I think the value proposition of college is completely based upon whether the learning strategy of classroom lectures followed by written tests works for you. For me, reading books and attempting projects are the only way I can learn effectively. Technical lectures are incredibly boring as I can't control the pacing, and many times I find they are altogether irrelevant.
Technology moves at such a blistering pace that if you aren't working with the cutting edge tools on a regular basis, you are falling behind. Unfortunately, most classrooms insist on teaching with antiquated methodologies and overemphasize classroom time/testing versus building projects with modern tools. For example, I had to take a full year of Scheme, which in hindsight was helpful, but could have been done far more efficiently by me reading How to Design Programs [1] over the summer and attempting the exercises. School time could then have been used to teach modern methodologies via project work.
How many startups can actually reach stable revenue? I don't mean you need to take down Facebook or Google. But there are way too many startups. Sometimes I start to think: how many customers do they get? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? How long? A year?
But on the other hand, startup is great for fresh out graduates. They learn better and quicker in theory - they are forced to adapt to the change of specs and environment. It's a great place to test your ability as an engineer and a team person. It's a challenge.
I think the majority of startups teach great lessons in how not to run a business. Some of the best lessons Ive learned is watching others as well as myself inadvertently blow stuff up and realizing that should have been done a lot differently. Every once in a while the stars align but what the tech media doesn't say is that the majority of work that goes on in startups is doing stuff that is experimental but typically turns out to be a not so great or extremely bad business decision.
I think it's true. Well, two blades. Business wise, you need a real business man. Technologically you must employ the right technical lead. Then you and your employees (in particular fresh graduates) will learn quicker and better.
Hopefully this is related: can anyone give some advice or input on dropping out to work in silicon valley in general? I'm not close to done (first semester freshman), but I have an internship at a certain large SV company this summer. If you were in my position, and that company offered a job, would you take it?
Not to discourage you, but your education will likely benefit you far longer than most SV companies will be around. The benefits of education also brought, in my life, career choices that would not have been available without it. Choice is liberating. Who knows though, the world does seem to be changing.
I agree, but I think it's fair to say that education definitely exceeds the classroom in our fast-paced industry. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years in college, but very little of it, IMO, was related to classroom or homework-based criteria. It was almost all side projects.
I find it to be overwhelming. I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love and taking the risk on something new is a huge decision. Like, "should you divorce your wife to date the interesting new girl you met?" kind of huge.
I did not have the opportunity to obtain a formal post-secondary education though, so maybe that is something you learn to manage in that process.
> I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love
25% of the North American population are college educated. Based on the previous poster, I would assume at least 25% of the population have to deal with it. In fact, they probably have it worse given the more opportunities than I have access to.
I recently (2 months ago) dropped out to join Pinterest full-time, and I am extremely happy with my decision.
I was in a similar situation as you, except the opportunity came to me as a sophomore, instead of a freshmen. Let me preface by stating that I think college is an extremely invaluable resource to grow up and learn outside of the classroom. I did, and love it.
If I were you, assuming you do get an offer, I'd register it as a co-op with your college. I did that last year with Lift (http://lift.do), and think it was the best way to go about the situation. Here's why: it's still a full-time job, you're still technically a student, and you don't pay any tuition. If you like it, great — stay out there. If not, no harm-no foul, and go back to school.
Happy to chat over email with you, if you'd like. Look in my profile for contact info. Good luck!
I could go on about my opinion on this for a while, but to keep it short [edit, ok, maybe I failed at "short"]:
- If you like programming/CS, then studying CS in college can be fun (once you figure out if you're more into programming or theory you can take more systems or theory courses as appropriate).
- Having a degree will never harm your chances at a company, and can be seen as a legitimizing factor at many [usually larger] companies. If things ever go south, getting a job at a bigger company will be much easier.
- You learn a lot in a short time at university. A lot of this will be the type of things often asked in technical interviews, so it will generally make getting a job in the future easier (the CS interview process can be a little biased toward college type questions rather than industry type questions. Whether the system is broken is another topic). You will learn things in industry too, but if you stay in college you'll still learn them, just later. If you drop out, you might always wonder what topics you're missing out on.
- I don't feel like you're delaying your life by attending university, as that's generally what people expect you to do with the four years after high school, IMO.
As to how useful university has been, I found it very useful. But university, like many things, is what you make of it. It can be useless or very useful or somewhere in-between depending on what you do while there (what classes you take, what projects you work on in your spare time, possibly what clubs you find a fit in).
I've technically been in that situation, and my manager at the time encouraged me to finish my degree. But take this with a grain of salt; I would have finished my degree regardless of what anybody said at that point.
You have a better idea than anyone else of what's best for you, and you should make this decision, if it comes up, at the end of your internship rather than now. But I generally encourage people in CS to get their degree.
If you have any questions related to that, I'd be happy to answer them.
The real question is, "are you someone who will start a business no matter what?".
If so, then I'd say dropping out early is something to consider. But do so knowing the risks associated with it. Any business you start will most likely fail. And many companies will require that you have a degree to get a job^. If you have a chance to move to SV then do it. There's a lot of negative aspects (group think, etc) but the positives drastically outweigh them. You'll have the opportunity to surround yourself with people who think big and take big chances...the type of people who are great at starting businesses. You won't find it anywhere else.
If not, then stay in college. A degree gets you a good amount of choice that you'd lose if you opt not to get one. But those choices are always when working for someone else. If that's something you can do (99% of the population) then the degree will go a long way.
I'm 34, now living in SV. Dropped out in my 3rd year to take a contracting gig at GM in the late 90s. If I knew better I would have came out to SV. Instead I moved back to Cincinnati and did a startup for 3 years before I was married or had kids. Now I'm on my second startup (normally spend 3 years at a "real" company between startups) but this time I have a wife who stays home and I have 2 kids. The lack of degree has not yet had a negative impact on me. But I don't know if that will continue.
^ I've not yet finished college and I never have trouble finding work between starting up. YMMV
My uncle told me: you're going to be working for the rest of your life -- five days a week, with minor breaks for vacations. Enjoy school while it lasts, make the most of it; there's no rush to get into work because there's no getting out.
(Yes, some people end up rich or with atypical work schedules that make the above categorization not true, and others roll the startup dice and have a great time at that too, but the vast majority of people, including many intelligent, interesting, and otherwise nontraditional people, fall into the above pattern.)
Ten years from now nobody's gonna care whether you've been in the industry for five years or eight, but some will care about your degree, and much more importantly you will care whether you took the initiative to learn something interesting (not about computers!).
You see, the thing with this kind of advice that your uncle kindly gave to you is that this only settles into the mind of people who have the mentality that they can only really enjoy life at school/college before being locked in a confined work cell.
I dropped out of college a few months ago & I'm focusing on self educating myself on subjects that I'm particularly interested in, investment, accounting, web design, I'm working on a few great ideas & I have no intentions of working five days a week with minor breaks for vacations in the future because I am currently working 7 days a week with no vacations in order to not only live a life that most people only dream of, but also to make a real impact in the world within a few years (I'm 19).
I guess it's all opinion, but assuming that the process of enjoying life at school then going into work for the rest of your life to suffer is the standard among 'the vast majority of people' is just non-existent to me. I consider myself to be a normal person who is just damn willing to work hard for what he believes in, and fortunately at this time in my life, I have a concrete vision of what I believe in.
If you love what you do, then your work days are just as fun and fulfilling as your vacation days, and believe me, I intend to do what I love.
(Btw I hope I don't come across as arrogant or rude, I respect your comment and I'm just offering my opinion.)
Thanks for taking the time to read and think about my comment. I myself didn't take my uncle's advice seriously at the time, which is all the more reason I can still remember it now (over a decade later). To clarify it slightly: I enjoy my work, perhaps even more than I did school, but when I think back to meaningful events in my life the months I worked are a blur around the memorable parts.
If there's any interesting life lesson I've learned in my few years it's this: just because you're different from the people immediately around you (due to intelligence, drive, etc.) it doesn't mean your broad needs in life (e.g. human companionship, time to unwind) are going to be significantly different than the billions of humans that came before you. That's not dooming you to mediocrity, that's just stats -- that's the intelligent read of the data we have. But despite a million cliche stories of the powerful magnate whose only life regret is that they had spent more time with their children (even Steve Jobs, perhaps: http://technology.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=28... ), it may just be a lesson you can only learn from experience.
Thanks everyone for the replies. My logic is:
I learned everything I know about programming on my own (specifically, almost exclusively from the internet), and I am dying to get to SV, get some industry experience, and hopefully soon start my own company (me and my brother hope to eventually apply to YC together, he's got big ideas too). I spend my spare time working on those "undergraduate hacker projects" pg mentions, but I would be regardless (possibly more so if I wasn't in college)
I'm loading up on CS theory classes this semester in and the next semester, because I do appreciate the importance of them, so if I do drop out I'll have that mostly covered. I really feel like 3 more years of mostly fulfilling degree requirements will only delay me, I'm not learning anything from the applied CS courses I take.
At a good college you learn as much from the other students as from your classes, and not only about CS.
It's also easier to work on side projects in college.
You should not leave college as early as this unless (a) you start something so successful that it pulls you out, or (b) you are one of the very rare people who are temperamentally unsuited to it.
Unless your college is awful, your longing for SV is a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. SV is full of people who wish they were back in college.
I wish this could be sent to a legion of career planning and placement offices across universities in the US (and Europe too, for that matter). It reminds of an old Einstein saying (paraphrase), "education is what you have when you forget everything you learned in school".
I know you're impatient and you can't wait to get the ball rolling on your ideas. Believe me, I've been in your shoes. And I thought the grass was greener on the other side too. Having tread the grass on both sides, here's what I've learned: hands-on smarts and school smarts are both indispensable for whatever you do in the future, whether it's starting a business or pursuing other dreams and ambitions. It sounds like you're on a great track for both right now, going to school and hacking on the side. This isn't a zero-sum game, you don't have to give up one for the other :) You may have to do a fair amount of exploring and perhaps change schools or majors to find something that's right for you, but certainly don't drop out and give up on a potentially great college education because you feel what you're learning isn't paying off right now.
This topic hits home so this may end up a long post -- you don't have to read it by any means :) Instead go read Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, it's much more eloquent and compelling than anything I have to say, and he tells a great story about how hard he tried to stay in college though he could not afford the tuition.
I thought I'd share my experience in hopes it would help give some perspective. First, I would never advise anyone to entirely drop out of school, but I totally get how you're feeling because I took two years away from college to explore and pursue a business idea. I grew up in Silicon Valley (or more accurately, I grew up with Silicon Valley) in an environment where your peers expected you to stay on a straight, almost preordained path to an acclaimed university and then a big tech- or science-related company. And should you stray from that path, it had better be to start a tech company with immediately obviously benefits that everyone understood and praised, or else you'd better prepare to be scorned. Even in SV, the word "startup" doesn't always connote glamor, most often people's views of success and fearless entrepreneurship are in hindsight.
I was tired of the social pressure and looking for different problems to tackle so I left school temporarily and went as far away from SV as possible -- I went all the way to a mountain village in China to oversee a teeny-tiny clothing factory -- not the type of "startup" my SV peers would have been proud of. But I always knew I'd come home to SV and I was determined to finish my degree. I took distance learning classes online so I could earn credits for transferring into a good business program. "Distance learning" from a mountainous village in China in meant hooking up a very slow, very unstable dial-up connection (it was a miracle they even had a modem and Internet service at all) at work and doing some random micro-Econ coursework while dozens of sewing machines whirled around me, and praying that the power wouldn't go out suddenly. Sometimes it meant taking final exams at 4am because of the time difference.
That experience was both vastly frustrating and great fun, but it would not have been complete if I hadn't gone back to college. I enjoyed being able to hack out my own curriculum, but those online classes would not have mattered if I didn't turn them into a real degree. I got the credits I needed and successfully transferred into the undergrad business program of my choice. After being away for two years, I had become used to being without many resources, and now there were tons of university programs and people who wanted to know all about what I've been doing and help me take those ideas further. The graduate school had entrepreneurship competition and I even got to pitch my ideas on reforming manufacturing processes in the fashion/clothing industry to some VCs. One thing's for sure-- I would've had a hard time coming by those opportunities to drive my ideas even further had I not gone back to finish my degree. I still had to take quite a few pointless classes but those didn't matter compared to everything else the university offered. Sometimes it's ...
I never felt like I was doing my best at college. After my first internship at a large software company, I didn't understand why people had told me to stay in school for as long as I could. I actually wanted to start working! So, a year before graduating, I dropped out and moved from Wisconsin to California.
I worried at first that my lack of a degree would make it hard for me to find a job in the Bay Area, but the market is incredible right now. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you have a degree. I managed to find a great job with people I have fun working with. Sometimes I forget I'm getting paid for it.
Reader, your mileage may vary. College is great, but it's not for everyone. I got a lot out of my three years (especially studying abroad -- if you can afford it, do it), but I knew I was ready for something else. The other path turned out great for me.
My advice: make a list of all the reasons to stay in school. Go through each reason and determine if it's valid.
For me, after doing this, dropping out was an easy decision and I have no regrets. I'm more engaged and challenged each day at TaskRabbit than I ever was in class.
However, ensure you'll have no regrets about your college experience. I achieved my goals, tried new things, and got what I wanted out of college - it just didn't take me 4 years.
A lot of the benefits he's talking about appear to assume that you're being supported financially during tertiary education (college/university) so the advice is like "if you find yourself in a situation where you are completely financially supported with a lot of free time, don't stop being financially supported in order to start a company". Which is pretty obvious advice.
I think what he is trying to say is just concentrate on what you are building/creating and not whether it fits a certain buzz word which is sound advice.
That's like saying stop thinking about eating an apple and start thinking about eating fruit.
It seems to me more like "stop thinking about eating durian and start thinking about eating fruit" -- true, one is a type of the other, but it's a wildly unusual type and certainly not one which is to everyone's taste.
As an experiment, pick three random portfolio companies from a16z.com, benchmark.com, and sequoiacap.com and see what percentage of the founders are college drop outs.
In SV, what you know and who you know are both very important.
One thing that almost never rises up when people talk about college is US work visas. Having a university level degree is pretty much essential in order to obtain a H1b visa to be able to work in the US. Of course there are ways around it but that itself is a good motivation to finish your studies if you're a foreigner.
I agree that school is good time to work on side projects and learn by doing. One other good way is to do a internship for a US based startup as obtaining a J1 internship visa is relatively trivial if you're in college. That was the single best thing I did in school.
In my early 20s. Dropped out of college to get "real world experience."
In retrospect, the thought of having blocks of free time to pursue whatever I want is very appealing. For now I am stuck doing 40+ hour workweeks and trying to cram side projects in on nights and weekends.
I think in particular, I would/could have benefited more from the increased number of opportunities for free time and flexibility:
* No longer have seasonal breaks outside of the odd vacation time.
* Can't cram work into only a couple days a week as I am expected to show up every day.
* In college, you can skip classes that you already know the material for and only show up for tests (i.e. do the minimum possible to maintain a good grade). With work, you are expected to be 100% productive every single day. There is no chance to get ahead: If you run out of work to do, you are given more, or more will be created for you.
This mostly assumes that you're already very smart and while in college you are financially supported via loans or scholarships, but if you're attending Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, you probably meet both criteria.
It's not that I want a college degree. I want to be financially supported while having (more) time to work on the cool things I want to work on, which is actually the same reason I want to run my own company. College is one such example that provides that opportunity.
Why not try freelancing? Take on only enough work to support your living costs, which should be far less than a full time job if you are a developer (I'm betting you could get by on 5-10 hours per week if you are careful with your money), and leave the rest of your time free to do whatever you want.
You are not going to get rich doing it that way, but wealth doesn't seem to be a concern of yours anyway.
"As a result, my advice to anyone thinking of dropping out is to keep studying, and use every opportunity to build projects and startups on the side."
Yes. In fact, I'd go even further. Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.
And unless you're Gates or Zuckerberg (protip: you're almost definitely not), that college degree is going to be infinitely more valuable to you than anything you might come up with while in college.
A lot of people think that it was because he dropped out that Zuck was so successful, but IIRC, during Startup School 2012 he said that Facebook hit 1 million users before he dropped out. So unless you're coming up with the next Facebook (and you're almost definitely not), dropping out is a boneheaded move.
Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life.
Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life.
Actually it'll stay with you for your first entry-level job, after which people will simply stop asking when/where you went to school.
No, College degree matters. In fact in many cases your resume may not even pass through the filters if you don't have college degree on it.
People seriously need to think before dropping out. What do you plan to do, if your start up folds up? Which is a very likely scenario given how many start ups fold up.
You can do the start up thing anytime. But going to college has always been a young mans game.
In fact in many cases your resume may not even pass through the filters if you don't have college degree on it.
If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, sure. If you want to work in technology, I've never met anyone who cares. In hindsight, I believe you can optimize your path for your career which often would not include college, but admittedly it is difficult to see that path as a youth, which I suppose could make college a good default.
This is a point which often worries me, I decided to skip higher education to travel and began programming (professionally for a company) when I had just turned 19, now, 7 months in I'm starting to see that my friends who went to college and university are actually light years behind me when it comes to achievements so far.
It's a bummer that I'll probably never work for the Facebooks or Googles of the world, but there are always jobs going in tech and once you have experience, your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Your education shows your first employer that you are dedicated and know your stuff, when you go to your second job, it is your performance in job one which will instead be validated.
I'll second the "keep studying" part. After high school and summers during college, I worked at a wonderful startup. Software was a big part of what they were doing, but hardware was the real innovation and everybody there except me was a hardware guy. By my second year I was giving architecture presentations to the client, because who else was going to do it? At one point I contemplated just dropping out and going to work because I'd be coming in at a higher salary than if I graduated and went somewhere else. I spent the summers grinding at that company, spent the school year doing projects on the side, and frankly blew off school because who cared about GPA when you had all that experience?
It's been five years since I graduated college, and to this day I regret not spending that part of my life focusing on that part of life. Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's, and I had no interest in all the web stuff that was being done now. At the same time, anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field.
I'm sure lots of kids are more responsible than I was at that age. They can balance hobby projects along with acing classes. But if you're not one of those people, then I suggest either doing school or doing a startup, but not trying to do both at the same time and letting both suffer. There is plenty of time in life for entrepreneurship. And frankly, outside the little Silicon Valley bubble, your chances at starting a successful business will be greatly enhanced by the signaling devices you can earn by focusing single-mindedly on school.
I do always like to point out the irony of the fact that Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford UG and Stanford Law, clerked for a Circuit judge, then went to go work for an investment bank. He was almost thirty by the time he started his first venture! Life is long, the only thing you're rushing towards is death. :D
> anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field.
'rayiner, if you're who I think you are (Northwestern Law?), your grades must not have been that bad; you seem to be doing just fine career-wise.
There is a reason the average age of successful first-time startup entrepreneurs is something like 35. And this is something I only learned in retrospect, having precocious talent for being at the right place at the right time in my 20s and never really capitalizing on it. Yes, there are outlier cases but really successful startups tend to be led by people that already have a few iterations under their belt.
Experience is more valuable than it ever seems like it is before you have it. It will also take more than the couple years in college you might skip to acquire it. College does not add that much value from the standpoint of building a technology startup but there is also little upside in not completing college or using it as an opportunity to gain some early good experience.
Dropping out and doing a tech startup should be independent decisions.
Your whole point is based on the "35 year-old" static. That being said, if you don't link to the resource you are getting that data from; your argument is likely not going that far.
I dropped for two years, and experience was the main bottleneck (though I thought I had a lot of experience when I did). I'd be interested to confirm that.
If you are not American, do not drop out. You will have issues obtaining a US work visa without a uni degree, i.e. you cannot go to Silicon Valley, i.e. you will be at a disadvantage.
On the flip-side, if your reason for going to SV is to look for riches, the composition of the top 1%, according to Gallup, is comprised of:
23% college graduates
27% college dropouts, or less
49% post-graduates
Unless you are willing to do post-graduate studies (which, I imagine, is primarily limited to professional degrees like MD and JD), you are statistically worse off by having a college degree.
this is a tricky subject with the current state of free online education. im currently enrolled in a small tech for game design. its becoming more apparent as time goes on that everything im learning in school is easily found online. not to mention my school keeps losing all of our good instructors to full sail and Disney leaving us with fresh college graduates. for me it boils down to the quality of education im paying for. i know being in debt is apart of getting your degree but at what point do you take the leap of faith and just try to educate and grow on your own?
It’s really easy to forget that the only reason you have these swathes of free time is because your life is funded by a student loan (which is usually the cheapest credit you’ll ever get in your life).
One thing to keep in mind ... sure, look at Gates and Zuckerberg the two prime examples of college dropouts who went on to found wildly successful companies. But if I'm not mistaken, these guys were already wildly successfull before they dropped out?
Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of successful tech startup founders probably did finish college and have some life experience... E.g. Elon Musk is a prime example - he got degrees in both Economics and Physics before going on to found Zip2, X.com (precursor to PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla motors.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadTechnology moves at such a blistering pace that if you aren't working with the cutting edge tools on a regular basis, you are falling behind. Unfortunately, most classrooms insist on teaching with antiquated methodologies and overemphasize classroom time/testing versus building projects with modern tools. For example, I had to take a full year of Scheme, which in hindsight was helpful, but could have been done far more efficiently by me reading How to Design Programs [1] over the summer and attempting the exercises. School time could then have been used to teach modern methodologies via project work.
1. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
But on the other hand, startup is great for fresh out graduates. They learn better and quicker in theory - they are forced to adapt to the change of specs and environment. It's a great place to test your ability as an engineer and a team person. It's a challenge.
I did not have the opportunity to obtain a formal post-secondary education though, so maybe that is something you learn to manage in that process.
One percent (of developers) problems.
I was in a similar situation as you, except the opportunity came to me as a sophomore, instead of a freshmen. Let me preface by stating that I think college is an extremely invaluable resource to grow up and learn outside of the classroom. I did, and love it.
If I were you, assuming you do get an offer, I'd register it as a co-op with your college. I did that last year with Lift (http://lift.do), and think it was the best way to go about the situation. Here's why: it's still a full-time job, you're still technically a student, and you don't pay any tuition. If you like it, great — stay out there. If not, no harm-no foul, and go back to school.
Happy to chat over email with you, if you'd like. Look in my profile for contact info. Good luck!
- If you like programming/CS, then studying CS in college can be fun (once you figure out if you're more into programming or theory you can take more systems or theory courses as appropriate).
- Having a degree will never harm your chances at a company, and can be seen as a legitimizing factor at many [usually larger] companies. If things ever go south, getting a job at a bigger company will be much easier.
- You learn a lot in a short time at university. A lot of this will be the type of things often asked in technical interviews, so it will generally make getting a job in the future easier (the CS interview process can be a little biased toward college type questions rather than industry type questions. Whether the system is broken is another topic). You will learn things in industry too, but if you stay in college you'll still learn them, just later. If you drop out, you might always wonder what topics you're missing out on.
- I don't feel like you're delaying your life by attending university, as that's generally what people expect you to do with the four years after high school, IMO.
As to how useful university has been, I found it very useful. But university, like many things, is what you make of it. It can be useless or very useful or somewhere in-between depending on what you do while there (what classes you take, what projects you work on in your spare time, possibly what clubs you find a fit in).
I've technically been in that situation, and my manager at the time encouraged me to finish my degree. But take this with a grain of salt; I would have finished my degree regardless of what anybody said at that point.
You have a better idea than anyone else of what's best for you, and you should make this decision, if it comes up, at the end of your internship rather than now. But I generally encourage people in CS to get their degree.
If you have any questions related to that, I'd be happy to answer them.
If so, then I'd say dropping out early is something to consider. But do so knowing the risks associated with it. Any business you start will most likely fail. And many companies will require that you have a degree to get a job^. If you have a chance to move to SV then do it. There's a lot of negative aspects (group think, etc) but the positives drastically outweigh them. You'll have the opportunity to surround yourself with people who think big and take big chances...the type of people who are great at starting businesses. You won't find it anywhere else.
If not, then stay in college. A degree gets you a good amount of choice that you'd lose if you opt not to get one. But those choices are always when working for someone else. If that's something you can do (99% of the population) then the degree will go a long way.
I'm 34, now living in SV. Dropped out in my 3rd year to take a contracting gig at GM in the late 90s. If I knew better I would have came out to SV. Instead I moved back to Cincinnati and did a startup for 3 years before I was married or had kids. Now I'm on my second startup (normally spend 3 years at a "real" company between startups) but this time I have a wife who stays home and I have 2 kids. The lack of degree has not yet had a negative impact on me. But I don't know if that will continue.
^ I've not yet finished college and I never have trouble finding work between starting up. YMMV
(Yes, some people end up rich or with atypical work schedules that make the above categorization not true, and others roll the startup dice and have a great time at that too, but the vast majority of people, including many intelligent, interesting, and otherwise nontraditional people, fall into the above pattern.)
Ten years from now nobody's gonna care whether you've been in the industry for five years or eight, but some will care about your degree, and much more importantly you will care whether you took the initiative to learn something interesting (not about computers!).
I dropped out of college a few months ago & I'm focusing on self educating myself on subjects that I'm particularly interested in, investment, accounting, web design, I'm working on a few great ideas & I have no intentions of working five days a week with minor breaks for vacations in the future because I am currently working 7 days a week with no vacations in order to not only live a life that most people only dream of, but also to make a real impact in the world within a few years (I'm 19).
I guess it's all opinion, but assuming that the process of enjoying life at school then going into work for the rest of your life to suffer is the standard among 'the vast majority of people' is just non-existent to me. I consider myself to be a normal person who is just damn willing to work hard for what he believes in, and fortunately at this time in my life, I have a concrete vision of what I believe in.
If you love what you do, then your work days are just as fun and fulfilling as your vacation days, and believe me, I intend to do what I love.
(Btw I hope I don't come across as arrogant or rude, I respect your comment and I'm just offering my opinion.)
If there's any interesting life lesson I've learned in my few years it's this: just because you're different from the people immediately around you (due to intelligence, drive, etc.) it doesn't mean your broad needs in life (e.g. human companionship, time to unwind) are going to be significantly different than the billions of humans that came before you. That's not dooming you to mediocrity, that's just stats -- that's the intelligent read of the data we have. But despite a million cliche stories of the powerful magnate whose only life regret is that they had spent more time with their children (even Steve Jobs, perhaps: http://technology.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=28... ), it may just be a lesson you can only learn from experience.
Thanks everyone for the replies. My logic is: I learned everything I know about programming on my own (specifically, almost exclusively from the internet), and I am dying to get to SV, get some industry experience, and hopefully soon start my own company (me and my brother hope to eventually apply to YC together, he's got big ideas too). I spend my spare time working on those "undergraduate hacker projects" pg mentions, but I would be regardless (possibly more so if I wasn't in college)
I'm loading up on CS theory classes this semester in and the next semester, because I do appreciate the importance of them, so if I do drop out I'll have that mostly covered. I really feel like 3 more years of mostly fulfilling degree requirements will only delay me, I'm not learning anything from the applied CS courses I take.
The internship is at Facebook, if that matters.
It's also easier to work on side projects in college.
You should not leave college as early as this unless (a) you start something so successful that it pulls you out, or (b) you are one of the very rare people who are temperamentally unsuited to it.
Unless your college is awful, your longing for SV is a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. SV is full of people who wish they were back in college.
This topic hits home so this may end up a long post -- you don't have to read it by any means :) Instead go read Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, it's much more eloquent and compelling than anything I have to say, and he tells a great story about how hard he tried to stay in college though he could not afford the tuition.
I thought I'd share my experience in hopes it would help give some perspective. First, I would never advise anyone to entirely drop out of school, but I totally get how you're feeling because I took two years away from college to explore and pursue a business idea. I grew up in Silicon Valley (or more accurately, I grew up with Silicon Valley) in an environment where your peers expected you to stay on a straight, almost preordained path to an acclaimed university and then a big tech- or science-related company. And should you stray from that path, it had better be to start a tech company with immediately obviously benefits that everyone understood and praised, or else you'd better prepare to be scorned. Even in SV, the word "startup" doesn't always connote glamor, most often people's views of success and fearless entrepreneurship are in hindsight.
I was tired of the social pressure and looking for different problems to tackle so I left school temporarily and went as far away from SV as possible -- I went all the way to a mountain village in China to oversee a teeny-tiny clothing factory -- not the type of "startup" my SV peers would have been proud of. But I always knew I'd come home to SV and I was determined to finish my degree. I took distance learning classes online so I could earn credits for transferring into a good business program. "Distance learning" from a mountainous village in China in meant hooking up a very slow, very unstable dial-up connection (it was a miracle they even had a modem and Internet service at all) at work and doing some random micro-Econ coursework while dozens of sewing machines whirled around me, and praying that the power wouldn't go out suddenly. Sometimes it meant taking final exams at 4am because of the time difference.
That experience was both vastly frustrating and great fun, but it would not have been complete if I hadn't gone back to college. I enjoyed being able to hack out my own curriculum, but those online classes would not have mattered if I didn't turn them into a real degree. I got the credits I needed and successfully transferred into the undergrad business program of my choice. After being away for two years, I had become used to being without many resources, and now there were tons of university programs and people who wanted to know all about what I've been doing and help me take those ideas further. The graduate school had entrepreneurship competition and I even got to pitch my ideas on reforming manufacturing processes in the fashion/clothing industry to some VCs. One thing's for sure-- I would've had a hard time coming by those opportunities to drive my ideas even further had I not gone back to finish my degree. I still had to take quite a few pointless classes but those didn't matter compared to everything else the university offered. Sometimes it's ...
I worried at first that my lack of a degree would make it hard for me to find a job in the Bay Area, but the market is incredible right now. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you have a degree. I managed to find a great job with people I have fun working with. Sometimes I forget I'm getting paid for it.
Reader, your mileage may vary. College is great, but it's not for everyone. I got a lot out of my three years (especially studying abroad -- if you can afford it, do it), but I knew I was ready for something else. The other path turned out great for me.
For me, after doing this, dropping out was an easy decision and I have no regrets. I'm more engaged and challenged each day at TaskRabbit than I ever was in class.
However, ensure you'll have no regrets about your college experience. I achieved my goals, tried new things, and got what I wanted out of college - it just didn't take me 4 years.
Startups are a proper subset of businesses. It's up to each individual what type he or she wants to start.
It seems to me more like "stop thinking about eating durian and start thinking about eating fruit" -- true, one is a type of the other, but it's a wildly unusual type and certainly not one which is to everyone's taste.
In SV, what you know and who you know are both very important.
I agree that school is good time to work on side projects and learn by doing. One other good way is to do a internship for a US based startup as obtaining a J1 internship visa is relatively trivial if you're in college. That was the single best thing I did in school.
In retrospect, the thought of having blocks of free time to pursue whatever I want is very appealing. For now I am stuck doing 40+ hour workweeks and trying to cram side projects in on nights and weekends.
I wish I were back in college.
* No longer have seasonal breaks outside of the odd vacation time.
* Can't cram work into only a couple days a week as I am expected to show up every day.
* In college, you can skip classes that you already know the material for and only show up for tests (i.e. do the minimum possible to maintain a good grade). With work, you are expected to be 100% productive every single day. There is no chance to get ahead: If you run out of work to do, you are given more, or more will be created for you.
This mostly assumes that you're already very smart and while in college you are financially supported via loans or scholarships, but if you're attending Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, you probably meet both criteria.
It's not that I want a college degree. I want to be financially supported while having (more) time to work on the cool things I want to work on, which is actually the same reason I want to run my own company. College is one such example that provides that opportunity.
You are not going to get rich doing it that way, but wealth doesn't seem to be a concern of yours anyway.
Yes. In fact, I'd go even further. Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.
A lot of people think that it was because he dropped out that Zuck was so successful, but IIRC, during Startup School 2012 he said that Facebook hit 1 million users before he dropped out. So unless you're coming up with the next Facebook (and you're almost definitely not), dropping out is a boneheaded move.
Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life.
Actually it'll stay with you for your first entry-level job, after which people will simply stop asking when/where you went to school.
People seriously need to think before dropping out. What do you plan to do, if your start up folds up? Which is a very likely scenario given how many start ups fold up.
You can do the start up thing anytime. But going to college has always been a young mans game.
If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, sure. If you want to work in technology, I've never met anyone who cares. In hindsight, I believe you can optimize your path for your career which often would not include college, but admittedly it is difficult to see that path as a youth, which I suppose could make college a good default.
It's a bummer that I'll probably never work for the Facebooks or Googles of the world, but there are always jobs going in tech and once you have experience, your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Your education shows your first employer that you are dedicated and know your stuff, when you go to your second job, it is your performance in job one which will instead be validated.
It's been five years since I graduated college, and to this day I regret not spending that part of my life focusing on that part of life. Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's, and I had no interest in all the web stuff that was being done now. At the same time, anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field.
I'm sure lots of kids are more responsible than I was at that age. They can balance hobby projects along with acing classes. But if you're not one of those people, then I suggest either doing school or doing a startup, but not trying to do both at the same time and letting both suffer. There is plenty of time in life for entrepreneurship. And frankly, outside the little Silicon Valley bubble, your chances at starting a successful business will be greatly enhanced by the signaling devices you can earn by focusing single-mindedly on school.
I do always like to point out the irony of the fact that Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford UG and Stanford Law, clerked for a Circuit judge, then went to go work for an investment bank. He was almost thirty by the time he started his first venture! Life is long, the only thing you're rushing towards is death. :D
FYI, this is false
'rayiner, if you're who I think you are (Northwestern Law?), your grades must not have been that bad; you seem to be doing just fine career-wise.
Experience is more valuable than it ever seems like it is before you have it. It will also take more than the couple years in college you might skip to acquire it. College does not add that much value from the standpoint of building a technology startup but there is also little upside in not completing college or using it as an opportunity to gain some early good experience.
Dropping out and doing a tech startup should be independent decisions.
I dropped for two years, and experience was the main bottleneck (though I thought I had a lot of experience when I did). I'd be interested to confirm that.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of successful tech startup founders probably did finish college and have some life experience... E.g. Elon Musk is a prime example - he got degrees in both Economics and Physics before going on to found Zip2, X.com (precursor to PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla motors.