
Graduated with a Major in Startups - holman
http://zachholman.com/2011/02/graduated-with-a-major-in-startups/
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eugeneiiim
I graduated from CMU about two years ago. Here are some of the things my peers
from CMU have worked on (playing significant roles) based on what they learned
in classes like OS, compilers, and algorithms.

\- Facebook's PHP compiler.

\- VMWare's ESX network kernel.

\- iPhone hardware and firmware.

\- Qualcomm's Linux distribution.

\- Citadel's trading algorithms and execution platforms.

I constantly draw on my coursework in compilers, programming languages, and OS
in my work on the Palantir Finance platform.

CMU's CS program prepares you work on problems that are truly technically
challenging -- problems that require deep technical knowledge and that often
take a large investment to implement. Small startups rarely have the staff and
time horizon to invest in creating systems that require technical skills
beyond the ability to use an API. So if you work at a small startup that
doesn't have the capacity to invest in custom low-level solutions, don't be
surprised if your CS skills are not utilized.

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tfe
I went to CMU with the author; in fact we worked together on one of the
semester projects he mentions.

There's no doubt that CMU prepares students for the corporate world. In fact
some programs are expressly tuned for this.

But this is exactly what the market demands, so why are we surprised? Industry
wants employees that integrate well and work in teams. Students want to be
hired by industry. How can we be surprised that the curriculum is tuned for
turning out cogs for corporate machines?

The demand just doesn't exist for startup education. It's the nature of the
beast. How many hardcore entrepreneurs do you know would have been content to
take classes on it and be told how to do it? That's the exact opposite of
their natural character. :-)

~~~
ScotterC
CMU as well. Same class year as you guys but I was MechE.

I also adore CMU because of it's absolute fundamentals teaching that allowed
me to teach myself web development in such a short amount of time after
leaving nuclear engineering.

The one thing CMU taught me was how to work and learn anything. That's what I
do and being a startup guy was a good fit for completely unrelated reasons
(mainly my problems with authority).

In my undergrad course load, I had very little time to work on the projects I
already had, let alone starting something cool on my own. However, that course
load was so much tougher then normal employment life, that once I graduated, I
could learn so much more while being very underemployed. This underemployment
led me to the one place where I could learn everyday and solve cool problems
=> startups

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babeKnuth
well said. i didn't think of that perspective.

my own experience was more along the lines of feeling a disconnect between
classwork and how it applied to the real world.

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gohat
I'm an undergraduate at a school, Brown, that has a somewhat decent
entrepreneurial mindset. What I've seen is that it is not necessarily
something you can force.

You can't from top down try to make someone do a startup.

But what you can do is create an environment which has the culture and
attitude that promotes it.

That said, I think telling someone or a group to go and come up with a good
business idea - then helping it develop and become viable, is perhaps the best
way to promote it in a school setting.

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alexwestholm
School is about indoctrinating certain ways of thinking, not teaching the
specifics. I've done a CS degree (admittedly at a crap school), an MBA and am
about to finish a law degree (at a non-crap school) and none of these bear
direct relevance to what's out in the field. Indeed, part of the reason I put
myself through the agony of so much higher ed is to gain experience thinking
in different paradigms, not merely so that I can now write an algorithmic
description of the rule against perpetuities.

With that in mind, and having written code for both startups and large
companies, I don't think that CS programs are generally all that much like the
real world in either situation (unless of course you're talking about
somewhere like PARC). You're absolutely correct that learning to "build cool
stuff" is pretty important, but I think it's equally important for larger
companies, so I'd say that's more of criticism of CS in general than a failure
to prepare people for startups.

~~~
babeKnuth
i agree with most of what you say, but i think a key is more balance between
the two. not purely "real world", and not strictly "academic world". somewhere
in between.

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endtime
Stanford, perhaps anomolously, has a number of startup-oriented classes. The
one with which I'm most familiar (and probably the one most of interest to
HNers) is CS210: <http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs210/>

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bpeters
Great points!

Most educational institutions prepare students for the average life style.

However, to go beyond just comp sci curriculum most businesses classes don't
focus on the true skills that matter in running and starting a business. They,
just like in computer science, focus on what the majority of the population
will probably be doing after graduation.

When I decided that I wanted to do a startup and not join the masses in the
corporate life, I did not have much experience or course material to leverage.

These institutions should try and find a balance between offering courses for
both types of peoples. Even those going into the corporate world could learn
and use a bunch of the skills entrepreneurs use everyday. Most executive
leaders of these big companies have the same qualities as entrepreneurs.

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adelevie
I go to Penn State and major in Political Science and Telecom.

I'm pretty comfortable with web development using Rails, and other than an
introductory database course, everything I know about programming I learned
outside of the classroom. I've put that experience to good use, as I've worked
on a startup for about 1.5 years.

Despite some pretty notable startups coming from Penn State (eg, Weebly),
there is not much of a startup culture here. The School of Information
Sciences and Technology seems mostly interested in landing jobs for its
students at companies like Boeing, Ernst and Young, and Lockheed. There's
nothing wrong with that, but I'd like to see faculty and the administration
take more interest in startups.

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kevinburke
CS departments might not be good at turning out startup candidates because the
people running the departments are more interested in the academic side of CS.

Where I've been learning comp sci (Pomona & Harvey Mudd) the teachers'
interest in CS is more academic and less practical. It's a reflection of what
they're interested in - they probably turned down jobs in the industry to work
in academia and teach students.

Almost all of the marketable skills I've learned have been self-taught outside
of class.

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toadstone
Yeah, there totally should be a class on how, as an slightly above average
programmer, to use open source projects representing man-decades of work by
geniuses and millions of dollars in corporate investment to avoid any
technical challenges and slap together a website in a few weeks.

~~~
kd1220
Unfortunately, that's the mentality of a many start-ups. A couple months ago I
was posed the question "Why don't you apply to work at Facebook?" by an
interviewer. [To give him the benefit of the doubt, he didn't appear to be
versed in how to conduct an interview.] It was a pointless question with an
obvious answer, but the wording he used to pose it gave me the feeling he had
a chip on his shoulder. The rest of his questions had the same undertone. It
would have been better for him to ask "Why are you interested in working here
instead of Google, Facebook, etc.?"

I got an offer from his company, but turned it down because I didn't want to
work with people who were combative instead of cooperative.

