because after your first real job no one cares about degrees anymore. It just makes the initial job search, pure hell. The only difference between an associates and a bachelors is about 32 credits of liberal arts, lots of math, and some random stuff (public speaking, survey of engineering, business 101, that kind of thing). I was kind of pissed off at not getting transfer credit for my FORTRAN and COBOL classes, I got to take some intro to programming C++ classes in the early 00s, that was, um, interesting, it was very easy but still very time consuming.

Liberal arts are wasted on the youth. For example I hated history class in 8th grade, absolutely loved college level history when I was about 3x that age. Lit classes were awesome. You'll hear a lot of 19 year olds on the HN echo chamber mode telling each other that liberal arts classes are a waste of time, that kind of talk goes away once (or if?) they age and get some wisdom.

Like so many others have said, first it depends on what you mean as successful. One thing you need to think about with college is student loan debt. Some can go through without loans but many can not. So you need to not only work hard, but also to network hard so that you can get a good enough job that will allow you to pay back the loans without destroying your standard of living.

Beyond that, college offers many opportunities such as making friendships, meeting people from other countries and having access to vast stores of information and industry professionals. This is something that is difficult to duplicate simply by striking out on your own. Possible, but difficult.

It's true that some people simply don't need to go to college. They are already emotionally and intellectually mature enough to enter the world of business. But you must realize that they are the minority. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs.

Personally, I didn't drop out. But I did take several years off between high school and college. I worked one awesome job until it went out of business. Then I tried freelancing but I just didn't have the technical ability nor the salesmanship to make any money. During undergrad I continued freelancing on and off but I got burned by more clients than I actually got paid by. During my master's though I worked for the university on several great projects and that allowed me to have an awesome resume. Then it pretty much started raining jobs. By the end of my coursework I was working 3 jobs and I ended up killing my 4.0 and graduated with a 3.9 (I may never get over the shame).

Now I am qualified, have a track record of success, and above all else have the confidence to sell myself and my abilities. And I didn't have any of that before college.

Binary thinking ALERT

Lets have fun with "scare quotes". No one told me I "had to" "either" attend university full time or drop out completely, so crazy me, I chose the 3rd option.

I ran out of money and motivation after about a year full time, man cannot live on ramen alone, got an offer for about 1/2 the pay of a real job but full tuition reimbursement while 1/2 real pay was still a modest integer multiple of minimum wage, so needless to say I jumped. Dramatic increase in standard of living, etc.

Personally I found one weeknight class (typically 2 hrs tue/thr or mon/wed) and one weekend class (typically a brain numbing 4 hr saturday morning/afternoon) was about right when things were boring, but family + work pressure etc occasionally resulted in only one class per semester. I knew people who tried to pull off 3 or even 4 classes with a full time 1st shift job, but they suffered horribly.

I studied and did homework every lunch time at work and very rarely did homework at home other than the occasional term paper.