Ask HN: To go or not to go college?
I'm currently a high school senior, I'm an aspiring and pretty badass dev and designer. I've built a few apps and I'm pretty sure that I'll be doing startups(most likely my own still) for the rest of my life.
I can't bear working for some big corporation(I've done it once, it's just not my thing) and thus really find no point of going to college.
I could get into a lot of good colleges, yet I really don't want to "waste" 4 years of my life doing a CS degree in college when I certainly won't learn much; I'd definitely learn 3x much being on my own. And if you say that college degrees make it easier, well...if I spent 4 years building awesome things, I'm pretty sure that I'd eventually build up much more credibility than some graduate from Carnegie Mellon.
I'd really appreciate your feedback on this, since it's a big dilemma that I think a lot of people from HN have experienced.
104 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadYou're 18. Confidence is essential to success but please remember you only know a fraction of what your parents wanted you to.
You won't meet anyone in CS that doesn't learn better on their own - fortunately college isn't about the force-fed learning you've endured for the last 12 years.
I can't think of any "I'm sure glad I didn't go to college" stories I've ever heard from any successful coders/millionaires - just "I'm sure glad I dropped out of college" (but you have to get immersed in college and classmates before those opportunities will start knocking).
Fair. Say you move to SF and spend 4 years. I'm pretty sure you'll meet more and probably experience a lot more things there than in college. Parties and stuff? Ah, that's great, I'm not worried about that.
As glorious as the SF scene (more specifically the Palo Alto crowd) is, beneath the surface they put more weight into your foundation than your skills ATM. And put this concept to the test, when you get a 5 day vacation - go out there. Meet as many people as you can, and ask the "will you hire me now/why not" questions that your alternative plan would have you ask in 10 months anyway.
Even in the land of SV-coders, people with degrees get paid a lot more than simple HS graduates. Having that degree opens doors, having mad skills gets short-term consultant work. You won't/can't/shouldn't believe that until you experience, so go test this "you'll meet more and probably experience a lot more things there than in college" theory. I'll happily provide 4-examples to the contrary to every 1 you find.
If that is your mindset, I would say don't go to college simply because you're so set against it. I started college straight out of high school with no goals and little interest in it and quickly dropped out. Eventually, I went back (about two years later), graduated and then went on to get a PhD. But my first semester as a college student, I failed or did poorly at everything since my heart wasn't in it (and I skipped almost all my classes). If that's where you are, I think a year off is better than starting with a negative approach.
Having said all that, I wish every day I could go back to school and spend my days reading, writing, learning and shooting pool (how I spent most of my college/grad school days).
Edit: remove overly long thing about a typo that's now fixed.
a) In college, you would still have a lot of free time to pursue your own projects, and could always drop out if you hit it big! It gives you a safe place to work from while giving you a chance to learn more skills, too.
b) It gives you a GREAT chance to meet other people who can help you, work with you, drop out with you, etc.
c) You can learn about other life skills, too!
Those are three good reasons that you might want to consider more seriously going to college. I feel the same way about many post-graduate experiences as you do about college, and it's important to try to see things with more shades of grey and to be more open to positive experiences.
Remember, no one is going to put you in a prison for four years, but by not going to college now (or not applying... etc) you are losing on some opportunities that you might like, even in six months. So for now, relatively easy to keep more options open.
My decision was in some sense made for me, in that I didn't have the grades to go anywhere attractive to me.
Here's my scattershot take on this:
(a) 15 years later, I feel pretty lucky about this set of circumstances. The four years I would have lost to school were really good years to be in the industry.
(b) There are jobs that will care that you don't have a degree. But they are, by and large, jobs you don't want. This is especially true 5 years into your career, when most of the reasonable companies will open those roles up based on your experience.
(c) I coded when I was a teenager, but I had absolutely no appreciation for computer science. I was profoundly fortunate to have been drawn into a field that requires CS (software security); it forced me to pick up compiler theory, computer architecture, and distributed systems, and made me a systems programmer, which forced me to pick up data structures. My point here is, skipping school puts you at extreme risk of being a lifelong PHP or game dev, and you should be at pains to find roles that will keep that from happening.
(d) Almost everything I've managed to achieve has been a result of the people I've managed to work with. Words like "badass" and "awesome" are not conducive to learning from people who are smarter than you, which is basically the path you're choosing.
(e) You're not old enough to know that you'll want to be in startups your whole life. Realize that while you have a ~5-6 year window within which you can opt back in to college, you will hit a point in your late 20's where that becomes much harder. You will inevitably regret opting out. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but if you can't foresee that regret, you should at least respect how little insight you have right now and factor that in.
PS: If you don't have the self-discipline to craft a tolerable role at a "big corporation", you're probably not ready to make decisions like this on your own. There's a lot of negative things to be said about BigCo work, but entrepreneurial work is harder. This is a genuinely terrible reason not to get an engineering degree.
It's important to consider that not getting the degree removes backup plans. Backup plans are important to have if you're not independently wealthy, especially in the current economic climate.
It's unlikely that OP is so badass (s)he will be able to avoid years of learning software dev. University is a good place to do that and full of good people to work with. It's not like undergrad is even 10% as demanding as a startup (except the top top schools, perhaps) so why not go and work long hours and if you get traction then go full time on the startup.
So yeah, you did have an unusually fortunate circumstances. Even being in Chicago versus rural Texas provided you with a greater pool of jobs that would consider you beyond your academic credentials. And a greater pool of badass, awesome people to work with. And internet access, which multiplied both of those pools by some huge amount. Not everyone has those kinds of resources, but universities with deep pockets attract them.
And last, entrepreneurial work is not harder, just more risky.
If your circumstances are such that you'll be leaving home to support yourself on your own and never have the luxury of downtime or uncertainty (and there are many tens of millions of these people), yeah, I think, go to school.
Oh, hey, Hacker News readers, welcome to 5-7% of all of me and Erin's arguments. =) Erin's got a (technical) degree and had to clean up hotel rooms to pay for it. Our worldviews are uh different.
"Getting through it", "finishing stuff" and learning how to teach yourself are what makes college worthwhile. If you're using a different scorecard, you may be overlooking value.
You will learn more than you think. I started programming at 7 and still learned a great deal in some of my CS classes. College will round you out as an individual. Sure, some classes will feel like a monumental waste of time, but just interpret that as part of the character building process.
A college degree is the basis of any career and really is the high school diploma of the 21st century. You will meet people, open up networks, and learn about things you never knew you were interested in.
I experienced a lot of frustration in college because I felt a lot of classes were remedial and unchallenging and many of my professors were terrible educators, but, as a whole, it was a very rewarding experience.
Have you visited some of these campuses? ;)
I've been out of education for nearly 3 years now and already have made good use of such connections.
Of course if by that time you are married and have kids and a house, etc.... yeah it would be exceedingly difficult to be a full time student for four years.
EDIT: changed "have a wife" to "are married"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528863
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636275
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198732
There are many more but ycsearch and Google are failing me at the moment.
Short answer: a degree is an easy way to weed out candidates. Also, if you're going to college to learn C or iPhone development or other "trade" bullshit, you're doing it wrong. You should be studying computer science. Anecdotally, I've never met a good systems developer without a degree-equivalent. The people without CS degrees also seem to be universally weak on theory: discrete math, computational complexity, proof construction, relational and abstract algebra, graph theory, and (amazingly enough) calculus.
Edit: You don't have to major in computer science, I was simply stating that you shouldn't expect your university to teach you objective c. That's the kind of thing good hackers pickup in a weekend.
Edit2: Seems Ptacek is an example of a systems developer who didn't get a degree. Looks like he had to duplicate the effort of learning the systems stuff anyway so, meh.
I don't know what maths education is in US high schools but in Australia I learnt differential and integral calculus in high school. It wasn't required (it depended on what courses you chose) but most people who went into science and engineering did it (along with physics and chemistry).
There's two ways to look at this problem:
1. There are a significant number of college dropouts who founded massive companies (Bill Gates springs to mind). There are people who are so driven that college is a waste of time for them. A certain amount of luck is required too but luck rewards persistence; and
2. There is everybody else.
If you're asking "should I go to college?" you probably don't belong in (1). Those in (2) should go to college.
Remember too that for every success story in (1) there are a hundred stories of failure and a dozen success stories in (2).
It should serve as a cautionary tale that at the time something like Google could never have been created when it was without a solid theoretical foundation.
This example is usually posted and, once again, usually noted that people like Gates and Zuckerburg are really bad examples of people who "didn't go to college" (especially since they actually did, they just didn't complete it). The only lesson that you can really take from them is that if you are already proficient, have achieved an upper-middle/upper class education and gotten into Harvard, and formed a successful software company that benefits heavily from luck of positioning and timing, yes it may be a good idea to drop out of school.
I don't know what maths education is in US high schools but in Australia I learnt differential and integral calculus in high school
Confuses me too. I did multivariable differential/integral calculus in high school as well, but those with only calculus in high school seem to get in a bind whenever it comes to vector calculus or worse, calculus/differential equations with linear algebra.
A good friend of mine with even less school than me (I have a summer semester at UIC) recently left his last job with a seven (7) figure pay-check to found and then sell (lucratively) his third startup. He could also kick both of our asses in a programming contest.
JWZ: another obvious counterexample.
There are people for whom school is extremely helpful, but if you're going to make your way through your career on raw technical aptitude, it's clearly not a requirement.
Absolutely. I agree with the op's point, I was just pointing out that Gates and Zuckerberg are poor examples, not that they are the only examples.
I studied all that stuff in getting my BS in CS. I've not used any of it professionally, and now 20 years later I could not have an intelligent discussion on any of it much less apply it. My work has all been in business/enterprise computing, and strangely these are employers who are most likely to demand a degree as a basic qualification for employment, but are the least likely to actually require any of that knowledge.
I think many people never use it and that's fine, but I also think it's a nice tool to have in your toolbox if you encounter a problem that could use it.
Also: a lot of the topics you've cited are only superficially implicated in systems programming. Discrete math is a great and obvious example, but (perhaps counterintuitively) so is complexity; once you understand 1, log n, n, n2, and 2n, you're ready to read papers and algorithms books critically. The number of times I've been called on to construct a proof of anything, let alone of the complexity of an algorith, is zero.
Graph theory is something you'll miss. Go audit a class and read Skiena; better yet, build a router or a program dag analyzer.
Finally, there's a hell of freight loaded onto that "meh"! You just "meh'd" a decade's worth of debt and four years outside of the industry. A "meh" answer here is pretty damning! Fortunately, I don't think it's at all "meh". There are plenty of good reasons to go.
I think what it boils down to is that college is a universally accepted "good idea", and if you are deciding not to go that route, it's something that you have to tackle on an individual level.
Not everyone is a hypocrite. I just have first-hand experience with trying to decide a course of action based on all the things you don't like. It doesn't work very well. If someone has no idea what they want to do, there are worse ways to "waste" their time than pissing it away on college classes. And they are highly unlikely to be happier with that outcome. If you do know clearly what you want to do, that's different -- and I think that is part of what was different about people like Bill Gates and Madonna. They didn't drop out of college out of dislike of school. They dropped out because they were intently pursuing other goals and college was a hindrance to those goals.
Also, I tend to think you get out of college what you put into it. If you focus solely on the courses you need to graduate: sure, you'll probably miss out on stuff. Discrete math and graph theory are usually required though (as well as continuous math if you're in an engineering program).
Going to school is only 4 years, but you'll immediately come out of it most decidedly not at risk of being a Geek Squad "geek". At the very least you'll be able to get setup in a decently paying, full-time, salaried job that pays the bills and leads to a decent standard of living.
My friend from High School, who also did the "screw you conformist career path!" thing didn't end up in school and struggles far far more with his day-to-day than I do. Not because I learned some special secrets at uni, but because it simply stamps you as "mother approved" to most employers.
Discussions about how it's the person and not the meaningless sheep skin and how employers are really dicking themself over for using diplomas as a signal of quality are wonderful and all, but unless the question above is "I'd like to stick it to the man by not going to school, how can I game the system and get lucky and end up where I would have had I actually had a degree in the first place?" then it doesn't really matter. Most people can't navigate the world in that way. More power to people like you, but it's simply not a realistic picture for most people.
By the way, if you can code, and you're working at Geek Squad, you have problems school wasn't going to solve for you.
I admire that you were able to autodidact your way into a successful career, most people aren't capable of that. I think it's ultimately unhelpful to advise people to follow in your footsteps unless they really truly are capable of following in your footsteps.
I really really wish I had had better opportunity in my youth to have gone to school right after high school, instead of burning through 4 years at uni, I burned through 6 years banging around in various tech jobs and trying to get past the notion society has that you really should go to school for jobs in the skilled labor fields. I watched many people who were not as good as I was absolutely leave me in the dust. Then I burned through another 6 years putting myself through school part-time while supporting me and my family.
Hell, I'd give anything to get 8 of those 12 years back.
>in fact, I think that if your mindset is "screw you I won't conform", you especially don't want to skip school, because you don't know what you're talking about.
Truer words were never spoken.
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0004-college-vs-startup.html
And of course the attached discussion on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500007
Startups tend to be slow to get off the ground. The # of companies who go from 0 to millions within a year are few and far between(especially if you are bootstrapped).
So use the 4 years of college as your cushion to grow your business. It's the best time to do it, since you don't need a job to pay for your rent/food...everything can be paid for with loans that you won't need to start paying for 4 years...and when you do start paying, the amounts are tiny.
You have a set of music files that you want to search on a mobile sd card..
The pseudo code and math to do this is what?
Hint: Most programmers take 7 days to figure this out..
If you can come up with the code and it works, than odds are you only need a 2 year degree..or less..
Note: Question is right from an interview with RealNetworks...the interviewer could not come up with reasons why his assumptions would work(they do not) and thus I declined to interview further..as most texts have the wrong assumptions about this..
>> learn 3x much being on my own
I doubt that. Part of it is the mindset of school. For 4 years of your life, you will have no other obligations than to focus and learn. It is "liberating" in the sense that you know you're there to improve your self and your talents.
You can buy textbooks, but you can't buy the experience of going to school and meeting a diverse set of interesting people your age.
For me, University was a formative stage of my life. I don't regret going at all. It also forces you to learn things that you may not have thought of learning, things that you learn to appreciate later.
You may not want to work at big corp now, but there may be a time when you have to sell-out, even for a short period of time out of pragmatism.
But the one big thing that college offers that lee references here is the learning things you may not have thought of learning. You'll have to take some "fluff" classes, or classes that aren't related to your major, but they expand your appreciation for other topics.
More importantly, at least for me, was the idea that college was a sandbox in which to learn about myself and leadership. I went the fraternity route (of the "Greek" variety, at that), and I learned more about leadership than I would have thought possible at my age. When I first got to school, I never would have dreamed of joining a "frat", let alone running one.
Working my way to President and leading 60 men/fratboys to a higher calling than getting drunk on weekends - a Sisyphean task if there ever was one! - built up my ability to lead without authority, and focus on such nuanced topics like recruitment for business and attention to detail.
Not everyone will have the same experience, that's for sure. I can definitely say I learned a ton outside of the classroom, and the ability to have those experiences when the generally worst case scenarios is a few angry drunk guys and not salaries or a business was very unique.
Especially if somebody else is paying your way, college is a small window of time where you can be entirely devoted to learning and growing. Meet people like you and people who are not like you but you still respect. Maybe instead of a doing startups, you find a field of research that draws you in. Or maybe you discover that philosophy is actually what you want to study and you spend the next four years trying to understand what it means to truly live a meaningful life. You can still keep programming on your own time and leave college if a great startup opportunity comes along.
If you are very, very intelligent, my advice is to go to the best school you can afford, not for the education but for the relationships you will make. It is a wonderful, humbling experience to walk around the grounds of Stanford, MIT, etc., and realize there are thousands of people just as smart as you, just as competent, just as lost and searching.
Whatever direction you take, put a large X on your calendar one year from now. Reevaluate your decision. A year of working full-time or a year of college will give you much, much more perspective. I'm glad I went to a great college, but I would have appreciated it more if I had spent a year in the workforce beforehand.
And what if he is a pretty badass dev and designer?
College isn't about the curriculum as much as about your fellow students. If you go to a good Computer Science department, you WILL find coders that are at least as good as you. Great people to start projects with and network with if you are looking to do a startup.
For something like what you're doing, you will likely meet a lot of similar students in your CS classes, many of which who might not even care for college but go for other reasons (their parents value education, they want the college experience, etc).
I really agree with hedging your bets; if you have the happy problem of creating something that is worth dropping out to work on, more power to you.
However you're young, and probably hard headed. My recommendation, go for a year, during that year work on the idea you like. If it fails stay for another year, and work on another idea.
For what its worth, I also started 2 internet companies while in high school and have been a passionate entrepreneur since. After much deliberation and discouraging (not a typo) advice from those around me, I went back to college after 1.5 years in industry to get my degree, knew what I wanted to study, finished quickly and paid for a majority of it on my own. In a few cases, I even finished just as my friends who had gone straight through after HS. I had some real-world experience and knew what I wanted to study. I did serious research on degree programs and studied exactly what I wanted.
If you are up for it, college is a different kind of challenge that is hard to recreate. It requires a lot of "work" but its satisfying to move toward a long-term goal and finish; very similar to the satisfaction of building/launching an app from nothing. It requires discipline no matter who you are (entrepreneur or not) to get through college or school.
Quite simply: I wouldn't go if you expect to get professional experience or learn more about CS, I would go to learn and have fun but know that it will get harder for a lot of reasons to go back later (mostly because you won't have as much fun). ;)
Just like you I thought going away for a few years would make or break me professionally. I guarantee not much will change and you won't miss out on ("waste") as much as you think you will.
All the best.
If you make the most of your college experience you can get involved in research, get on or off campus jobs - basically, get to know interesting people, and get some exposure to real world problems and experience trying to solve them. I don't think you should throw away this great chance for growth.
You might consider doing a different major, i.e. math, science, engineering, if you're interested in anything else, and just taking the CS classes that interest you. If you have issues with prerequisites, get to know the professors personally - this is the college secret to being allowed to do just about whatever you want.
Go to college, but don't stick around if it turns out to be a waste of your time. That's the mistake I made. It took me nine years and $35000 in student loans to figure out that I'm not cut out for college.
That said, I did learn a decent amount about programming in college that I might not have learned about on my own. So it wasn't a complete waste of my time.