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Dropping out is probably not for you

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Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#91

Post by dasil003 »

randomdata wrote: post #72
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 ;)

It is true that dropouts in the past have had to work hard to point out that college is not necessary for success. However, given how many articles we have seen about not dropping out on HN in the last week, it seems the tables have actually turned. It is the graduates now working hard to restore value to their degrees. College has no proven track record. The best we have is some loose correlation showing people who…

If you could somehow determine the benefit of a college degree and graph it against the cost over time it would be obvious that college was a no-brainer for boomers, and is becoming quite dubious these days.

50 years ago a state college degree could be paid for by a part-time job at a gas station, and once you had it you were virtually guaranteed gainful employment. These days, easy loans are turning ignorant youth into indentured servants, and it's not even a guarantee of employment, so college could actually be harmful.

Personally I got a great deal out of my college experience, and I did it without debt thanks to 2 years of community college and 2 years of staff employment at a University that paid my remaining tuition (ironically it was my self-taught web skills that landed me this job). If I had had to take on $30k or $40k of debt the equation would have been radically different.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#92

Post by ricardobeat »

the success rate of the average first-time start-up is so low that it makes playing the lottery look like a good investment

People love lines like this, but a 20% chance is a million times better than any kind of lottery. Even here in Brazil, where it sucks to be a business owner, recent data shows that +50% of small business survive for over 2 years.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#93

Post by invalidOrTaken »

No one will read this because I'm posting so late, but I'll describe my experience:

I was a stats major, emphasis actuarial science. On paper, I was set to go work for some insurance company and make bank.

Except...I couldn't make myself care about it. Done purely for money, that stuff is pretty boring.

No, I didn't drop out. The university did that for me as my grades plummeted.

I'd learned a bit of java, so I applied for a job out of the student paper and ended up working on an application for...wait for it...insurance agents. Exactly what I couldn't make myself care about in school. In Visual Basic.

Having read enough of pg's essays to somehow acquire the impression that I was a Great Hacker destined for startup greatness because I had played around with CL, I quit the insurance software gig to build....video conferencing software! I even found a customer willing to pay me for it. I was clueless and so was he, so we ended up negotiating a fixed-price contract. Cue the tragic cycle of I-didn't-realize-it-would-take-this-long-and-I'm-not-getting-paid enough on the developer's part, and it became a nightmare project that dragged on four months longer than it should have.

Cue some more inexperienced-at-software-and-inexperienced-at-contracting horror stories, and I was kind of sick of being on my own. I found the one cool company in my area and bravado'd my way into an interview. They were everything awesome the insurance company hadn't been: smart people. Great conditions. Clojure and Ruby as main languages. Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information on the coffee table in reception. An engineer cofounder (vs. an insurance agent founder).

And...I wasn't qualified. I'd plugged some libraries together for the videoconferencing thing, and the Rails stuff I'd done on contract was pretty basic. Any my stats knowledge was poor. I'd dropped out!

So I decided to go back to school. Part of the reason I failed so badly in school is because I had a really hard time getting motivated when I could see how sucky most of higher-education is for actual education---many things are quietly optimized toward extracting money from the student's parents, or measuring things for future employers, or compensating for a model with many students and few professors. This is all true, but I can get a loan to attend school, while I can't get a loan to grab a bunch of textbooks and start cranking.

So if someone were thinking of dropping out, I'd say---do it. Absolutely do it. If you're sick of school and can't get motivated, no inspirational talk will cure that, and you'll stumble through half-caring, graduating with either a useless degree (because you didn't learn anything) or failing out like I did.

The only thing that will cure you of that is experience outside of school. That will be what tells you how off-base (or on!) you are. Since I left school my opinions on some portions of it being B.S. have only strengthened. But I have also gained an appreciation for certain parts that I took for granted. So if you leave, be cold-blooded about it. You may hate the system (it deserves it), but it might be useful to you later, so don't burn that bridge if you can help it.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#94

Post by dasil003 »

michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Thank you. Excellent article that needs to be read by everyone who's considering dropping out for "a startup". Let's ignore the complexities and focus on crude market value. A smart person with no college degree can probably earn $25,000 per year at 18. We're assuming a middle to upper-middle class background-- no special family connections-- and a reasonable work ethic. With a CS, math, or science degree from a good…

Your back of the envelope is dubious. Where are they paying 22-year-olds $80k? Only at soul-sucking corporations and over-funded startups with no fiscal responsibility.

Also, the person with the capability to get a CS/Math/Science degree (from a respectable program) will likely have other potential that fall somewhere between the typical dropout and Gatesian success.

I think the strongest argument to stay in school is that most 18-year-olds don't have the discipline to fulfill that potential, so they'll get more out of a structured environment. I know I was certainly this way. However if you are the exceptional 18-year-old that is driven in some way (whether it be code, art, music, business, whatever), then you probably won't regret jumping.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#95

Post by sukuriant »

padobson wrote: post #89
michaelochurch wrote: post #10

Thank you. Excellent article that needs to be read by everyone who's considering dropping out for "a startup". Let's ignore the complexities and focus on crude market value. A smart person with no college degree can probably earn $25,000 per year at 18. We're assuming a middle to upper-middle class background-- no special family connections-- and a reasonable work ethic. With a CS, math, or science degree from a good…

I graduated with honors from a top 10% university and it cost a heck of a lot more than $25k AND I've now been working for 3.5 years and I haven't hit the $80k mark yet. Only a small subset of the skills that I'm marketing right now did I learn in college. Furthermore, I'm doing better than a lot of my peers. Your numbers are suspect at best. $25k x 4 = $100,000 opportunity cost for college. $20k x 4 = $100,000 colle…

Don't forget some people get free rides through college (I did), so they only have to pay for food for 4 years. Also, 25k a year seems a bit optimistic, IMO.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#96

Post by dasil003 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #35
kiba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleep deprivation. Drunk people. Final exam stress. Sleep deprivation and final exam stress is mostly our own making. If you use SRS and study regularly, I am sure the college life is no problem.

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 go…

Or... it taught you to deal with procrastination head on?

Anyway, this is not universal. My CS program (University of Minnesota) tended to be about 50% assignments / 50% tests. It varied by class of course, theoretical stuff has to go by tests (numerical computing, discrete math, etc). The programming classes sometimes had competitions for bonus points, optimizing a C program in machine architecture, or a head-to-head game competition between programs (that was super fun, and really cut my cleverness down to size).

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#97

Post by cperciva »

hugh3 wrote: post #80
cperciva wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 hours per week for 50 weeks per year for 4 years is 10,000 hours Or for most students, 40 hours per week for 16 weeks per term for 2 terms per year for 4 years is 5,120 hours. Which might just explain why students coming out of college tend to be at most half good at something.

40 hours per week? Sure, maybe if you're a total conch. For me, undergrad was more like eighteen hours a week for fourteen weeks, then fifty hours a week for one week. And that was with a heavy physics/maths courseload.

I was trying to be generous. Some students come out of college nowhere near to being half-good at anything. ;-)

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#98

Post by Ryanmf »

Going to keep most of my crazy opinions to myself on this one, but a few points:

1. If someone dropped several thousand dollars in seed money in my lap today and said "Hire some people, establish a profitable business," I would feel more enthusiastic about an interview with someone who'd dropped out of CalTech, MIT, OTIS, Art Center, RISD, or Parsons than one with a graduate from anywhere.

2. Not that it necessarily matters, but whenever I encounter the argument that a university education is or should be considered a required component of "success" or "learning" my opinion of the person making the argument drops significantly. Specifically, I find myself treating their judgment of what constitutes "success" or a "learned" person with complete disregard. These feelings are especially strong when they're directed toward someone older than me. (Is there a fake formula to measure how forgivable someone's stupidity is, given their age?)

3. If you're between the ages of 16 and 24 and have convinced yourself that you must be "successful" by the time you're 25, you'll probably feel like a failure whether you drop out or not. In the event that you matriculate/graduate, you'll just be more likely to have picked up a lot of debt, and maybe a nasty alcohol and/or adderall habit. Worse case scenario: you'll be 21-23 with a fancy piece of paper, the false impression that you "get it," and not much else.

(To be fair, I met my best friends in college—which is now a huge pain in the ass since everyone's scattered across the country—and the majority of my favorite memories are from that time. But after meeting those people my freshman year, I could have dropped out, done enough design work to cover food, gas, and rent in Pacific Beach—I went to school in San Diego–and had largely the same experience.)

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#99

Post by tedkalaw »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #93

No one will read this because I'm posting so late, but I'll describe my experience: I was a stats major, emphasis actuarial science. On paper, I was set to go work for some insurance company and make bank. Except...I couldn't make myself care about it. Done purely for money, that stuff is pretty boring. No, I didn't drop out. The university did that for me as my grades plummeted. I'd learned a bit of java, so I appli…

I wanted to reply to this because my experience was somewhat similar to yours. I dropped out of school to do a startup and realized that I actually WANTED to learn my major (CS stuff). I also missed the academic environment. Luckily for me, I was far enough ahead with credit hours that the time I took off didn't mess up my graduation time.

Re: Dropping out is probably not for you

#100

Post by lurker17 »

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.…

That story is not true at all. Bill Gates's mother set him up with IBM years after he dropped out. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_...
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