6 ms·

Having a college degree sends a signal that you can dedicate yourself to education and follow through. I find employees with college degrees are better than tho

• hockeybias 11y ago
  Spot on.
• spike021 11y ago
  Side jobs are great and sadly not many students take advantage. I was fortunate enough to get an in-office campus job my freshman year that I'll finally be leaving now due to getting an offer to continue my summer internship part time. But the experience of working hard, learning new things (Apache webservers can in fact have very shoddy configurations and issues..), and earning money that can be spent toward tuition and other bills is invaluable.
• untilHellbanned 11y ago
  pay to show your dedication is messed up
  • seibelj 11y ago
    In America, higher education is not free, unlike high school. Our society will always make you pay, that is reality. The way to get around this is to get scholarships, which are not that hard to get provided you work hard and dedicate yourself in high school.
• brighton36 11y ago
  It could just as easily signal a lack of financial competency, and/or a lack of ability in teaching oneself. If you want to signal that you can follow through with 'something' - join the military or start a business.
• daegloe 11y ago
  I was recruited to join Microsoft a while back. At the end of the 8hr day of interviews, the VP formally offered me the job. However, he made a point of mentioning his concern that I dropped out of college, twice. Being a cocky young buck at the time, I in turn pointed out that the founder and (then) Chairman of his company, Bill Gates, was a dropout. He explained to me that there were exceptions to every rule, which was why he was extending the opportunity, but in his experience, college was akin to bootcamp. If I couldn't get through 4 years of doing what I was told, how could he be sure I would do what I was told at Microsoft? I drove back to the hotel, phoned the internal recruiter and declined the offer. He was on to something, of course. But I'd already known that I march to the beat of my own drum.
  • CydeWeys 11y ago
    I had a coworker once who was a college drop-out and had exactly all of the flaws that the VP warned about in your story. He was highly intelligent, and could have made a great software engineer, but his focus and work ethic were terrible, and his work suffered for it terribly. He was exactly the kind of person for whom everything was easy their whole life, then they finally reached a level where blind intelligence alone was not sufficient, and has no persevering skills to fall back on. I hit that same crisis my sophomore-junior years of college, but powered through it and finally learned the skill of hard work (which most other students had already mastered by high school).
    • cyan_atrus 11y ago
      I've had the same anecdotal experience with a coworker. Brilliant engineer and amazing mind for engineering -- but not reliable in the slightest with a terrible work ethic.
    • sotojuan 11y ago
      Can I ask how you got over it? I am going through the same thing, except I was in a hard high school program but ended up in a university with an easy Comp Sci program. I am a senior, and the graduate class I am taking this semester is the first time I have been mentally challenged by the Comp Sci department. Because of this, I tend to "give up" easily in other things that I am interested in but are harder (mathematics), or I am not motivated to build apps for fun and portfolio, even though the ideas and the languages come easy to me.
• latj 11y ago
  Kids these days are lazy. In my day I bagged groceries at the the local family owned grocery store. They paid me a dime a day. I lived off of one nickel and paid college tuition with the other. At the end of undergrad I'd saved up enough to buy a house. Oh, and I fought a god damn war in the middle of all that!
• bpchaps 11y ago
  It's funny you say that. Most non-college folks I've worked with have been significantly better compared to their same-aged counterparts. There's just something to be said about someone who just simply learned through absorption rather than through lectures/assignments/tests.
  • latj 11y ago
    I wouldnt say that most non-college people I have worked with have been better. But I will say that some of the smartest and most talented people I've met never went to college. High school is training you to act the way mainstream society wants adults to act- find the clique you fit into, accept your place in the hierarchy, and do as you're told. More and more, college is the same thing except specifically preparing you to be a professional. Because competition has grown so fierce emphasis is placed on skills that will get you a job. Results are measured based on your ability to pay back your loans. You just sit and listen and sit for the prime years of your life. This prepares you for life as a professional-- where you will sit and listen and sit away the rest of your productive years. College is what you make of it. You can make something useful out of college. But you can also make something out of spending four years on a boat drifting around the south pacific. If you are going to be a filmmaker, you can benefit from four years of film school. But you could also benefit from just making movies for four years. Want to write software for some project you care about? Guess how the first generation learned before there were Computer Science programs? Yes, some studied Math or Physics and met the pioneers of the field. But the vast majority just taught themselves-- and they didnt have the Internet! If you already have what you need to survive and are healthy, just figure out what ratio makes you happy of FUN vs. PROFIT vs. HELPFUL TO SOCIETY and do that shit for a few years. Then, reevaluate.