"I hate dread. What a completely useless emotion."
Funny you should say that, since the sense of dread seemed to motivate this decision pretty heavily. Seems like the emotion was pretty useful as a sort of "burnout immune system".
Ah, interesting! Useless in the same way pain is useless, then — not very helpful in the moment, but it sure teaches you what to avoid in the long run.
As a college dropout myself, I don't think I've ever used this ridiculous "argument" to justify my decision. Are there seriously people out there who fancy themselves "The next Mark Zuckerberg", simply because they don't have a degree?
Yes. I've encountered them. My anecdotal evidence is that all who dropped out because of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill gates, or Peter Thiel showed them 'a different way' have completely stagnated.
On the other hand, anecdotally, those dropouts who put their heads down and got stuff done, some of them did pretty well.
Finally, anecdotally, in my experience, people with college degrees got hired faster and in times of woe, are the last to be let go. In fact, many SV companies (Google, for example, but funded startups often work the same way), won't hire you without a college degree unless you've done something notable. Being notable, by definition, means you are in the minority of any group. making dropping out to achieve success a risky proposition.
Anecdotally, the only people that have been laid off/fired in IT at my current $DAY_JOB are people with degrees.
I think the fundamental issue is perception matters. The perception of having a degree matters to some people. To some people, its about performance metric X instead, etc.
I dropped out too, and while I was perhaps reassured by the fact that successful people had been able to make it without college, really I just fucking hated sitting in school all day.
There are plenty of reasons to drop out beyond "wanting to be Zuckerberg." How about "not wanting $100,000 of debt?" or "Prefering to be paid for my work?"
College just isn't for some people. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing.
i dropped out because i started college when i was 22. i was already working as a developer for 4 years.
when i got to college, it was more of the same and i was basically learning a lot of things that i already knew -- so for me, it was better to focus on working than working + going to college.
It always comes up at some point in discussions about education. Zuckerberg is a particularly poor example because he really doesn't strike me as a transcendent genius like Gates or Wozniak or Jobs, just a guy who built the right thing at the right time.
I think for the vast majority of people, self-education is really, really hard. Even now in 2014, the material available online is very limited in scope and depth. Maybe some people could grab a college curriculum, get the lecture notes, buy all the books, and then sit down and truly learn all that material by themselves. I certainly couldn't.
Oh, these kinds are everywhere. I am surprised you haven't met them.
People think having ruffled hair makes one like einstein, being highly assertive makes you like bezos, wearing jeans and polo shirt like job and so on.
Same. I didn't it because as far as I could tell at the time it would have 0 impact on my income one way or the other so why spend the money & time at a rate of lost salary + tuition.
Funny you should say that, since the sense of dread seemed to motivate this decision pretty heavily. Seems like the emotion was pretty useful as a sort of "burnout immune system".