

All I learned in college was how to work for someone else - stefan_kendall
http://www.stefankendall.com/2013/01/all-i-learned-in-college-was-how-to.html

======
tinco
I didn't learn any of those things in college. Maybe you just picked up the
wrong things or are you just ignorant of what you really learned?

I learned a good basis in information theory, maths and software engineering.

Besides that I learned to analyze, research, work together on and write about
software development processes.

I also met many people who were interested in the same things as I am, and
many people who are interested in different things but still in the same field
or in a field that touches my field.

And althought I learned how to work for someone else I also definitely learned
how to start for myself and build something cool :)

~~~
bokonist
Where did you go to college?

~~~
tinco
University of Twente, The Netherlands :)

------
majormajor
Where do you go to learn not to write a rant insulting the "stooges" you
presumably hope to one day be hiring yourself?

I would like to add more than just a snarky comment like that, but the post is
high on bitterness and low on content. It's a curious flip side to the
"college doesn't teach people how to work on a team in a company, it just
teaches a bunch of theory nonsense" cliche, though. And I think both of those
views are way off the mark with the disregard for theory. I'd rather work with
(or start a company with) the guy who knows what his code does, and why it
does it, any day over the guy who is more proficient at a certain set of
tools, or knows more about the details of starting a business.

------
barik
This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address
at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off
the bat:

"1. Plagiarism is bad.

Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not
in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want
with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you
find a real swell formula online? Did you know you can't copyright formulas?""

This isn't plagiarism. Plagiarism is when you copy others' work and claim that
the work is yours. You are welcome to copy the entirety of a Wikipedia article
verbatim and submit it, as long as you appropriately cite it. Of course, you
may not get a good score, since your contribution to the work was zero, but
you haven't done any unethical.

This is true both in academia and industry.

~~~
stefan_kendall
Most open source licensing requires 0 citation. If I copy your formula or
recipe, I don't need to cite a thing - you don't own the copyright to your own
formula. I could sell your work if I wanted to do so.

Plagiarism, as it affected my grading, was copying without attribution.
Attribution is rarely required for most licensing, except where it is. These
sorts of distinctions are lost in the collegiate machine.

~~~
barik
Which open source licenses are you talking about? The most common that I can
think of is GPL, which does not allow you to remove the copyright notice,
although you may add yours in addition to it. The next one that comes to mind
is the BSD license, which states:

"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that
the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms
and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related
to such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by
the <organization>."

Whew. So maybe the third popular might be The Apache License, but this states:

"You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You
distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the
Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to..."

And so on. I am unaware of, but would be interested in knowing about, licenses
that would allow you to verbatim take code and also claim it as your own work.

~~~
droithomme
Here is the WTFPL, which is my favorite license as it works as well as public
domain, but, being a license, deals with the concerns of people who believe
public domain is a legal fiction in certain jurisdictions.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL>

This is the only total freedom license I am aware of, and allows claiming
others work as your own if you wish.

I agree the OP was confused about the word plagiarism, but from his follow up
it seems clear he meant not giving acknowledgement, as opposed to falsely
taking credit. Regarding non-acknowledgement and non-advertising clause
licenses, the zlib is perhaps the most popular and is a really nice license.
It has an anti-plagiarism clause that you can't falsely claim it is yours, but
you are not required to acknowledge ownership in binary distributions. (It is
appreciated but not required.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_license>

There is also the anti-copyright notice, which varies in form, but is an
explicit public domain grant required by the Berne Convention. Typically they
do not require acknowledgment either.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-copyright_notice>

~~~
waps
What I wonder is how far copyright protection goes, specifically when AI
algorithms are involved. Suppose you "copy" a recipe + description (or a book
for that matter) in the following way :

1) you create markov chains using a large number of cookbook texts

2) you create the markov chain for a specific recipe's description and go down
alternate high-probability paths in an effort to creatively change the wording
without changing the content (maybe this is comparable to the way a human
would if he tried the recipe and then wrote down "how he did it")

3) you republish the result

Did you violate copyright or not ?

The reason I ask is that this is often used as an end-run around patents and
copyrights. What most speech recognition programs do these days is preprocess
the sound + feed into neural network + get output. (and while most "pattern
recognition" algorithms for non-visual things seem to have a love affair with
support-vector machines, temporal neural networks are certainly advancing
there too).

Now if you analyse what those neural networks do there's 2 types of things 1)
~40% effectively is unrolled loops of (mostly) patented algorithms 2) 60% you
effectively don't recognize (to be fair it takes hours of seeing the network
operate before you realize anything it's doing)

Clearly this is legal, in cases human implementations of the exact same
algorithms wouldn't be, nicely sidestepping the problem of patented
algorithms. And as a bonus you don't really have to know the subject matter
(e.g. you can write a pretty good voice recognizer without 8 years experience
as a linguist. Or you can write them for languages you don't actually know).
And as a bonus, academics are miles ahead of the private sector where it comes
to machine learning algorithms, so extremely useful thing are effectively
free-for-all.

Of course this is also what humans do. If you look at neural networks, they
can only do what they've "seen" happen before, or they can combine various
things they've seen before. But they are utterly incapable of coming up with
original work. So I don't think humans are any different to machines when it
comes to producing original work based on combinations of previous works. This
doesn't mean the thing that was copied was itself copyrighted, you can write
about your own life, for example, or about nature, or ... but we'd call that
original, when (in a strict mathematical sense) it's not.

So clearly we've de-facto accepted in our society that machine-processed works
at some point start constituting original work.

Do we have any data what point that is ?

------
duggan
As someone who dropped out of college to join a "startup," I can reliably say
that I didn't have enough information at the time to make an informed decision
about what I did or didn't need to know.

I'm happy with how my career has gone since then, but it would be absolute
hubris to declare that it was due to my astounding foresight or careful
assessment. I was a) motivated b) lucky and c) relatively free of
responsibility.

Maybe I've had a more skewed career than most, but I've spent my career
working with complex and busy systems. I never had a "freelance web developer"
period. I've never just spat out web app after web app for clients. To take
your specific example, I missed out on a chunk of algorithmic complexity in
college (which I have since picked up) that sheds light on real world problems
that might otherwise seem confusing or unconnected.

I understand your frustration, believe me, but be careful not to mix up the
knowledge with the institution, or the message with the messenger, as it were.

------
RuggeroAltair
I understand what you are trying to say, but this article is silly from many
points of view. I don't want to answer with wise-ass comments like "you went
to the wrong college" and such, so I'll give you a couple of arguments:

\- College isn't only CS.

\- Pure (computer or not) science isn't 'working for someone'. It's 'learning
how to do (computer) science correctly', hopefully.

\- Plagiarism is not what you are saying, which is superficial. Citing a paper
and using previous work in academia isn't plagiarism, for example. Copying
someone else's paper and putting your name on it is. Which IS bad. I can't
take a linux distribution and tell the world I wrote it. But I can use it and
(depending on the license) sell it. Or make something else with it and add my
name on it.

\- Performance matters or not depending on the users, obviously. But if you
don't know that your algorithms are bad, or if you don't know how to fix them
when you hit scaling problems, then what do you do with all your users? Sure,
you can hire someone who went to college or learned that somewhere else, but
then you'd be supporting the idea that there is no need to be technical to be
founders, which is partly true but if google and others taught us something is
that the technical founders tend to be able to understand some problems better
(and solve them better).

\- Learning the concepts behind the list you wrote isn't incompatible with
college. If you take some business classes you can learn a lot of it. No one
is forcing you not to take those classes or a major in CS and a minor in
Economics.

\- From college you don't get only the classes, but also the interaction with
a lot of smart people, diversity, challenge and many other things. It changes
you, hopefully in better.

\- Getting excited about being entrepreneurs doesn't always mean the sooner
the better. It depends if one is ready. Like with startup ideas, arriving too
early may be as bad as arriving late. So, if you quit college for the sake of
being an entrepreneur when you are 19 and then you fail, you lost the chance
of getting 'more' ready through college.

\- Same applies for grad school. You might not need to go to grad school to do
anything. But a lot of people change the way they see the world going to grad
school, which, if it made you wiser, could be a good quality to have when
founding a startup (plus the extra knowledge).

All this to say that if you think that you can say "all this does is this" I
think you might want to rethink a little bit, since it's rare that such
absolutists ideas about things so controversial are ever correct.

~~~
majormajor
"So, if you quit college for the sake of being an entrepreneur when you are 19
and then you fail, you lost the chance of getting 'more' ready through
college."

I hear this a lot (frequently even about passing on college for lucrative, if
short-term, opportunities), but I don't get it. This isn't amateur athletics
where you have to worry about losing your eligibility and wouldn't be able to
get in without an athletic scholarship. You could easily go back to college at
age 21 after a year or two of trying to start a business.

~~~
jff
You can go to college any time, but it's damn nice to be the same age as
everyone else there. I'd argue rather that unless you've got a really solid
plan, given the choice you should go to college first. You can start a
business any time, the only thing you'll miss out on by waiting 4 years is the
"Check out this 19-year-old entrepreneur" techcrunch articles.

~~~
stefan_kendall
I fear that colleges condition students to be _bad_ at entrepreneurship and
teach actively harmful lessons.

Of course this isn't true of all schools, but I can't say for certain I know
anyone who came out of college more prepared for the world and business than
they went in. More prepared for a job, surely.

------
jblock
I prefer to take a different perspective: college didn't fail you, you failed
at going to college.

College is a place to gain knowledge from those that have more than you. If
you see it as anything else (especially anything malicious) then you're
looking at it from the wrong angle and coming in with the wrong attitude. A
motivated person can gain a lot of insight and knowledge from even the
shittiest of situations.

College classes are a completely valid way to learn things. If you think that
you're entrepreneurial dreams will be fulfilled if you drop out, then go for
it. Some people don't learn that way, and that's just as acceptable. There are
problems with higher education, and some places more so than others. But don't
be so vain as to denounce the entire institution of higher education from a
single anecdotal data point.

------
diek
1\. Plagiarism is bad

I'm assuming this meant in the sense of "why can't I just copy a binary tree
implementation from the internet and turn it in", since every advanced course
I took in college encouraged the use of libraries where appropriate (to the
point of linking to open source libraries on the course website). The answer
to the former question should be painfully obvious... you're learning to be a
creator of things, not a user of things. That would be like taking an
operating systems course and saying, "See, I downloaded Windows! Where is my
A?"

2\. Performance Matters

Tell this to Digg (one small example in a sea of them). Kevin Rose has said
several times that he regretted hiring so many "get things done" PHP
programmers that had no in-depth algorithm knowledge because as soon as the
site had to scale none of them had knowledge outside of their PHP sandbox.

As far as the difference between copyright, trademark, and patents, ABET
requires a Capstone/'Ethics' course that includes these very topics. I
actually did a research report on software patents during my undergrad which
included a presentation on how software patents have affected the software
industry. As far as planning a product and tracking its development, ABET also
requires an 'Intro to Software Engineering' course which is, you guessed it,
planning and building a product from first principles.

~~~
stefan_kendall
My school was ABET accredited, so I guess ABET is crap. I don't care at all
about ethics - you can't teach that in a semester of college.

I care about the law, and what I can and can't sell without being able to win
the lawsuit when I'm sued.

I've never had to build an operating system, and I never will. Performance
problems likely mean you have product success, at which point you can figure
out solutions to your problem.

You don't get facebook scale by planning it up front.

~~~
diek
The name of the class will vary, I just mentioned Ethics because that seems to
be what a lot of schools call it. Mine was "Social Implications of
Computing"... but again, it goes into (very specifically) the law regarding
copyright and patents. Your college can be ABET accredited, but that doesn't
mean your degree program was.

I've never had to build a priority queue. The language I've used has always
had a library to provide that functionality for the purposes I needed.
However, knowing what a priority queue is, how it works, and when it is
appropriate to use (and those pesky big O performance implications) were all
taught in an algorithms course (and are a quick CLRS reference away).

On performance problems, that is an incredibly hand wavy response. You seem to
be assuming product success is a $50 million Series A round and enough buzz to
make people want to work for you. And what are you going to do with that
money? Probably hire someone who has an understanding of algorithms and
operating systems.

------
Posibyte
Apparently I went to the wrong college. Note, I still _am_ in college, but
nonetheless part of our learning was independent readiness. In my first non-
basic programming class, my professor taught us alongside our Operating System
class how he built computer kits and sold them. We were taught legalese in the
field, and the power of performance.

My school is very small, and our department is even smaller. We have very few
students pass through our department each year (around 3), but we're pushed to
be our own innovator in the world. While a lot of our schooling does involve
how to work within a company, we learn just as much about being independent.

~~~
stefan_kendall
I've heard great things about the Stanford school of business, and the
entrepreneurship program specifically, but it was outside my purview and
budget.

I'm certain there are outliers to what I wrote, but I feel the majority of
schools are _just_ creating employees, and that's....sad.

~~~
Posibyte
The small class sizes are surely a boon to be had. I have a good direct
relationship with all of my professors, and they monitor my progress closely.
If I ever have issues, I'm meet personally with them to straighten them out.

But to be perfectly clear, the best thing I could ever ask for is the ability
to see my professors work live. One of my professors was a high-up manager for
a very large insurance company, and the other was a good friend of Edsger
Dijkstra, among others. One is an immense source of advice in practical
software engineering, and the other can usually teach me a pattern to solve a
problem in ten-times less code and more efficiently.

And, due to the small size of my school, my semester-ly tuition is less than
$2k. It might not look like much on a resume, but I've hit the jackpot of
schools.

------
Fargren
Computer Science us a scientific career (the name is a dead tip-off), and as
such you shouldn't expect to learn how to start a company if that's your field
of study. There is some common ground between what's needed to be a computer
scientist and what's needed to be a technical entrepreneur, but if being and
entrepreneur is what you know you want to do, CS is probably not the best way
to get there, specially in places where education is as expensive as it is in
the US. But that's a long shot from saying it only "prepares you to work for
someone else".

------
textminer
"Pedigree Matters" as an untruth: I wish this were the case. Too many
entrepreneurs I know are only entrepreneurs because they have the support
system of comfortably wealthy families and the professional network gained at
elite schools and fellowships.

Would love to hear more about entrepreneurs who live on the edge and try to
start a business while also needing to make rent and student loan payments.

~~~
tedkalaw
It sucks. A lot. I planned on dropping out two years in and ended up having to
go back to school because my parents couldn't afford the loan payments at the
time - and they wouldn't have to pay while I was in school (which they wanted
me to do anyway). Went back and did client work to keep the lights on.

------
jjkmk
I started school when I was 23, mainly due to pressure from my parents. I was
working full time as a VoIP tech however my mom kept pressuring me to get my
degree.

I'm 29 now, have worked full time until I was 26, and started my own web
development firm at 27 (hired my first two full time employees in 2012).

I'm a few months away from being done with school, and I can honestly say it
has been the most worthless investment in my life. Everything I have learned
in my positions as a IT Admin to Dev has been on the job.

School has just been a lot of wasted time doing fill in the blank work that I
could have spent learning things or bettering my business.

~~~
lasersteve
This seems like a learning style issue, and that will vary; however you and I
are in the same boat.

------
kyle_t
Like most comments here I would have to say I completely disagree. In fact I
learnt very little of the skills needed to work in a corporation. Testing,
build automation, source control, working on large projects, working with
poorly documented legacy code. All skills necessary to survive in corporate
software development that were never touched or only very lightly grazed.

If you want to go to college to learn to be an entrepreneur, get a degree in
entrepreneurship. Colleges should teach the core competencies of your degree
that can then be applied in any number of ways.

[Edited for spelling]

------
mcrider
This is ridiculous. Going to college certainly shouldn't be taken lightly and
if you don't have an interest in broadening your mind and just want to make
money, then you'd be better off educating yourself or going to a trade school.
But for people that genuinely have a love of learning and want to discipline
their mind in ways they haven't thought (not to mention meet interesting and
intelligent people inside and outside of their career), college can be a
worthy investment.

------
temuze
I disagree.

I'm a senior a very theoretical university and my friends in the CS department
often complain:

\- "Why should I learn all these sort algorithms? Let some grey beard figure
out which one is best for me and wrap it up in sort()"

\- "Why do I have to take all these required classes? Why do I have to do a
semester of foreign language or a physic pre-requisite?"

\- "Why do I have make an entire operating system in this class? When in the
real world would I ever need that?" etc.

Bullshit! It's good to be "T" shaped - studying a very technical area like
honest-to-god computer science trains you to dive deep, to be able to confront
a problem and approach it analytically. All the prerequisites have given you a
stepping stone into understanding, or at least appreciating, other areas.
These are very useful skills to have and they certainly make you a more
interesting person.

Sure, there are plenty things left out that would be useful for
entrepreneurship. Half of my friends in the CS department haven't taken the
initiative to learn "real world" development yet with all the shiny tools and
most (myself included) have no idea what it takes to run a business. But to
say college only "prepares you for the life of a corporate stooge" is a
mistake.

------
abr0414
Surprise! College is supposed to teach you to be proficient at what most of
their students end up doing: working at the corporate level. Whether or not
you have the desire to go and do your own thing is really up to you.

At one time I was extremely dissatisfied with my college's cookie cutter
curriculum. But I realized that this setup is built to get you in the job
market. It was up to me to do the extras.

~~~
numbsafari
I think it really depends on what college and what program in that college you
go to.

The vast majority of my professors were genuinely interested in developing
their students as independent thinkers capable of much more than corporate
drudgery.

Perhaps the business-end of the university is focused on getting you into the
job market (since that's how many people want to evaluate their college
experience and investment and hey, somebody's gotta pay the bills). But if you
are in a more academically inclined program, I think you'll find that the
pursuit of knowledge and a joy of learning is what matters most.

~~~
abr0414
True. In my experience, the professors really worked hard for the development
who had the desire to go beyond the required material. It's just that the
average student will never think about going beyond what is required for the
class.

------
CKKim
One of those articles where a lot of ideas have been put down that aren't
exactly "true" so much as it would be _convenient_ if they were, to better
justify the path the writer has decided to take in their life.

------
securingsincity
I don't have a CS degree nor did I attend a school that even offered a CS
degree so my college experience was quite different.

I attended Emerson College where most of the degrees are in the arts and
communications and everything there was focused on not becoming a corporate
stooge but often an entrepreneur.

Most work was project based often with the idea that your work would help to
build your portfolio. Most importantly, your work outside of the classroom
working on films, recording bands, writing marketing campaigns with clubs or
on your own was just as much of the curriculum, possibly more so. I learned
that only a small percentage of knowledge was coming from my professor at the
front of the room but from the people around me and the work I was doing on my
own. If I didn't take that "work outside of the work" attitude from college I
think I would have had are a hard time getting motivated to learn to program
and do other ventures like doing freelance work or working on passion projects
on my own.

Sorry but college is what you make it.

------
edouard1234567
Seems like you're just trying to get attention with this post. The title is
catchy and the content pointless but it did remind me of a good quote from
Joichi Ito "Education is what something does to you, learning is what you do
to yourself. Education is the worst you can do to someone who wants to be
creative"

------
spaulding
Because everybody who studies CS wants to be an entrepreneur? Of course you
don't need a degree in Computer Science to develop a technology startup. Web
design is a trade skill and should be excluded entirely from an academic
curriculum. Sadly, some universities are being pressured into offering it due
to increased demand from an influx of wannabe sellouts. I decided to pursue a
college degree because I'm interested in solving challenging engineering
problems that your two-bit startup and myopic vision couldn't possibly begin
to encompass. So, Mr. Kendall, you have it rather backwards: it's not
universities that are in the wrong but rather students who come in with
maligned expectations and the determination to under-utilize their academic
training.

------
AndrewKemendo
Nothing new here. School isn't for learning. it's for learning how to "toil."

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-
lear...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-
learning.html)

------
greghinch
I've thought about this question for a while, if I would recommend college or
not. Ultimately I've come to realize it has _loads_ more to do with the
personality of the individual than going to college or not. Some people are
fit to be entrepreneurs, others are not. Some people are good at taking
orders, others at giving them. It's not completely black and white, but
generally a person leans one way or the other. The given person _can_ change
to the other side, though I would say that is less common.

------
therandomguy
So, considering that under 5% of the ventures succeed, college set you up for
almost certain success? Seems like a great thing to me.

------
christiangenco
As a soon-to-be college graduate, I'd be very interested in hearing your
answers to those 10 questions at the bottom.

~~~
Lost_BiomedE
I will answer 5, 7, and 9. Although there are many ways to answer that are
correct or good, these are what seems to work with my temperament.

5\. The way I have done this is by a landing page to gauge interest and by
getting a handful of customers willing to buy in a recurring fashion as a
starting base before significant monetary investment on my part.

7\. Get a partner in equity early and outsource or automate everything
possible before hiring employees. Hire when the cost of failing to get the
right employee will not harm you financially.

9\. If none of the directions are obviously better or have data to show why
they are better, find a way to get the data to show you which direction is
best.

Just my 2 cents.

------
dshipper
You get out of college what you put into it.

I certainly have friends who are learning to "be a cog in a wheel" but that's
not at all the only possible outcome of a college education. Insinuating
otherwise is questionable at best and incredibly misleading at worst.

------
fatjokes
Given that it's what most people have to do their whole lives, I'd say it's a
pretty useful skill.

------
josh2600
Instead of advocating for the abolition of college or decrying the value of a
traditional education, could you perhaps phrase this as:

"An Alternative, Practical Education"?

------
ucee054
_10\. How would you move Mount Fuji?_

Seriously? You think it's important to know how to answer this bullshit?

Why don't you go the whole bullshit hog and add to the list

 _11\. What's your greatest weakness?_

