Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do I need to go to university?

colah.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 279 posts

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#71

Post by toyg »

CalChris wrote: post #49

If your own answer to your own question isn't absolutely YES then take a gap year or years. Join the Navy. See the world. When you're done with that you'll be much much more ready than if you indifferently do what you suppose you're supposed to do. But yes, you do need to go to university, a good one. And you need to graduate.

Can’t upvote this enough. I wish I had taken a gap year back then, and I will insist that my kids do it. More than a decade of schooling inevitably takes a toll, and optimizing for highschool success can mislead one’s choice for university.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#72

Post by sdan »

toyg wrote: post #52
barry-cotter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re already decided you’re into startups the network and prestige of Y Combinator will help more than most any college. If you want the stamp of admission to the US ruling class sure, go to where the elite send their children to find someone to marry but otherwise you could do worse than committing to what you actually want instead of chasing a network.

YCombinator might well disappear in a few years. Universities tend to last much longer, some of them have been around for centuries. In 50 years something like YC might be a footnote in wikipedia, but I can assure you that most respectable universities will still be around to “guarantee” one’s worth. I never graduated and I was an idiot. Stay in school, kids.

Yes, YC is amazing and I'll probably drop out when (if) I get in. At the moment I'm going to an Ok-ish UC (university of california) and hoping that I'll be able to prove to better colleges that I can bring in big donations later on :) and transfer there before I drop out so at least I'll be able to say "I went to X good college"

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#73

Post by sanxiyn »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #46
AdrianB1 wrote: post #18

I had in my teams people without any college degree or college dropouts, some gave up after one year and some close to graduation. They were good developers, the only difference I saw between college graduates and the other developers was that the college graduates were less flexible and tending to apply what they learned in college to the letter, even where it did not make sense. A few days ago I was talking to one…

I've had the opposite experience working with a mix of uni-attendees and not. Compared to their university-attended coworkers, the straight-to-industry folk were far more likely to cargo cult design patterns, languages, and frameworks.

This is not my experience at all, and people without a degree I worked with were better learners.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#74

Post by nabla9 »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

I think the sentiment is very U.S. specific. The US seems to have higher education system with some peculiarities. They have the best universities but also some shady ones and it can be expensive.

Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#75

Post by sdan »

WalterBright wrote: post #60
sdan wrote: post #32

I'm a senior in high school and decided to. I started a startup and got invited for a YC interview(got rejected) and am onto another startup which is raising soon. Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their N…

> college name matters Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.

I think you're right in many scenarios, but in the VC/startup world it def. seems to matter. I've been relentlessly reading people's stories and have been looking into how to get internships at various VC/tech companies and it always comes down to: which college you're going to.

Nuro for example had this open house that exclusively invited Harvard/MIT students (i snuck in) and I'm sure there's a lot of similar opportunities that are open to kids in these colleges.

In the long term, I'm sure it'll fade away, but starting out matters as to where you will end up (whether you go to X startup or get to work for X VC)

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#76

Post by llarsson »

xondono wrote: post #67
WalterBright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the same. I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc. I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.

And I suspect that both of you got technical degrees and work in technical fields. You are almost by definition an edge case.

Not at HN, where this is discussed, and also not considering that the article being discussed is hosted on a github page.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#77

Post by henrikeh »

oleks wrote: post #22
mvind wrote: post #14

I think the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs. This is a perk that not a lot of jobs in the real world offers. Almost nowhere else in a person's life are you given such an opportunity to invest in ones interests. But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.

You are not paid to go the university in Denmark. You are awarded credits by the government, and it is up to you to do something sensible with those credits. Don't waste them on needless courses! Learn that which will yield you (and the Danish government) the greatest benefits throughout the rest of your life.

It reads a little like your are misunderstanding what is meant by “paid to go to university”. Danish citizens receive a grant called “SU” (Statens uddannelsesstøtte), which basically is a payment from the government for being enrolled in education. It is meant to be spend on food, rent, living, books etc

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_Denmark

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#78

Post by zvxczvxz »

I know incredibly smart and wise people without a degree, and I also know incredibly dumb people with a degree. A degree is not a guarantee for intelligence and wisdom, but it is most often a guarantee for vanity covering shortcomings.

Almost all knowledge (and more) can be learned for free on the internet nowadays. I'ts only for a specific category of professions where a degree is mandatory. I never expect a great professional to have a degree, because the real defining quality cannot be learned at a university. You cannot express what you are not. You cannot become an Einstein by doing 5 years of university, but they love to make you believe that shit.

I am not against higher education at all, but the term 'degree' is pretty worthless if you want to measure mastery.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#79

Post by geomark »

Lots of anecdotes here. So I will add mine.

I did a 2 year technical diploma program and went to work as an electronics technician. I was good, got promoted fast, started fixing a lot of mistakes the degreed engineers were making. I got pretty far without a degree but eventually hit a ceiling because credentialism was strong at the company. So I went back to college, a good private college, paid for by my employer. It was hard, because I was working longer and longer hours since I was good and they counted on me, while taking classes part time. The classes I took taught very little and did nothing for me except that finally getting my degree I could break through the credentials ceiling.

So...if you are going to work for a company that values credentials then you need the degree and I think it is better to go straight from high school to college instead of doing it the hard way like I did.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#80

Post by virgilp »

laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

I've worked with a guy that didn't finish his studies (started working out of university/ during 1st year and completely neglected it until they expelled him). He was surprisingly good though as in he had a solid theoretical foundation, knew the inner workings of a compiler (this was relevant for the project we worked on) etc.

Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.

Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?

Post reply on HN