

The Fast Track to Start-Up Life - lachyg
http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-fast-track-to-start-up-life.html

======
davidism
> Already a veteran of several start-ups at the tender age of 17

> Groom attended Dev Bootcamp straight out of high school, skipping college to
> move to Silicon Valley.

On the other hand, college could be pretty useful if you aren't already
selling startups in high school...

~~~
randomdata
From a career perspective, I believe not going to college was the best choice
I could have made. Not even for the startup life, just the regular 9-5. From a
personal growth perspective though, I probably missed out on a lot.

It's impossible to have everything in life. I optimized for my career, but
those who optimize for other areas of their life are to be respected too. The
hard part is figuring out what you want from life straight out of high school,
with very little real-world experience.

~~~
timr
The idea of someone _skipping a CS degree_ to learn some Ruby on Rails and
start as a web developer makes me ill. It's classic short-term thinking: web
development (in Rails, in particular) is today's hotness, but tomorrow it'll
be something else. Since I've started coding, I've watched the waxing and
waning of so many technology hype cycles that it makes me dizzy: Hypercard,
Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, Win32, Windows MFC, Perl, PHP, Flash, Flex...and
now iOS, Android, Javascript, etc. And you know what? This, too, shall pass.
For every New Hotness, there's and Old Hotness, and there will be fans of the
New Hotness who will be making fun of the cult of the Old Hotness, and how its
vision of the future was laughably wrong. This is as predictable as the
seasons.

Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS
program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that
dominate this industry. Because ultimately, there's _always_ a new generation
of cheap, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 20-somethings who know the latest fad
better than you do. Yet there are surprisingly few people who can create new
recommendation algorithms or build massively parallel systems that scale to
thousands of nodes without downtime.

Nearly everyone who complains about CS degrees being a waste of time is
complaining that college isn't a vocational school. And, it's not -- but
that's a feature, not a bug.

~~~
untog
_Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS
program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that
dominate this industry._

I don't believe so. I never studied CS at college, but have had no trouble
learning new languages. I cannot write recommendation algorithms (though I'd
wager that I could set up a massively parallel system using existing tools),
but not every programmer needs to.

I don't doubt that a CS graduate is a better programmer than I am, but it's
disingenuous to suggest that a non-CS grad will be unable to keep up with the
industry. It just isn't true.

~~~
timr
So you're arguing that you don't need to know anything more than a steady
stream of new languages to survive? That's not a matter of belief -- there's
ample evidence to the contrary. The knowledge requirements for industry
programmers has been rising steadily for as long as I've been coding.

"Web developer" is today's equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer" in the
early 90s. Those kinds of jobs will always exist, but they'll be increasingly
marginalized -- just as they have been since the early 90s.

I expected someone to argue that university isn't necessary to learn CS. I
didn't expect someone to argue that CS knowledge isn't necessary to have a
career in software. Yikes. Whither hacker news?

~~~
mattmanser
I can't really take anyone seriously who says a _"Web developer" is today's
equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer"_. The problem with visual basic came
when people start drag dropping things together, which isn't even what rails
is about.

I would also bet heavily that the number of programmming jobs needing low
levels of CS knowledge but high levels of complexity management are growing at
a great, great rate compared to jobs requiring high levels of CS knowledge.

Marginalized? I think not. That 20 people with a mere 8 weeks programming
experience, people who will be relatively useless at programming for another
year or so, are in such great demand says everything.

~~~
timr
_"I can't really take anyone seriously who says a "Web developer" is today's
equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer". The problem with visual basic came
when people start drag dropping things together, which isn't even what rails
is about."_

That isn't what Visual Basic was "about", either. But in practice, most
professional VB developers made UIs that interacted with enterprise database
systems. Otherwise known as: CRUD apps.

Actually, to the extent that the vast majority of today's "web developers" are
building web interfaces to a database (which they are), the tools were
probably more advanced in 1990 than they are today. Hypercard and VB were far
easier platforms for "programmers" with shallow CS knowledge to build
enterprise systems.

------
plinio_silva
How was he able to start an immigration process without a university degree?
Was it because he is from Australia and not, say, Brazil? I'd love to move to
the US as well, but without a degree that's basically impossible for me.

~~~
lachyg
Actually, the process is just getting started. I'm looking into a variety of
paths, but I'm not going to 'really' start the process till I'm 18. From there
I will likely go a J-1 route.

I would love the O-1, but I'm afraid I don't yet have enough press coverage,
or letters of recommendation. Working on it.

------
robgough

        88% of Groom's fellow students currently have job offers on the table, with approximately 60% of those headed to start-ups and the remaining 40% mostly employed at consultancies.
    

If the total group size is 20, why not use actual numbers rather than
percentages? I know it sounds like more using percentages, but it feels a
little misleading to me.

edit: formatting.

~~~
lachyg
Because 3 of the 20 were not looking for jobs. Thus it would not have made
sense to use them in assessing the success.

I'm Lachy Groom, btw.

~~~
robgough
I think that's a good enough reason to not include them in the stats, but I
find the use of percentages confusing over simply the raw numbers?

20 People. 3 Not Looking, so removed. It mentions your fellow students, so
minus 1 more and we're down to sample size of 16. 88% of 16 is 14.08 - 14.08
people is a weird number. Maybe the maths was done including yourself, so
that'd be 17... which gives us 14.96 people - so that doesn't make sense
either?!?

Surely something like "Out of his fellow students 16 were looking for, and
have job offers on the table. 10 of whom are headed to startups, with the
other 6 mostly employed at consultancies." My numbers aren't accurate, but I
think the sentence is much clearer.

This is an aside though, congrats on being brave enough to go off to another
country to do this - never an easy choice, though sometimes here on HN it
comes across as not-a-big-deal.

~~~
lachyg
We provided the author of this story, and all other stories all the numbers. I
guess the percentages just are easier to write about!

Thanks for the compliment! It was a crazy ride.

------
porter
Is there anything like this for Django?

~~~
dpritchett
I would be very surprised to see it. This school is an outgrowth of the
unusual demand for Rails-specific talent amongst VC-oriented startups in SV
and NYC. Django has maybe a third [1] of the cachet of presence in that
particular niche. Note that this is not intended as a statement of the
relative merits of the two frameworks.

[1] I got those numbers by skimming the last six "Who's Hiring?" threads.

~~~
ep103
What "who's Hiring" threads? Can you link me? (still new to HN)

~~~
dpritchett
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring>

------
joshmlewis
What would living expenses be like in SF for 10 weeks?

~~~
mehulkar
I'd budget like $1000-$1200/ month. I paid $900/month just for rent when I
went through the program. And eating at restaurants is an easy $20/day on the
low-low end. $20*30 = $600/month. That's already $1500/month. If you're really
diligent, you can cut a lot of the food cost by going to 2-3 meetups every
week and getting free meals. Or eating the $5 special at Subway every single
day every single meal like I did. (I may never eat a Tuna Jalapeno sub again
in my life.)

------
stefatworld
Good one ! You're an example Lachy

