
All Rockstars Went to Julliard - LockeWatts
http://lockewatts.com/blog/2012/07/13/all-rockstars-went-to-julliard/
======
izak30
You're wasting effort with this. It feels good to write. It feels good to hear
when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you. It's not about money, it's
about positive indicators. An Ivy League school is a positive indicator,
starting a company is a positive indicator. Kicking Ass on your own personal
or side projects is a positive indicator. Open Source contributions are a
positive indicator. Previous work experience that you can explain well and
brag about is a positive indicator. Build your positive indicators, and don't
complain about others building theirs.

Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or
success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you
were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying
around".

~~~
crusso
I came here to say that, but you said it better than I might have.

I would like to add that his/her post reeked of rationalization fueled by
insecurity.

In real life, there are sometimes reasons we fail that are beyond our control.
There are always excuses for failure that have some truth in them. There are
always ways that we can look at the successful as lucky SOBs and the
unsuccessful as victims of cruel fate.

While it's interesting to contemplate the roles of skill and luck in success
on a Sunday afternoon -- I've never met a really successful person who didn't
have a positive outlook on her ability to mold her opportunities, to watch for
chances to make a move, and to sieze those moments that were right and ride
them to success.

To glorify happenstance (the particular school you can afford to go to) and
self-victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy and guaranteed way to minimize
your own chances of ever being successful at anything.

Are we our knowledge and experiences? Are we our genetic potential? Are we our
upbringing? Are we just products of random chance and our environment? The
more I learn in life, the more I become convinced that we are our ATTITUDE.
Attitude is the prime factor in success or failure. It is the leading
indicator to me when I go to hire someone or decide whether or not I want to
work with him.

I don't care what school you went to -- if success is your goal, then start
with attitude. Adopt one that drives you to focus on yourself and your own
improvement every day of your life. Good things will follow.

~~~
LockeWatts
Huh. Impressive how much of my personality comes across that way. You're
right, on pretty much everything. I am insecure, though I've never understood
the difference between rationalization and circumstance. When you're betting
more or less your future on you being excellent in your given field, that can
really do a number on your self confidence.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the critique. Besides the list of projects I'm
working on and my job, any advice for how to improve?

~~~
nostrademons
Rationalization = excusing your lack of success based on factors beyond your
control, circumstance = accepting the factors beyond your control and playing
the hell out of the factors that _are_ in your control.

It's too bad that Marc Andreesen took his career advice blog post off the
Internet, because he had some of the best advice I've seen. It was:

    
    
      1. Build skills & relationships.
      2. Take advantage of opportunities
    

Basically, all of the big leaps in your career will happen because some random
big opportunity outside of your control will open up. When it does, _jump on
it_. Immediately. Drop everything you're doing for it. Most people don't, and
that is why most people slave away their lives in cubicles.

But to seize that opportunity, you need to be qualified, and you need to hear
about it. So all the time that you're not actively seizing an opportunity, you
should be building your skill base and getting to know other people. That's
the important part: opportunities happen to everybody, but the vast majority
of people aren't in a position to take advantage of them.

------
larsberg
Two things:

1) Yield is a big issue. At larger companies, they track how many people they
get from different universities, how long they last, how far they go, etc.
Most recruiting efforts are then focused on the few schools that give the most
graduates that are the best fit for the company. And yes, there are all sorts
of long-term issues with this.

Speaking as a former hiring manger, it was just a lot of work to go some of
the other schools (especially some of the large state schools with non-top-
tier CS programs) because even though we would find 1-2 candidate, we would
have to filter through a huge number of candidates to do so. For those
schools, we generally relied on personal recommendations from faculty to
recent alumni.

2) I went to and am now a PhD student at a very expensive private university.
Many of the students, like myself, are middle class, getting very little aid
(other than merit) while their parents are forced to share the living-on-ramen
experience during college. But, those huge loans (I think I had somewhere
between 60-80k when I graduated many years ago) are quickly paid off if you
continue living on little money working for a top firm. Most of my peers'
loans were all paid off in the first 2-3 years of working. It's a huge worry,
but in practice turns out not to be a big deal for CS majors from top schools.

Certainly, it drives many job decisions, though. A low-pay startup job was not
in the cards while I had all that debt hanging over my head, and I assume
that's true for other middle class folks.

~~~
temuze
I think it's also worth mentioning that financial aid at most Ivy League
schools ar incredible. Look at Princeton - the goal of their financial aid
office is to make sure that everyone who needs financial aid (middle class or
not), get financial aid. It's very common that graduates come out of school
without any debt at all.

~~~
nessus42
I also know from having worked at Harvard that most Harvard students these
days graduate with little or no debt due to a generous financial aid system
there.

I wish it had been like that when I went to MIT. (MIT did have plenty of
financial aid, but not to the no-debt level.)

------
ihodes
The myth of a top-notch education costing six-figures is getting a little old.
The price tag is over $200k. The actual cost is under $50k, with the price
dropping as you go to school with bigger endowments/better financial aid. Many
schools graduate students with less than $20k in debt. At current rates,
students pay about $100-200 a month to pay off these loans on time. Just some
facts.

~~~
enjo
I came from a upper-middle class family. We were wealthy enough that
qualifying for financial aid at an ivy was basically impossible. We were poor
enough (with 3 of us in college at once) that it wasn't possible.

This was particularly problematic because my dad (a military doctor) had only
been out of the military for a couple of years. Meaning the salary he we were
being pegged at for financial aid was something he had only been earning for 2
years or so. He mad significantly less in the military.

Point being: For some folks, in some situations.. the cost is well beyond
reach.

~~~
ihodes
The Ivys and liberal arts places I know take multiple children going to school
at the same time well into account. I'm sorry for the trouble, but I'm not
sure if you didn't look into it, or if you are talking about a situation well
into the past. That's just not the case anymore.

EDIT: Hell, look at the comment below; the net price calculator
(<http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/>) even has a drop-down for number of children in
college.

~~~
enjo
It was 15 years ago:)

~~~
ihodes
That makes sense—it's gotten a LOT better! Even if the price tag has increased
significantly…

------
troels
Oh. Sure the rich and beautiful have it easier, but what does that have to do
with you? You say you want to pursue your own ideas? Great - Then do that.
What's the worst that could happen anyway? A bit of debt perhaps? A slightly
less flashy car? Fewer money come time to retirement? It's not like you and
your family would die from starvation if you fail - Unlike most of the rest of
the world. You're already uniquely privileged.

------
ynniv
Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when
GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who
maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship). Not saying that you won't find
good people at UGA (biting my GT tongue!), but following his rationale and
years of work experience in Atlanta (showing Georgia residency), his story
seems a little thin.

Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders, and
ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used. Not every rockstar
went to Julliard, but they were good at what they did.

~~~
LockeWatts
Lol, okay.

"Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when
GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who
maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship)."

UGA has a combined bachelors & masters program that I wanted to do, and I knew
the security professor and adviser going in who have both been very supportive
to me, while Tech's staff were absolutely horrendous.

"Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders"

I put the cart before the horse, so to speak. I made the links and banners &
such as I was working on the projects, and then my circumstances changed and I
had to find a job. I mentioned this in the post. Would you like me to send you
some of my completed work?

"ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used"

Where were those? I'd love to go kill those links.

~~~
ynniv
You chose UGA (a quiet state school) over GT (a world class research
university) because GT was too abrasive and you know a friendly prof at UGA?
To me, this undermines your position more than anything else. You have set
yourself up to get by without learning or trying too hard. If true, you are
only arguing against the Ivy League bias because you are on the losing side of
it, not because it is misguided.

 _Where were those? I'd love to go kill those links._

Seriously? _man grep_ and "to hell with (the University of) Georgia!"

~~~
LockeWatts
>You chose UGA (a quiet state school) over GT (a world class research
university) because GT was too abrasive and you know a friendly prof at UGA?

That, they have a fast track Bachelor's\Master's combined degree, and I was
originally a Poli Sci double major when I got here.

But I appreciate your condescension, thanks.

~~~
ynniv
_That, they have a fast track Bachelor's\Master's combined degree, and I was
originally a Poli Sci double major when I got here._

Computer science and Poly Sci double major? Are you serious?! Perhaps my
original comment that UGA < GT came off condescending, but honestly it could
have been a lot more. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt.

But, you came to HN to talk about there are capable people who didn't go to
Ivy League schools. And I agree with that. Given my experience thus far, I
would go even farther and say that an Ivy League education makes you a worse
engineer, but that's getting off topic.

So let's get down to how people really become rockstars: they are obsessively
dedicated to being musicians because they don't know what else to do in life.
Folks who went to GT to learn Computer Science were already at a disadvantage,
because of those of us who had been doing this for a decade already. I
graduated years ago, but I don't feel that I've ever stopped learning how to
be better at what I do. I'm not saying that I'm a "rockstar", but when I look
at people to work with (ie, hire), that's the kind of drive that I'm looking
for.

 _I appreciate your condescension, thanks._

Any time, and there's plenty more where that came from.

But don't take it personally. I don't dislike you - I dislike what you're
doing. If you want to do this for a living, then show us by working harder at
it. Get rid of anything that isn't complete on your website. Don't be so lofty
in your opinions, just do good work and keep doing it. You'll find more
opportunities than you need.

~~~
LockeWatts
_Computer science and Poly Sci double major? Are you serious?!_

Yeah? Does that say something I'm not aware of?

 _Get rid of anything that isn't complete on your website._

Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?

 _So let's get down to how people really become rockstars: they are
obsessively dedicated to being musicians because they don't know what else to
do in life. Folks who went to GT to learn Computer Science were already at a
disadvantage, because of those of us who had been doing this for a decade
already._

Perhaps I'm not obsessive on the level of Kurt Cobain, but I'll have been
doing this for a decade before I graduate. How would I go about better
communicating that drive?

~~~
philwelch
> Yeah? Does that say something I'm not aware of?

It says you're not a monomaniac who cares only about appropriate intellectual
pursuits, like computer science, mathematics, or physics.

~~~
ynniv
Snarky. Maybe if he took on a third major you would give him a job.

~~~
philwelch
I'm not in the business of giving people jobs. If I was, being enough of an
asshole to denigrate people for having different academic interests at age 18
would be more of a red flag to me than simply having different academic
interests at age 18. Maybe that's why I'm not in the business of giving people
jobs.

------
mustpax
Yes, getting out of the resume pile is harder without a name brand college
degree but you shouldn't be going in the resume pile in the first place. Make
connections, build your network, get referrals. Once you actually make it to
the on-site interview, your performance in the interview will trump almost all
else.

The resume pile is where good ideas go to die. Faced with the fact that
resumes are 99% useless, hiring managers latch on to things that are cozy and
familiar, keywords, GPAs, brand-name school. This sucks, but don't let others'
mistakes keep you from demonstrating your potential.

------
tytso
"Life is unfair. Deal with it."

There is no doubt that if someone's parents had the means to give them a
computer, and that grade school student or high school students was able to
start practicing the craft of programming early, they will have a huge leg up
on someone who didn't have that opportunity. For better or worse, that's the
world that we live in. Accept it, and move on.

OK, you weren't someone who had the opportunity to learn Cisco IOS at an early
age, and was configuring core Internet backbone routers as a job and wearing a
pager in high school, before you started at MIT as a freshman. OK, you're not
someone who contributed so much to the Linux kernel in high school that you
were invited to the annual Kernel Summit, which brings together the top 75 or
so linux kernel developers, the summer before you started at MIT. These are
two real people that I know. There's nothing I can do to change society to
make things "fair"; and there's nothing you can do about either. So stop
whining about it.

I've looked at LockeWatts's resume, and the problem as someone who has been a
hiring manager, is there's absolutely no signal in his resume that he would
actually _be_ a someone who could "compete with the best of them". He's made
that assertion, but lots of people have made that assertion. And while he
might be really bright, unfortunately, I've met many people who claimed to be
super bright, but then when I asked them to code up a simple function on the
whiteboard, they couldn't do something incredibly basic.

Furthermore, although it will no doubt be painful for him to hear this, I very
much _doubt_ he is a rockstar. He might have the potential to be a rockstar,
but takes a huge amount of practice to get there. It is rare, and no doubt
requires privilege, for someone to have that status right out of college, or
in the cases I detailed above, before they even started college.

The good news is that this is something that time and experience, and a lot of
determination on Colin's part, can fix. You can't change your family
circumstances; but you can control how much time you spend honing your art and
your craft. Sure, you need to focus on bringing home your biweekly paycheck.
But you can control whether you go to movies, or go out drinking with your
buddies, or whether you spend that working on open source projects, or
learning new computer languages, or taking time to read self-help books to do
what Stevey Covey called "Sharpening the Saw" (cf 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People).

Maybe it will take you an extra 2 or 3 or even 5 years. But you can give
yourself rockstar-like skills and experience, if you are willing to make the
appropriate choices and sacrifices.

~~~
jiggy2011
I'm not sure the article is intended to be targeted towards people who want an
excuse to blame for their lack of success. I guess it is aimed at employers to
try and make them consider context and circumstances when viewing somebody's
job application.

The problem with saying "Life is unfair. Deal with it." is that this argument
could be used to justify many things that we regard as outright wrong. Born
into slavery? Can't get a job because of your skin colour? Wrongly accused of
a crime? "Life is unfair. Deal with it."

At some stage somebody has to say "life is unfair, how can I make it a little
fairer?" or the problem will simply become self fulfilling.

~~~
tytso
Why should an employer consider context and circumstances? They want to hire a
best programmer they can for the money available to them. A sob story about
how someone hasn't had the luck to get the experience to achieve rockstar
status before they graduated as an undergraduate doesn't change the fact that
if I'm a founder of the startup, or a hiring manager I am trying to optimize
the chances of success of my startup or my team. I'm not a social services
agency.

~~~
LockeWatts
Rockstar is a relative, not absolute term. I'm not comparing myself to
Google's senior architects, I'm comparing myself to every other college
Junior.

~~~
tytso
The articles you quoted about people being courted, as opposed to needing to
find a job, apply to very few college Juniors. It doesn't matter whether
you're at an Ivy League school or somewhat lower tier school.

You're going to have a much harder time getting hired at a startup, mainly
because a founder can't afford to take any risks. And an unknown quantity
(which is what most college Juniors are) is a risk, by definition. An Ivy
League degree might make a difference, but at a startup, you're going to want
to optimize for the very best people you can find, and that's in general going
to be people with a lot of experience (not just in technical matters, which is
why being interested in learning about business and legal issues on the side
is no bad thing).

Also, while I wasn't at Google during the period when it was growing at an
astonishingly fast rate, the stories that I hard was that they were taking
busloads of candidates from schools such as Stanford (literally; they would
bring them in buses for interviews in an essentially production-line fashion).
I talked to someone who told me how hard it was interview a half-dozen people
in one day, and then having to keep track of it all to write up the interview
reports.

For companies going through a huge growth spurt, they are going to inevitably
take some shortcuts to maximize yield, and lower the burden on an
insufficiently staffed HR and interview-qualified engineers to do the bulk
hiring. And stories about the hiring practices of companies who are going
through that growth spurt might not be accurate when the companies' growth
rate has slowed, and they can afford to be a bit more deliberate about their
hiring process.

I've heard a large number of wildly inaccurate (at least from my perspective,
only having worked at Google for 2.5 years) stories about how hiring works at
Google, and I sometimes wonder if they are stories that reflected an era from
a previous stage in Google's evolution as a company, and yet, because they are
great stories, they keep on getting retold, even if in the end they are
actually harmful for people who believe they are still true.

------
tylermenezes
I don't understand what point he's trying to make.

For one, he starts off by talking about some specific school, but very few
people have ever claimed that going to some specific ivy-league school makes
you a great programmer. In fact, I often see people claim the opposite,
especially in startups. You could certainly write an article about Google's
bad hiring practices, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article -
he pulls up two examples, and then completely moves on from that point.

Second, he misses the point of looking for people who are self-led. It's not
to get people who produce good code - it's to get people to can produce good
code, but can also _think for themselves_. And what better way to get people
to think for themselves, than by looking for people already doing it.

~~~
aristus
Anecdotal, but I often interact with people who went to elite schools. A large
number of them are convinced that the world is run by their classmates. It's
sometimes tiring to hear, especially as having that kind of network does help.
Of course every company wants the "best", and credentials are a shortcut to
satisfying that. False positives are more of a danger than false negatives.

There are plenty of exceptions to this elitism -- I recently found out that a
long-time coworker not only went to a top school but is also a tenured
professor. It doesn't show. :)

This post is by an undergrad at a state school, and I gather the main purpose
is to get employers interested in him, and probably to vent some frustration
against the very real blindspot that many recruiters and employers have. It's
not intended to be an essay for the ages.

~~~
enjo
The world _is_ run by their classmates. That's a real problem. If you went to
a middle of the road state school (in my case in the south), then you face a
lot of additional challenges that my Stanford buddies do not.

I have a real win on my resume. I can point to products that I've built and
things that I've done. I'm even a published author. Yet when it comes to fund-
raising or trying to find a leadership role there is a definite boys-club that
is difficult for me to break into. For a great many investors they see my
education and the rest just doesn't matter.

It means I've had to swim faster and work far harder than these top-tier
grads. Even today, more than a decade out of college, it remains an issue.
I'll continue to show through my work that I'm a top-tier talent, and
hopefully one day that will be enough all on its own.

tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known
that when I was 18.

~~~
majormajor
"tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known
that when I was 18."

I wish I had known that when I was 14/15 and cruising through high school,
buying the feel-good talk about "paying that much for a top-name education
wouldn't be worth it anyway." So instead I got a very good education (you get
out of it what you put into it, after all) that actually cost more in practice
than a heavily-subsidized-by-the-school Ivy one and yet comes with a lower-
value degree.

I'm happy where I am, so I'm not complaining. But the system is fairly screwy.

------
mindcrime
Don't worry about the Ivy League stuff, and just keep working on your projects
and learning. Most of the comments here about "signalling" are true but
largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you have your
sights set on a job at one specific company (say, Google) then it's probably
true that you're more likely to get in with a degree from an Ivy League
school. But if you just want to have a great career, work on cool stuff, do
well for yourself and maybe even be an entrepreneur one day, you can do all of
that without ever sniffing an Ivy League campus.

The tech industry is, despite what some people may say, still fairly
meritorious. If you have talent, and you work hard, your ability will - over
time - dominate the signalling effect of your degree and what-not. OK, maybe
it means your first job is writing CRUD applications in the IT department for
a shoe manufacturing company in Bumfuckville, GA, and not doing machine
learning stuff at Google. Big deal. Take the shoe manufacturing job, keep
learning on your own time (don't get married or have kids too young though, if
you have high aspirations career wise), start an open-source project and/or
contribute to some well known projects. Blog, write a book, do screencasts,
whatever you can do to demonstrate your ability. If you are truly talented,
and have indomitable spirit, you'll make your way where you want to go.

------
LargeWu
Whether or not Ivy League or other top schools charge too much is basically
irrelevant; the real hard part is getting accepted in the first place. These
schools get so many applications in a year, and many of the applicants are so
thinly differentiated, that acceptance is virtually indistinguishable from a
lottery.

Saying graduates of these schools are the best of the best misses the mark a
bit. A more accurate description would be they had access to generally
superior education. This is an important distinction.

------
lazyBilly
I understand the frustration, and there are a lot more unfair things waiting
for you out in the business world. So opt out. Invent your own job and take no
shit from anybody. Get a consultancy running and freelance. It's not
complicated, just a lot of work to get started. Then transition off writing
code for others into your own projects. You're young, it'll be fine. It won't
be as sexy as doing yc and living the life in the valley, but you could
probably move down and do it there if you were hungry enough. Fuck the student
loans, if you can't eat and pay them it'll just fuck up your credit till you
get square. Don't be more emotionally attached to your debt than the bank is
to its own.

The upshot is, yeah, if you didn't go to an ivy, you're going to have a
tougher road in some capacities. Some. And mostly if you're trying to convince
somebody that you're _going to_ do something cool someday. Do something and
remove all doubt, or build something so that youre the guy deciding what's
good enough or not.

------
bane
Sorta, but all rockstars also have in common that they all have a band,
practice a lot, tour a lot and make lots of decent songs...most rockstars
played in 30 seat dive bars at one point or another. The _Goo Goo Dolls_ dwelt
in obscurity for about a decade before making it big. _Radiohead_ has a
similar story.

What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against
the wall until it stuck.

It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every
line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often,
and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big
and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs.

Some examples:

John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known
mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it
mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't
think so).

Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware
gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal.

Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's
undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days,
before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in
obscurity.

D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and
after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to
school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting
for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the
planet.

and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy
League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all _produced_
and in the end that's all anybody cares about.

------
rgbrgb
The truth is, rockstars didn't "look for jobs". They didn't submit their
resume to some big rockstar company and hope to get a place as a cog in some
corporate Googlish wheel. If you go to Julliard, it's a lot easier to get a
job in music that is more like working at Google. You can join a symphony or
something that you just could not do without a deep understanding of theory
and a skill set that is very similar to the other musicians you are working
with. But if you think you're hot shit, take the time you spend on whining
about the privileged and make something great (for rockstars this often
involves whining about privilege). Rockstars didn't get permission to make
their art, and none of us have to either.

------
timsally
The subtext here is that those without elite credentials are at some
disadvantage because they don't have a convenient signaling mechanism of
quality to prospective employers. Stipulated. But if you have the talent to
compete, this disadvantage is merely a speedbump. In 2012 you're just a git
pull away from interacting with the decision makers at your next job. It's
never been easier for programmers with top talent to convey their qualities to
employers. One community that has always worked this way is the community
surrounding the Linux kernel. Credentials are not even mentioned. It's all
about the code and people routinely get hired on that basis alone.

------
richcollins
If he's an academically qualified hacker but can't afford an Ivy, why'd he go
to Georgia instead of Georgia Tech?

------
benthumb
> _I read that a NASA subcontrator wanted someone to design high-efficiency
> power supplies for the Space Shuttle. So I wrote up a decent design and
> showed up. There were maybe 20 candidates at the office, all equipped with
> advanced degrees. But I didn't have a degree, I had a design. They hired me
> on the spot and sent all the degree holders away. True story._

[http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_for...](http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_former_nasa_space_shuttle_engineer/)

------
Terretta
More of those developers who made it before the dot com boom (in the 90's)
seem to have "made their luck". In general, they seem to have taken leaps of
faith, or gone out of their way to pursue something of significant risk not
because of expectation of disproportionate reward, but because of drive to
create.

After the dot com bust, in the aughts, certainly such cases still exist, but a
larger share of success stories seem to trend more cynical, arising out of an
almost inwardly focused ecosystem of investors and pursuers of investment,
looking to systematize the replication of success.

User adoption remains the primary driver of ultimate success, but the
opportunity to have a product in front of sizable number of users seems now
less about first mover advantage or technical edge, and more about correctly
(whether through luck or deliberate action) leveraging finance.

------
jberryman
Jesus Christ, it's spelled "Juilliard". Anyway, horrible analogy.

------
stephencanon
"An Ivy League education is almost certainly a 6 figure sum of some kind,
depending on where you go. They have need based scholarships, but if you’re in
the middle class those aren’t really applicable to you, and your parents can’t
afford to send you to that expensive a school"

At nearly any of the ivies, you will graduate nearly debt-free if your parents
make less than $100k-$120k. $100k household income puts a family in the top
15%, which is at least "upper middle class" if not "rich" (though clearly not
"super rich"). There are precisely two ways to be unable to afford to attend
one of the ivies: be an international student, or have wealthy parents who are
unwilling to contribute to your educational expenses. This wasn't always true,
but at this point, if the parents are willing it is essentially always
affordable.

------
subwindow
Amen. Almost.

I was in a startlingly similar position a few years ago- I graduated from
Georgia State. I went there not because it was the best school, but because
tuition was paid (HOPE scholarship) and the classes were offered at flexible
times so I could work while going to school. I had to turn down an acceptance
from Tech because of that.

While it hurt my career initially, I think the value of education is
drastically diminished in just a few short years. By the time I was 25 what
I'd accomplished professionally mattered far more than where I went to school.
Sure, I was still in debt from school so starting a company is difficult, but
open source contributions and side projects are a signifcant part of my
"resume" and far outweigh my schooling.

------
hinting
It'd be great if all these articles making big claims about what developers do
and don't do included some actual, you know, evidence.

It shouldn't even be that hard to collect. LinkedIn in a massive data
repository about what jobs people have had. Should be a fun analysis.

~~~
throwaway_95014
Say I've been at Obvious Company for a while. Maybe a long while. LinkedIn,
Github, none of these things have anything on me. I can't talk about what I've
done in the last couple of years because it's all still confidential (and I'm
not ratting one employer in front of a prospective - I'd like them to think I
can be trusted).

How do I convince you that I'm enough of a rockstar (and I am, for reals) to
get a foot in the door? I can blow your socks off in an interview by fixing
your product and your business model on a whiteboard, but until we talk I'm
just another pasty white guy in an ironic shirt.

You aren't going to recognize the schools I went to, or care, because I was
out before you were eating solid food. I don't even have the beard and
suspenders. How do I sell me to you?

~~~
boboblong
Perhaps you could contact the company you want to work for via a throwaway
email so that they don't see you and prejudge you as an "old guy"? If you can
fix someone's product and business model on a whiteboard, you should be able
to use their product, find a flaw, and send them an incisive email about it.

------
jiggy2011
At the crux of this issue is the question about correlation of intelligence
and ambition with wealth. I would be surprised if there was no correlation at
all, on the other hand it would be interesting to see what the relationship
really is but I can't think of an experiment that could be done in a way which
would be both accurate and ethical (for example switching poor and rich
children at birth).

This seems to be one of the arguments around keeping taxes low for the rich
(or "job creators") the implicit assumption seems to be "rich people are
smart, therefor they should be put in charge of money distribution".

As an example, there was somebody I grew up with who is now running a ~$1
million turnover web design company at 27. He is sometimes invited to speak at
events as a successful entrepreneur and demonstrated as an example of how hard
work can pay off etc.

Unfortunately if you know the real story it is somewhat less impressive. He
graduated from university with a fairly average degree and was having trouble
finding employment at any job that he was interested in working at. He comes
from a wealthy background however, so had little time constraints on his job
search. After some time he decided to give up looking for work and establish
himself as a freelance designer, his family gave him a chunk of money with
which to establish himself.

For the first few years his business was not too successful and was draining
capital, he was having difficulty finding clients as his portfolio of work was
not really comparable to other established companies who were charging similar
rates.

After a few years his family sold one of the businesses they owned which freed
up a bunch of extra capital, a chunk of this they gave to him. He was able to
use this money to hire some talented designers who did excellent work and won
him a bunch of awards and bigger contracts, this was really the catalyst that
made him successful.

Of course if the guy was a complete idiot he would have squandered even that
opportunity, he was intelligent enough to run a business day-to-day but there
was no way he would have managed that without such a capital injection. Would
be interesting to think about how many people in his position would have
failed and how many would have been successful earlier.

------
TillE
Actually, I've noticed that a large fraction of my favorite (rock) musicians
_were_ classically trained, at least as children. Not all of them, but enough
to surprise me. Self-teaching is overrated.

------
EricDeb
As a counter to one of his points I've seen developers who are completely
oblivious to money management and are always working on their own projects
despite having loans and having gone to an expensive school.

I'm like you though buddy I did undergrad and just finished a Master's degree
from two schools that barely crack the top 50 in CS. I chose to go the less
expensive route (read: basically free) as opposed to an Ivy-League education.
It's too early to tell whether it will hinder my job prospects or not.

------
Alex3917
The reason people like people who went to Ivy league schools is largely that
it's a proxy for having had good parents/values. The idea that you'd have a
better network or education might be partly true, but it's mostly just a
justification. Once you understand this, you should be able to work around it.

~~~
nostrademons
Going to Ivy League schools is a proxy for having good parents/values?

I went to Amherst (not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts college). I wouldn't use
it as a proxy for good parents or values at all. Hell, one of my classmates
stole an ambulance, drove it around the freshman quad, and crashed it into a
tree. Another embezzled $13,000 from the school newspaper. The latter had a
parent who was on the board of trustees. A third was the author of this
infamous breakup letter:

<http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp>

In my experience, the people who _really_ had good parents & values were the
ones who came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds and managed to
make it into Amherst despite them. Succeeding despite adversity says a lot
about your character. Succeeding because daddy's a legacy and donated a few
million dollars to the school doesn't say anything other than that your
parents have money.

------
jfarmer
Nothing it stopping you from writing a great article, building great software,
contributing something amazing to an open source project, etc.

Your time would be better spent focusing on doing good work and sharing it.
Assuming you do do good work and learn how to share effectively, the rest will
come.

------
johnkchow
I can say I understand where you're coming from, and if you carry that chip on
your shoulder for the rest of your life, you'll do just fine.

I want to share my personal story, since I felt the same way you did when I
was in college.

Coming out of school 2 years ago, I thought I was screwed. I had a shitty GPA,
I had no work experience (not even internships), and I never took on a
personal programming project. While my friends were getting offers months
before graduation, I was still applying to companies (and not hearing back
from any of them). Finally, a small .NET web shop gave me a call, and I
royally screwed up the technical questions. The interviewer, with a
disappointed sigh, asked me if I had any questions for him before we end the
call. This was my opening, my chance to show him that indeed I did care about
his company and, ultimately, programming. Prior to the call, I had done a lot
of research on the company and who their big clients are, so I told him how
cool that was and then asked what was the coolest project they've worked on.
Impressed, the interviewer immediately changed his tone, and it was as if the
interview restarted over. I pressed on, showing him my enthusiasm not only for
the company, but for programming and how I wanted to become a better engineer
tomorrow than the day before. The director, listening in on the call, pretty
much gave me an offer. The offer was severely under market rate, and I was on
a very short leash (3 month trial), but I was so happy, I cried. I knew that
the next step was to impress the shit out of them.

So starting day 1, I'd gobble up everything about the tech stack and the
domain. I'd subscribe to every .NET blog I could find. I bought and read books
about design pattern and enterprise architecture. I listened to programming
podcasts as I drove back and forth from work, and sometimes I'd listen to it
as I tried to fall asleep. I'd constantly ask questions to my senior engineers
about the .NET nuances, IoC containers, and good engineering practices. I
questioned why we didn't do TDD, why we didn't switch from the Web Forms to
MVC framework, why we're still using LinqToSQL instead of Entity Framework.

In three months, I got a raise, and within 6 months after that, I got another
raise. My director called me the "rising star" in our company. I worked my ass
off not because I wanted to prove to the world that I was good, but I wanted
to prove to myself that I'm not a chump programming monkey.

A year after my first job, I got an offer to work at a friend's startup in SF,
despite the fact it was on a Rails stack with WAY different
architecture/requirement. Again, paid under market rate because of my lack of
experience. Applied the same work ethic and dedication to the job. Learned how
to scale, how to design web apps top to bottom, how to architect our systems
topology, and how to get shit done.

On my personal time, I decided to build a website that would help the alumni
members of my college fraternity keep in touch with each other for networking
and inspirational purposes. Leveraging my knowledge from my job, built the
entire damn thing, from the DB schemas, to the domain logic, to even the
HTML/CSS. Initially it was built on ASP.NET MVC, then rebuilt the whole thing
in Rails to improve our development speed. Now, I'm asking around other
student orgs to see if they'd be interested in using our website.

Now, I guess I am that rockstar programmer, even though I don't really think
that. Recruiters are constantly messaging me for job openings. I just got two
offers from both a big, respectable company, and from another startup. It's
surreal. I never thought I'd see this day, but I still have that chip on my
shoulder to constantly improve. The point I'm trying to get is that it's not
about where you start but it's the journey you're willing to take to get where
you want to be. Earlier, tytso commented that you have to start at the bottom
with an entry-level job, and it probably won't be the glamorous
FB/Google/Apple/blahblahblah job that you so want. But that doesn't matter as
long as you work in a place that you can get really fired up about. In my
experience, a lot of managers would hire passionate, inexperienced guys over
talented yet indifferent engineers because company culture is a big deal.

So what is it that you can do to prepare yourself right now? First, network
the shit out of your school. Make as many friends as you can, regardless of
their majors or background. I guarantee you you'll find other people who are
smarter and more motivated than you are. Surrounding yourself with ambitious
or A+ kids will a) in the short term inspire you to work harder and b) in the
long term, they'll become valuable assets for your career. Then start a
programming project. Right. Now. In my last year of college, I built a beer
pong tournament website on LAMP. It wasn't the prettiest thing,
visually/architecturally, but still proud of that thing. (For fun, I'm trying
to rebuild it again with backbone, Rails, and MongoDB.)

Never forget this moment of frustration. In fact, embrace it. Use it as your
motivating fuel. And then go do what makes you happy.

------
aidenn0
Both cheaper than Ivy League, both are as good a signal in my book:

University of Illinois

Carnegie Mellon

~~~
tikhonj
Erm, is CMU _actually_ cheaper than an Ivy League university? I was under the
impression that they are fairly expensive and do not provide nearly as much
financial aid as at least the top Ivy League schools like Harvard or
Princeton.

At the very least, CMU has a _far_ smaller endowment (an order of magnitude
smaller) than most of the universities it competes with. I imagine this has a
real impact on how much financial aid it can offer.

Also, no love for Berkeley? We're public and have a pretty good CS department
:). Admittedly being out of state makes it rather expensive _and_ harder to
get in, but I imagine that's the same at UIUC.

~~~
aidenn0
Yeah, Berkeley is great, I didn't mention them since when I graduated HS (a
while ago) they were harder to get into from out-of-state than some of the
Ivys

~~~
tikhonj
For better or worse, that's still true, at least for engineering. I think the
acceptance rate over all (for both in- and out-of-state students) to the EECS
major is actually below 10%.

However, getting into CMU CS is also similarly difficult.

------
pnathan
Fundamentally, as someone who went to a Public State University, I feel your
pain. Let me take a look (based on my experiences of reviewing resumes)...

Analysis of your "about me" section:

Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA
isn't listed.

Resume: If I ask you in-depth, hard questions about any language or tech on
your resume, I expect an answer. If you can't give me a deep answer, I will
give you negative points in my mind. You listed those techs, so you better
have something to show.

WRT Technologies. I am a bit idiosyncratic: I want to know your preferred OS
and whether you can handle source control. Everything else is noise. You have
too much noise.

Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's too
generic.

Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can
do for me.

I don't really care about your in-progress work unless you have a github. You
should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight
your Honors courses.

In summary, you are an above-average candidate compared to most CS resumes
I've seen. Probably in the 80th percentile of the last batch of resumes I
looked through. However, you are not a must-hire in my opinion.

\---

In order to get to "must hire" state in my mind, you need something like the
following:

* Mastery of written communication.

* Explanation of what you have done at each position, why you uniquely made it happen, and what you can do for me and my team.

* Public code repo with a long history and a decent amount of loc in it. You've developed at least a small system (1-10KLoC) and maintained it for years. You support users of it.

* You have studied a "far out" technology - one that may never be written on the job. The more depth is shown here, the more commitment to your craft is demonstrated. At a minimum, this would be, for instance, learning Perl 6 or Haskell. At the higher end, it might be something like writing a working simulator of the CM-2.

* You have extensive internships at well-known companies. While this is limited by location and funds somewhat, it demonstrates that you can play ball with the big boys.

\---

Understand that you can better your marketing quickly - set up a github and
upload a project, wipe out the placeholder links, rewrite your resume to
better express your capabilities. But then the slog starts. You need to commit
to building your craft, constantly, in a visibly demonstrable way. Some of
that might be expressed via open source, or it might be expressed by a
portfolio of shipped software. That's up to you. And, further - express
yourself in a more careful fashion. No one wants to take the risk of hiring
someone who complains life is unfair.

While I am not a hiring manager, I do assist with technical hiring. I am
always happy to look at your resume (or anybody else's) and provide feedback
and critique. My contact email is in my HN profile.

Best wishes for your future.

~~~
LockeWatts
_Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA
isn't listed._

Do GPAs go on your CV? I didn't know that.

 _Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's
too generic._

How can I make those more specific? In my eyes they seemed like pretty
specific details to me.

 _Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can
do for me._

I don't know how to compress a research paper into a two sentence resume
description. Even the abstract is longer than that by an order of magnitude.

* You should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight your Honors courses.*

People care about either of those??

~~~
SatvikBeri
> Do GPAs go on your CV? I didn't know that.

The flaw in your thinking here is that there's some sort of "standard"
template for a resume that will highlight your excellence. A resume is a
_sales letter_ designed to show how awesome you are. Include anything and
everything that makes you look good.

As an example, with the research paper, highlight why it was impactful. Saying
the paper was published in one of the most prestigious journals in its field
is vastly more effective than telling us what your paper was about.

Your work experience tells me what you did, but it doesn't tell me why you're
awesome. As an example-my resume highlights the fact that I saved my employer
millions of dollars. It only glosses over how.

So write your resume in a way that would make someone say "this guy is
awesome", rather than trying to write your resume in a way that describes your
life.

------
raverbashing
I assume HN reaction to the headline is "Julliwhat?!"

But maybe they go here first: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School>

Edit: wrong info about an Alumnus, but there are plenty of famous artists from
there

~~~
dwc
Julliard is pretty well known even among non-musicians.

