
College Dropouts Thrive in Tech - porter
http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-1433323802
======
ChuckMcM
During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out
of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding
work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically,
those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty
of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a
bachelors degree were having a hard time. I know of at least two people who
went back to school to finish their degrees (one essentially having redo their
entire bachelor's program because their previous credits would not transfer).
My takeaway from that experience was that during boom times it doesn't matter,
but during lean times it does.

~~~
mullethunter
This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code
for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview
because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well
known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on
phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees.
Four years ago it happened again, and I had enough. I went back to school
(working full time with side projects, as well as 2 year old and newborn in my
life), losing two years of credits to study business. I graduated last month
with over $40k in student loans at 37 years old just so the next time I don't
get the brush off for having completed 3.5 years of university.

The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I
interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I
do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I
guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some
interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to
hinder them in the consideration.

~~~
commandar
>losing two years of credits to study business.

This is interesting to me because I'm a little younger than you, but
considering a similar path. I feel like finishing a degree would be useful,
but I'm at a point career wise that I don't know going back to do CS or
similar would be worth the time and cost.

I've been toying with the idea of a business degree for a while now. The kind
of shops that want a degree just to get past HR usually aren't overly
particular about what the degree is and I'd be adding _new_ skillsets instead
of supplementing the ones I've already developed over the course of working
professionally for a decade plus.

------
rconti
“It’s almost a bigger risk to stay in school and let people like me drop out
and start things before you have a chance,” he says.

That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are
real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one
good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset.

College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. But it's a
great experience for most people, and education is worthwhile for it's own
non-vocational merits.

I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to
college. Either path is fine. I'm glad I went to college, even though it
didn't directly prepare me for my career.

~~~
philangist
> I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to
> college.

Can you speak about what your experience was like? I'm currently working as a
backend developer in new york and I'm planning on starting a CS degree at CUNY
Hunter this fall, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences with
working and going to school at the same time.

~~~
bcheung
I had my first job at 18 working on the development tools for embedded
microprocessors. I was working about 30 hours a week and going to a local
community college for about 20 hours a week. It was a good experience.
Ultimately I dropped out because it didn't seem like I was learning much (I
was already doing C and assembly language programming, and even training other
programmers at my job) and it was too expensive (that was back in 2000, it's
even worse now). I have no regrets about not getting a degree.

~~~
philangist
The difference is that I can't actually code in C and assembly and my
knowledge of a lot of lower level topics is sparse. Sure I can sling
Python/Go, but I feel like my understanding of topics like networking,
compilers, or even algorithmic analysis is sorely lacking. And I'm not
disciplined enough to learn from a book

------
dopamean
The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses.
That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the
next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is
thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an
entrepreneurial spirit.

A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went
on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn
(Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story
there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to
give programming a go as a career.

My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty
much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and
Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel
techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and
contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work.
It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and
database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does
managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them).

With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really
thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters.
I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am
now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you
don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be
smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.

~~~
Nicholas_C
>My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert.
Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called
Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to
advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from
elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that
needed Excel work.

I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these
freelance opportunities?

~~~
dopamean
I was pretty lucky. By time I was ready to try out coding for a living
everyone I knew in college had graduated and was working on the street. I
leveraged my connections there and it worked out pretty well. It happened
mostly accidentally really. I had contracts with several banks and hedge funds
and it call came through word of mouth.

------
jasode
Some observations...

I just finished Fareed Zakaria's " _In Defense of a Liberal Education_ "[1]
and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly
disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley
tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in
English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts _education_ was on equal
footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting
as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize
the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its
own sake when making comparisons.)

Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts
graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend
of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity.

If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a
startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old
compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is
to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the
top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so
than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years.

It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match
how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme
Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you _must finish_
those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you _must finish_ medical
school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else.

So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a
dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more
important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes
completed at a low-ranked one?

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-
Zakar...](http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-
Zakaria/dp/0393247686)

~~~
dylanjermiah
" it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an
unspoken IQ test. "

IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've
seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a
topic I rarely see discussed.

A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of
college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great
degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT.
Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600
SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison).

~~~
robgibbons
Have you ever heard of Emotional Intelligence? EQ is increasingly being seen
has a higher determinant for success than IQ.

~~~
bdavisx
Is that true in tech or just in "regular" big business? I don't see Gates,
Zuckerberg or Jobs being real high in EQ as I understand it, but perhaps I
don't fully understand it.

------
imgabe
I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful
businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are
whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence
of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough
experience in a particular industry to encounter them.

It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and
images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the
hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.

~~~
brighton36
There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that
qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech
qualification.

~~~
sz4kerto
Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where
open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg,
Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k
followers on GH.

------
thoward
Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who
had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a
smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer.
Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients
on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned
over six figures.

I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs,
and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education,
healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials
for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is
quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the
Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women.

I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college
and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At
the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills
valued in industry.

To what extent are these trends linked?

~~~
meatysnapper
In college, in STEM, it seemed like all of the smartest women ran straight to
academia and married a rich tech dude. The incentives are aligned nicely
there.

The smartest guys on the whole seemed to go into industry or start their own
companies.

I unfortunately was not smart enough for academia, and as a man have not found
a rich woman willing to subsidize my lifestyle.

------
theVirginian
One of the worst antipatterns in web design is a website that asks you "sign
in or subscribe" to read this article. Well. I signed in, and it directed me
back to the home page, tried searching for the article, now it wants me to
sign in again, which I do, then it directs me back to the home page. Now I
guess they have one more account but I don't have access to the article.
Thanks WSJ

Can we get a mirror up?

------
humbleMouse
I dropped out of college at age 19 and I now do consulting pulling in over
5k/month, and work a 9-5 as a java developer (100k+). I knew college was a
waste of time when my information technologies class professor assigned us as
homework to look at the best buy ads every sunday morning to keep up to date
with technology prices.... I am 22 years old now...

~~~
riveter
How did you start out without having a background from school? I've always
been really curious how people were able to gain a reputation in consulting or
gain expertise starting off

------
justinpaulson
If you want to do real engineering and solve hard problems, stay in school. If
you want to build a flashy media app or a social network, drop out.

There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just
learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to
engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the
hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good
setting for that learning process.

~~~
conradev
I agree with the last sentence, but not the first and second. The first
implies that the only way to learn computer science is in school, and the
second attempts to stereotype products built by those who drop out of college.
I understand the sentiment, but I think it's possible to both create real
value and not go to school. That's one of the points that this article is
trying to make.

I also think that framing all hard problems as engineering problems is an
engineering-centric view. Depending on the product, sometimes designing the
user experience to be seamless is just as hard as building the technical
foundation.

------
lordnacho
If you're able to write code, that's relatively easily provable. You'll be
found out quite fast by other coders if you can't do it, maybe a few weeks if
you can pretend onboarding is going badly. So at a time when there's loads of
demand for techies, there will always be some people who are happy to give you
a go.

Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are
you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party
head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap,
how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend
what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge
demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there
with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor
thought enough of him to not send him down.

~~~
rjsw
Political parties do hire people who just talk a good game [1] so that isn't a
great example.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps)

~~~
walshemj
Party Chairman are different they are meant to be backroom establishment
fixers with tons of contact's who will pony up 100k -1 million. Grant wasn't
that at all.

At one industry conference in Brighton the other year when his name got
mentioned 1500 people collectively groaned.

------
kdamken
Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why
you would post it if people can't view it without an account.

~~~
wololongong
Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link.
The paywall will be gone.

~~~
kazinator
Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the
headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the
full text.

The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as
our submission:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-
tech-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-
tech-1433323802)

[EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using
[https://www.google.com/ncr](https://www.google.com/ncr) (no country
redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected
Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]

~~~
squeaky-clean
The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it
will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.

------
oscargrouch
“I thought he would miss out on the social aspects of college,” says Judy
Weinstein. “It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in
transitional time.”

Bright Mom. College is a important rite of passage.. maybe thats why im kind
of a grown up child

~~~
humanrebar
> It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional
> time.

I wish parents would start transitioning their children sooner. There's no
reason you shouldn't be able to make some big mistakes in high school with
respect to driving, money, relationships, and responsibility in general. It's
a lot cheaper to make a mistake when your parents are around to help you learn
and recover.

...in other words, all of childhood is a built in transition time. The teenage
years are _supposed_ to be the runway for takeoff into adulthood. Delaying
that process into adulthood is much riskier, IMO. This is part of the reason
I'm concerned about teenage employment rates being so low these days.

------
bcheung
My first job straight out of high school at age 18 was working on the
development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was self-taught and already
knew C and Assembly. There was some serious doubt from some of them about
hiring me but I was able to pass every technical test they threw my way so
they eventually hired me.

I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other
companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't
have any mention of it on my resume.

I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes
like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I
already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to
drop out.

I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I
don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier
with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I
did take were so easy they were a waste of time.

I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up
for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing
photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with
models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way
better experience I'm sure I would have had in college.

With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial
sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and
incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly
lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the
same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have
invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.

------
PennyWhistle
Every time this debate comes up (online or offline) it really troubles me
because I can not help but wonder how can so many smart people be so
blissfully ignorant of how the world actually works. I guess this is the
engineers "entrepreneur-tunnel-vision-syndrome".

Few notes about Gates and Zuck: I don't know why people (media in particular)
made such a big deal out of dropping out or rather taking a leave of
absence/gap year).

They could've always go back if things didn't work out. Dropping out of
college is not akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It is just
NOT

Also: The both came from money. It is easy to say I want to whatever-I-wanna-
do when you have a trust fund ready for you. Having very successful
parents/families -just in case you were wondering helps...

Jobs is a more peculiar case because he didn't have anything. But he got lucky
and came upon the other Steve who was/is a genius-mastermind.

Third: why the measure of success in tech so extreme? Why do you have to make
billions of dollars to be considered successful? In the world today, if you
have just a couple thousand dollars in the bank you are living the dream of
some six billion other people. I personally would consider anyone who has made
more than 1mil out of a business (in profit) to be successful. The rest of it
is just the lust for having more for sake of having more.

Last: College is supposed to get people ready for life. its not supposed to be
a vocational school or diploma mill. It is sad that colleges today have became
both. Denying the personal gain that university provides for pupils and the
spirit of college amd liberal arts education itself is no worse than denying
global warming or evolution.

You can become a programmer and make a buck without going to college but
chances are you will not be an enlightened individual without attending a
decent higher-ed institution.

(and of course we have people like Ted Cruz to the contrary but I'm speaking
for the majority of population)

------
nish1500
Either the proportion of people with a WSJ subscription, or who up vote the
title, is unusually high here.

~~~
blueblob
The trick is to paste the url into google and then click a link to it. Note to
other duckduckgo users, it has to be google.com, not encrypted.google.com.

------
wesleyy
Has there ever been a college dropout article in the past 3 years that didn't
involve Dave Fontenot?

------
Futurebot
I'm very glad to see that many of the more prestigious companies have loosened
their restrictions and are willing to consider skill and experience, rather
than formal credentials. Early in my career, this was definitely not the case.
Heartening. There are still some less-than-ideal things people who don't go /
drop out should be aware of, though. I wrote about some of them here:

[https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-
should...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should-still-
choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1)

Still, this is a heartening development.

------
nmyk
"If money is all that you love, then that's what you'll receive." \- Leia

------
cafebeen
It doesn't seem surprising these kids are doing well--they're already top
students, money's no worry, and they're hooked into the a successful social
network. However, these ~100 examples _don 't_ characterize college dropouts.
There are roughly 30 million total dropouts, and most of them are unemployed
and poor:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-
myth...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth-of-the-
successful-college-dropout-why-it-could-make-millions-of-young-americans-
poorer/273628/)

------
JackFr
It's become like the NBA draft -- if you've spent four years in college, how
good can you really be?

~~~
bgribble
Oh, please. Spending 4 years in college just means you are slightly less of an
infant when you enter the workforce.

Recent college graduates and recent college dropouts are alike in a few
things: they are still getting pimples, and they have tunnel vision because
they're barely off training wheels and are on their very first trip around the
block.

They can be tremendously smart, talented, and energetic, but at 21/22, whether
they went to college or not, they are not very experienced in either adult
life or professional life, and that lack of experience is a real handicap.

------
dataker
As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my
only fear is on what's next(on my career). b

Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to
do that.

Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me
for an entry position.

~~~
a1k0n
I never finished my bachelor's and Google hired me for a senior position.
There were several intervening years of experience though. And while I don't
regret leaving the college program I was in, do regret not completing a decent
advanced CS degree.

------
anuraj
It is just confirmation bias.

------
JoeAltmaier
Three spring to mind: Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates

~~~
dylanjermiah
There success is more related with their superior IQ than their college
attendance.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
They're probably not all that smart. They're persistent, dedicated,
hardworking. But I've seen Bill Gate's code, and its bad.

Typically its B students that run the world.

~~~
dylanjermiah
>"They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking" And intelligent. Those qualities
are not independent of intelligence.

Gates = 1590 SAT (out of than 1600), Zuckerberg = 1590 SAT, Drew Houston =
1600 SAT, Travis Kalanick = 1580 SAT, Chris Sacca = Doing college grade math
in 6th grade. Look into Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, John Collison,
Roelof Botha, and many more I am definitely forgetting of the top of my head.

>"Typically its B students that run the world."

I disagree. Any examples?

~~~
Bostonian
George W. Bush was president for 8 years.

------
bcheung
Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still
says "sign in to read the article". Lame.

~~~
stuharvey
There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google
the article title and click the top result for wsj.com.

Or you could automate that as described [1] here:

[1] [http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-
th...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj-
paywall/)

~~~
bcheung
Thanks. Good to know.

------
vonklaus
paywalled.

~~~
j1e
FYI: If you Google the article title the search result will bypass the
paywall.

