Ask HN: Friend's 15 year old wants to drop out, I've been asked to intervene

Personally, this is how it should be. Let him be his own man or woman. Don't take his freedom simply because you cannot see the logical reasoning or benefits in it, and by preventing his freedom you are preventing the future freedom and partially your own.

Your situation is fascinating. You are simultaneously me (although substitute software exploit development for Minecraft hosting and subtract a lot of dollars) at Jesuit school in the '90s and, from what I can see coming, my son (now 13).

Can I offer you some more advice?

* Find some honest, worldly adults, preferably some affiliated with colleges, to lock down the advice you're getting about going GED instead of finishing school. I'm finding it jarring and disquieting; on the one hand, if the people advocating GEDs are wrong, you could be making your life much more annoying by complicating your entrance into college; on the other hand, if they're right, sticking out school is actually going to make college harder because your grades are going to suck.

* Read fiction, and get a book on writing (check out _Style: Towards Clarity And Grace_ --- it approaches writing the way K&R approaches C), and take writing seriously. You write like a very smart teenager; you don't edit, and you choose puffy words, but you also write like someone who doesn't hate writing. The world cares very much about this. Writing clearly and confidently will get you a long way in your career. You won't find many successful adults who will tell you otherwise. Participate in forums and, when you do, try to be mindful of how you're writing; there's no better way to learn than to practice, and no easier way to practice than to yell at people (gracefully) on forums.

* If you're serious today about a future in technology, learn to code. I know a lot of people who dropped out of college early for careers in systems/networking who never learned to program, and it hamstrung them later in life. High school won't teach you anything about programming, but the first few semesters of a good college CS program are a forcing function that does. Don't settle for PHP! If you're already doing this, congratulations, and keep on it. Software development is the fissile core of the whole industry.

* I'm probably the 1000th person to tell you this, but that's because it's very true: you will not necessarily want the same things when you're 30 as you do now at 15. The world is full of talented technologists now working as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and teachers. Screwing up college doesn't close many doors in technology, but it does almost everywhere else. As you get older, your degrees of freedom diminish, and obstacles you create for yourself now can become forbidding later. Keep the doors open.

Let us know how all this goes!

Lots quit school for "real life", and for far worse reasons than having a substantial & profitable business, though I'd suggest there's a survivor bias to the ones you hear about - Branson, Gates etc.

Like I said, the only reason against is that you don't know what you don't know, and his parents will see real risks that he won't.

The time for an intervention was a while back, and it just doesn't seem like a terrible parental decision to throw your support behind a child with ambition and some success. (unless of course the business is propped up by parental subsidy, or favours from friends: free rent, broadband, meals etc. might have made a ramen-profitable business look like a fabulously comfortable one).

Who knows whether it's the right decision? It's a viable one while business is good. I hope his motivation stays strong for whatever comes next - whether that's expansion, a second business, college, or something else. Good luck to him.

I was a lot like you (I'm addressing this post at the person the whole thread is about, not Thomas) for the second half of high school. I had a lot of fun hacking on various projects, was quite sure that CS was my future, and thought my classes--though I did find parts of most of them interesting--were mostly wasting my time. I talked about wanting to quit, and if I had a successful project that started bringing money in the door, I might have.

One trick is that I did care very much about my grades. So after some wavering about whether I wanted to go to college or push it off indefinitely, I decided to go to Stanford. And for reasons that I can't entirely explain, I signed up for a program where I spent freshman year reading a sizable portion of the important Western writers of the past 2500 years. And I realized that I actually really like the humanities when done well.

But I was still pretty set on a career in tech startups, took mainly CS aside from that program, and flirted with dropping out a couple times.

Now it's my junior year, and I've slowly realized that there are a lot more options out there that interest me. I gained an appreciation for the academic side of CS. And I realized that I really do like and care about thinking and writing about social issues, philosophy, and some other things.

I've pretty much determined that my dream job is professor because it would let me do everything I like doing (innovate technically, communicate, teach people, mentor people). However, I'm also probably not going to go down that track because of the hazing (grad school + difficulty of finding academic jobs afterward) and inflexibility (in the good case, you probably only have one great job offer in one place, and you'll pretty much be there for life), but if you had asked me freshman year, I would have said I had no interest in research.

I'm also not sure that I want to stay in tech forever. There are a lot of interesting problems, one person's contributions can be meaningful in some settings, and it's very flexible and well-compensated. However, a lot of what people are doing is pretty boring to me on most levels (most companies don't need innovative technology, and even most of the ones that are innovating aren't particularly doing anything for society that I care about). After a decade or two, there's a good chance I'll want to do something more interdisciplinary and with more social value. I definitely am not convinced startups are the thing for me; the vast majority of startups just seem banal at this point, though there are some gems.

This also ties into the fact that I expect the world to change a lot in my lifetime. Tech is important to me now, but as the world changes, that could change too, and the more freedom I have to do that, the happier I'll be.

I've learned a lot about what there is in the world and what I care about in the last five years thanks to being in school. And I have a great foundation that will make it easier for me to follow my interests as they develop.

As a side note, college has been an extremely important time for me as a person. I felt pretty adult as a senior in high school, and in many ways, I was; I was far more responsible and better at avoiding stupid decisions than most of my classmates. But I still had a lot of growing up to do, especially socially. I don't think college is necessarily the optimal environment for that development, but it's a very good one. Make sure that you have friends about your age, whom you frequently see in person, and spend significant time with. Get close to some of them.

Finally, writing well is extremely important and useful no matter what you do. It is worth the investment, and the earlier you invest, the more it will pay off.