No degree. Founder and UI/UX Dev (now in Sacramento be previous Bay Area). Six figs. No connections, just hard work.
I'm definitely an outlier. I've yet to meet someone holding it down in the Bay Area with a developers title who didn't have a degree. It's always a look of surprise when asked where I went to college and I respond "I didn't.". Part of me wishes I had, the other part wishes I was less lazy. The ladder in me knows there isn't a thing I can learn in college I couldn't teach myself on my own.
I once asked a genius colleague of mine (also founder and now millionaire at 29) who went to school for biology and wound up a developer if he felt he wasted his time pursuing biology. His response "No, it taught me how to learn.". I really liked that response, obviously it's stuck with me. For many things you need a degree (health fields etc) but for most everything else you need the ability to learn and learn well.
It can be done, but it's much harder, at least in my experience. You're 100% right about being an outlier. People who go this route are going to work much harder as their similarly skilled, but degreed colleagues at everything (proving themselves, earning respect, getting raises, having people even listen to them.) Anyone who can go without accruing a mountain of debt should do so unless you're naturally incredibly talented or have Zuck-level support.
The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees
Is there anything surprising or interesting about this truism? There are millions of jobs and millions of people without college degrees with infinite combinations of skill sets. Of course you are going to have some jobs that are best executed by some people who don't have a college degree.
I'm pretty sure there's an entire generation (or two) of parents who beat into their children's heads that if they didn't get a degree they wouldn't amount to anything. Also, see: credentialism.
So yes, for many people there is a belief that the only jobs for the un-universitied are garbage collection and scrubbing toilets.
It's not surprising, but at the same time so many companies (outside tech) require college degrees for absolutely menial work. I work in biotech and it's fucking terrible.
Recently was turned down for a job that required an MS in bioinformatics (at the time I was 4 classes shy of finishing the degree), this was also at the same company I was already employed at for 3.5 years. Since I didn't have a masters yet they did not think I would be qualified and they refused to let me do a project to showcase my skills.
Instead they gave me a month-long internship so I could gain experience and apply for another position down the road. My first day at the internship I was given work that I could have done prior to starting my masters, it was insulting. My manager (who had an MS in bioinfo) could not even wrap her mind around the questions I was asking her, it was pitiful.
I put my two-weeks in the next day. In this case I think the manager projected her ineptitude on me, since she couldn't do the job without a masters she assumed no one else could either.
The further you go up, the worse it seems to get. SO YES, this apparently should be surprising to a lot of people...so many do not seem to understand this simple concept. Or at the very least, they don't believe it enough to actually put it into practice.
Things that are not surprising take a while to propagate into the core institutional rules. Internet has enabled information sharing, and people have figured out how to educate themselves relatively recently, in historic terms. It is good news when self educated people have more chances and educational institutions are pressured to innovate.
Maybe it's just me, but in discussions like this, I consistently interpret an expectation of naivety in non-college graduates. In practice, I find it's the exact opposite.
If your mentality is to follow Gates' advice of a “much surer path to success” you've already demonstrated weakness.
Many graduates I know did not have a job before college. You don't learn practical job experience in school, so they're left having to figure it out. For example, a lot of my peers aren't comfortable solving problems in their workplace. After they vent and I recommend making changes, most are unwilling to act; they'll make excuses or expect to be fired. Having experiencing a wide variety of "professional" environments myself, I know where to draw the line, and how to stand up for myself.
I also find that expectations of employment differ. That MS title was hard earned, and gets them into interviews at companies with those requirements, so that's where they go. It's expected that you want a salaried job and will ride it (or similar positions in similar companies) to retirement.
Sure, I may one day be the "old dude without a degree who says he can code", but I'm actually preparing to be the dude who no longer codes because he has skills that apply to many industries. Try diversifying your skillset in your cubicle, or exclusively on weekends; from experience, I can say I'm better off without. In the 4+ years you were socializing and studying, I was already living life (actually, I've been working since I was 15-1/2).
I think we'll start seeing a trend where students, especially at STEM schools, can come out of high school, do a coding bootcamp, and work as a junior startup dev without college.
That said, the challenge of when they hit the point that algorithms and data structures are important to their software is creation is I think unsolved so far. edX/Coursera/etc. could be a big help.
That was pretty common in the '90s dot-com boom, quite easy to get a web-dev or Perl job out of high school (or even while still in high school). However the people who skipped college for those jobs were also (on average) the hardest hit in the downturn, so many went back to college in the early 2000s. Excluding those who cashed out, of course.
This sums up pretty much nicely. You don't always need a college degree is a fact. But, getting a college degree is useless is an over statement. I have interviewed/spoken to a bunch of bootcamp camp grads who are good at what they do. But, they fail to catch up with other people when anything new is thrown at them(eg., devops stuff to a front end guy). But, if you are a hacker at heart, you dont need any bootcamp or any degree to excel at a job. The best developer I know is a high school dropout who started out as a kernel hacker.
It's easy to be cynical (apologies if I'm misreading intentions here) about reduced paychecks. There is one complexity here that generally doesn't get mentioned.
There are two mechanisms by which we get richer. One is by increasing our income. The other is by reducing the prices of the things we buy with it. The former is how we increase our wealth relative to other members of society. The latter is how the society increases its overall standard of wealth.
On one hand each of us wants to get paid well. On the other, the more we get paid the higher the costs of the business we're in and the less of its fruits the society gets to enjoy overall.
This dilemma is particularly acute if you're lucky to be in a business you genuinely care about (a huge and rare privilege). For example, if you work in space industry, your salary and benefits contribute directly to the costs of space exploration. This means that ultimately the more you earn the less space exploration we can do per buck.
Generally, people's pay is a balancing act that should involve both fairness and efficiency.
You're argument assumes that all cost is labor which is obviously not true. The higher a percentage of cost that is labor, the better of most people are, since they work. To put it simply, if everyone in the service sector made double, prices wouldn't double. The only people who would suffer are people who make most of their money through capital gains. Even many of them would benefit to have a healthier economy, margins can be replaced by volume. You would also see a spike in prices for limited resources that many can't afford, but innovation usually solves that problem. If you want a good empirical data on this, see the institution of minimum wage. Contrary to the naysayers predictions, there was little inflation and overall, a better economy.
The argument doesn't really make assumptions about how you contribute to a business. Investors fighting for higher capital gains also drive up the costs for the business they fund.
Higher ROI is how an investor increases her wealth relative to other members of society. Lower capital gains make the society richer overall.
If you invest your savings in a space business and genuinely care about it, then the return you demand becomes the cost of space exploration. Identical dilemma to that of the worker.
The class warfare between owners of capital and workers is essentially the same mechanics but taken between two specially chosen groups. In general, each individual and each group seeks to increase their share relative to others (whether you call it income or capital gains). Costs going down is how we all get richer as a society (the costs including both paychecks and capital gains).
I don't think workers, in the united States at least, are fighting for their share. Marketing efforts by the capital side have rendered the working side a helpless lamb ready for the slaughter. But if a symbiotic relationship becomes parasitic, sometimes the host is destroyed, taking the parasite with it.
> For example, if you work in space industry, your salary and benefits contribute directly to the costs of space exploration. This means that ultimately the more you earn the less space exploration we can do per buck.
Doesn't this assume that you the value you create for the company is less than or equal to your salary? Seems like the opposite of reality.
In for-profit businesses, workers should always be a net gain.
Your space exploration analogy would fall apart if you worked for SpaceX, for example. Paying engineers dearly doesn't mean the company makes less money: it means it can get even more lucrative contracts.
So yes, in budget-constrained non-growth organizations like NASA, you might be a net-loss, but that's a pretty special case.
So here's the question: If they're getting paid less than someone with a degree (and initial salary when entering the labor market has a very significant effect on how much someone earns over their lifetime since most pay bumps are incremental), will they be better off in the long run getting the degree?
There's a lot of hate on degrees at HN, but I felt like I got a lot out of mine, even if I was bored in of all the intro classes; sure it's not something I couldn't learn by myself, but being employed full time tends to not give you a lot of time to just learn things that aren't necessary to do the job right in front of you.
Unless, in fact, they can. Of course, any career progression requires more than just one trick in your bag. Being able to communicate well, moving from coding into managing, moving from coding to freelancing, getting domain knowledge relevant to your customers (internal or external).
Turns out there are many important qualities that a person can posses that are important and perhaps indispensable, but often a degree ain't one.
(And yes, I am an old guy speaking with first hand experience).
Hints of "sour grapes" can be detected in this article.
- well credentialed candidates are harder to get due to the job market and are expensive -- the grapes are high on the vine.
- but they are not all they are cracked up to be; and besides it is elitist to be hiring them since they are from affluent backgrounds -- the grapes are sour!
- hiring them for junior roles is a "terrible approach". (Why? Not explained: probably because they are, doh, expensive for junior roles) -- I didn't even want grapes in the first place; free blackberries grow everywhere.
I'm definitely an outlier. I've yet to meet someone holding it down in the Bay Area with a developers title who didn't have a degree. It's always a look of surprise when asked where I went to college and I respond "I didn't.". Part of me wishes I had, the other part wishes I was less lazy. The ladder in me knows there isn't a thing I can learn in college I couldn't teach myself on my own.
I once asked a genius colleague of mine (also founder and now millionaire at 29) who went to school for biology and wound up a developer if he felt he wasted his time pursuing biology. His response "No, it taught me how to learn.". I really liked that response, obviously it's stuck with me. For many things you need a degree (health fields etc) but for most everything else you need the ability to learn and learn well.