4 ms·

For myself college was absolutely not worth it. What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. I had

For myself college was absolutely not worth it. What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. I had fun in college and made some good friends but my professional life hasn't been impacted positively in any way by going to college. I looked up my college and my department in their table and I'm making above what they estimate for 45 years old (I'm 30) and I beat the estimates for 25 by a healthy margin. I dropped out my junior year after working for a full 40-hour week over spring break and realizing I was throwing away money to get a degree to.... get a job that I already had. Since then I've had absolutely no issues finding new jobs and moving up the pay scale. I'm not even sure if shorter (2 year) tech colleges are worth it if you want to go into software engineering, maybe some of the bootcamps are worth it but I'm not sure. I've learned more on the job that I ever learned in the classroom (as it relates to computer science) and if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. It would have been far cheaper, I wouldn't still be paying off college loans, and I'd have an extra 3 years of full time earnings/raises/bonuses/etc.

paulpauper 5y ago
as it's said in the commercials "results not typical"
ptudan 5y ago
Do you think you would have had a harder time getting that college SWE job if you weren't an active CS student?
- joshstrange 5y ago
  I don't think so. My first job hired me because I had done some java programing in high school and they needed updates to an existing java tool. I did that work and they offered me PHP work (which I had taught myself in high school, I even wrote a few programs for the school) and I've been doing a mix of web dev (front and back) and mobile work ever since. In college they only taught C and Perl and I've never used either since then. I asked the owner of the second company I worked for (the place I was working when I dropped out) if getting a degree would change anything and he told me he paid me based on what I could do, not some piece of paper. That discussion, plus a full-time week of work that I enjoyed, and my dislike of my college classes pushed me to drop out.
wyldfire 5y ago
> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract. In any case, that was my experience from a CS degree ~20 years ago, probably similar now if the curriculum is similar. Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
- joshstrange 5y ago
  > Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract I hear this or similar things often but I don't really buy it. Sure, if you are doing super high stakes things and you need to optimize the hell out of something then you might be able to pull from concepts learned in college but I've seen new grads waste so much time on pre-optimization and honestly it's just not needed for so many things. Also I've had no issues learning concepts/algorithm/etc on the fly as-needed when performance was crucial. My college experience might be different than yours but having an EE teacher rail against and regularly make fun of web development as "not real development", losing 1 point on each answer of my database exam because I didn't put a semicolon at the end, and having to write a C program from scratch (headers and all) on paper for an exam are only a few examples of what turned me off the way my college taught computer science.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    I feel the same way as you. In high-school I had a chance to do a "co-op" program (like being an intern for the American's) for a company. I did web development work there. I got offered a job there over the summer and continued to work there for 6 more summers while I went through University for software engineering. The thing that is funny is that University didn't help me in that job at all. The vast majority of skills I used at the job were self-taught. A good chunk of those were self-taught before I even went to University. University teaches a lot of theoretical and basically makes you teach yourself the practical. I started to realize that unless I planned to go the academia route and get more into the theoretical, then the degree was pretty useless to me. I ended up not completing the degree because it was just way too hard to stay motivated. It felt like I had to teach myself the important skills anyway, and then listen to stuff I could self-teach myself when I needed to know it. When I had group projects a good chunk of classmates I worked with sucked at programming. Like they didn't know how to use git, sucked at object orientated program, etc... They would produce code that was just in one big massive single file. It was frustrating because the degree really just made a lot of people book smart, but they weren't actually that hirable. I actually got to help with co-op hiring while I was in school for multiple years at the company I was with. When we would look at resumes the biggest thing I realized is that the degree wasn't really relevant. When almost every applicant has the identical degree it's not meaningful. What mattered was what kinds of things they did outside of school. What personal projects they had, what their github looked like, did they have their own website, were they involved in groups or starting their own sidegig websites, etc... Our best candidates were the ones that did a lot of stuff outside of school. And the funny thing is that the majority of those candidates had bad grades. We got the transcripts with every co-op applicant.
guyzero 5y ago
Not knowing what post-secondary school you went to it's worth saying that not all universities and colleges are equal. Don't go to a bad school. Don't go to a mediocre school even.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  If all you need is an overpriced piece of paper to get your resume past the HR drones then there is little difference in outcome between a good school and a bad school.
  - guyzero 5y ago
    Certain schools will get your resume past the "HR drones" when other schools will not, even within the same field of study. We can debate whether top schools actually teach any better or whether they're just skimming off top students out of high school, but there's a significant difference in groups outcomes between schools.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    55% of degrees from for-profit schools have a negative ROI, compared to 24% from public schools. Further, "Attending a very elite school and choosing the right field often has a significant payoff. The best program anywhere in the United States is the computer science major at the California Institute of Technology. Graduates of this well-regarded program can expect an ROI of $4.41 million over the course of their careers. Not far behind is the finance major at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School, where lifetime ROI is $4.35 million."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination. Without a degree, employers had to make a snapshot judgement call on whether or not I was good enough. They didn't see me. They saw my disability. After I got a degree, it was like some sort of checkbox had magically been checked, and the man who had fixed modem drivers in his teens was suddenly good enough to hire. I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.
- joshstrange 5y ago
  > I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination. This isn't what you are talking about but one thing college did that I haven't mentioned is expose me to different people, cultures, etc that I was not exposed to in the bubble I grew up in. That is something I do value and I think there are social aspects of college that are useful. I'll also say that as a white male in the US there are doors that were opened to me that were not open to everyone so I can absolutely believe that college might be necessary (if only for a stupid piece of paper) for some people because of a number of factors outside of their control. I hate that our system works that way. > I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid. 100% agree it's stupid but I just use it as another flag to not work at a company that is that short-sighted or stuck in the past (same way anti-remote-work companies are immediately written off for me).
dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
Hehe, are you me? Dropped out in my 2nd year too. I went to university in Europe though, and have no loans to pay back. Being a student definitely helped me get my break though, mainly due to the tax status. I had been programming for a decade when I got my first job, but everyone's shit and a drain on resources for a couple months regardless. Accepting peanut pay (relatively) + tax benefits made getting that first job easy. The amount I learned in my first couple of months does not compare in any way to university. You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. Meanwhile, it's the job of the senior engineers to be your babysitter at the start (bless the patience of the ones who taught me). And the few times you do get an audience, it's very short (as they have to see 50 other students), and much too vague. There's too little "you idiot, you do that and in 6 months you'll be sorry the DB is deadlocking". More "hm, do you not think you could turn this O(n*log(n) into O(log(n))", which, at the end of the day, I could probably care less for but not by much.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  > You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. My experience in the US was that you could do exactly that. Except for the week before midterms and the week before finals, the professor's office hours were often empty. I could show up and have at least a 1/4, if not better, chance of getting one-on-one talks with someone skilled in their field about what they are working on. That was worth more than anything else I got out of college (except maybe the magic piece of paper that means more companies will interview me).
Melting_Harps 5y ago
> if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. As a biology major who later had to turn to tech (sadly quite common as it turns out), I can sincerely empathize with this. Unfortunately, in the health sciences you cannot do this, even taking a low level lab position requires some level of college/university credit because of the samples you are dealing with (blood, tissue) and the requirements imposed by Law to ensure they gate-keep even though errors occur regardless of degree level in labs, which is why you take such large samples to begin with. In my foray with tech I've made a career in fintech (co-founder then went to a Megacorp), after spending time in Supply Chain roles the auto Industry. In both of those fields you are encouraged to not follow the predecessor if you want to be successful and move up; it rewards you if can pull it off and bring something novel and add value to the Team/Operation. And that, more than anything I learned in University, stuck with me for reasons that I think you could understand. After COVID derailed my Life, as it did others, I asked myself what I wanted to do and I decided to enroll into a BSc program in AI and Machine Learning, with the aspiration of doing what you just mentioned--getting a role before graduating by leveraging my existing skills and the new skills I'd learn with the brand of a University to back it up. My entrepreneurial habits kicked in during the on-boarding process and I saw a need to create a payment processing system to pay for tuition as so many students (mainly international) at the University in question were forced to pay via a system which resulted in delays, missing deadlines and large fees to process if it were possible. Some students even had to resort to using Western Union to make the deadline! This was at the time that Twitter had launched its Bitcoin tipping feature via iOS on it's platform, so a proof of concept/MVP could have been spun in short order. Eventually the faculty sent out a memo condemning using any alternatives (they became aware of the conversations happeing in Slack chat) saying it would result in further delays (or inability to register at all) if they did, thus making it entirely moot to try and flesh anything out. It wouldn't be anything but a MVP, as being a middleman/clearing house doesn't serve any of my long term goals. But what it could have done is disrupt the model and force progress to be made where it would otherwise remain stagnant. With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears? I mean, I'm guessing YOU would be open to this given what you've said but how would your project managers react to this? I've held developer and consultant status at the aforementioned Megacorp and I had way more friction for more insipid things.
aidenn0 5y ago
Around the time of the dot-com bust, I had been interning at a network equipment company. They went under; those without college degrees to much longer to get new jobs, even one person I know who had over a decade of experience in the workforce. That piece of paper can be worth a significant chunk of change, particularly since the gap on the resume caused by fewer companies hiring non-college grads can cause companies to low-ball their offers to you. Maybe the job market is different now, but, even if it is, maybe it will be that way again in 5-10 years. Predictions are hard and all. Also, CS degrees are varied. Very little of what I learned was outdated given that most of what I learned was discrete math. The more practically focused classes were OS and networking and I've used both of those on the job.
Nasrudith 5y ago
> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. That hints of an underdiscussed pitfall when choosing colleges in "practical" fields like engineering and apparently nursing - the theory:practice orientation of their curriculum. A theory oriented one tends to give you a backing which not eternal or life long, shift far slower. We may not use linked lists as much as hash maps but the same complexity analysis applies. If you are savvy enough you can pick up the specifics as needed backed by theory. The disadvantage of a too heavily theory oriented one is bootstrapping to the workplace is more difficult and it may fail to establish proper habits like say how to properly write commits for version control. A more practice oriented one which is proper for the current is more relevant and avoids the starting pitfalls but leaves the alumni less equiped with theory to deal with shifts. An outdated practical oriented curriculum is the worst of both worlds really.
skeeter2020 5y ago
You shouldn't have been looking for specific technology training is the short answer. I'm not aware of any company that would allow you to pay for employment while you were a drain... sounds like you should have gone to a vocational institution like Devry.
- mcguire 5y ago
  I still remember the letter that went around UT Austin's CS department when I was in grad school, from an undergraduate complaining that the department didn't teach i386 assembly.

paulpauper 5y ago

as it's said in the commercials "results not typical"

ptudan 5y ago

Do you think you would have had a harder time getting that college SWE job if you weren't an active CS student?

joshstrange 5y ago
I don't think so. My first job hired me because I had done some java programing in high school and they needed updates to an existing java tool. I did that work and they offered me PHP work (which I had taught myself in high school, I even wrote a few programs for the school) and I've been doing a mix of web dev (front and back) and mobile work ever since. In college they only taught C and Perl and I've never used either since then. I asked the owner of the second company I worked for (the place I was working when I dropped out) if getting a degree would change anything and he told me he paid me based on what I could do, not some piece of paper. That discussion, plus a full-time week of work that I enjoyed, and my dislike of my college classes pushed me to drop out.

wyldfire 5y ago

> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract. In any case, that was my experience from a CS degree ~20 years ago, probably similar now if the curriculum is similar. Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

joshstrange 5y ago
> Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract I hear this or similar things often but I don't really buy it. Sure, if you are doing super high stakes things and you need to optimize the hell out of something then you might be able to pull from concepts learned in college but I've seen new grads waste so much time on pre-optimization and honestly it's just not needed for so many things. Also I've had no issues learning concepts/algorithm/etc on the fly as-needed when performance was crucial. My college experience might be different than yours but having an EE teacher rail against and regularly make fun of web development as "not real development", losing 1 point on each answer of my database exam because I didn't put a semicolon at the end, and having to write a C program from scratch (headers and all) on paper for an exam are only a few examples of what turned me off the way my college taught computer science.
- Fogest 5y ago
  I feel the same way as you. In high-school I had a chance to do a "co-op" program (like being an intern for the American's) for a company. I did web development work there. I got offered a job there over the summer and continued to work there for 6 more summers while I went through University for software engineering. The thing that is funny is that University didn't help me in that job at all. The vast majority of skills I used at the job were self-taught. A good chunk of those were self-taught before I even went to University. University teaches a lot of theoretical and basically makes you teach yourself the practical. I started to realize that unless I planned to go the academia route and get more into the theoretical, then the degree was pretty useless to me. I ended up not completing the degree because it was just way too hard to stay motivated. It felt like I had to teach myself the important skills anyway, and then listen to stuff I could self-teach myself when I needed to know it. When I had group projects a good chunk of classmates I worked with sucked at programming. Like they didn't know how to use git, sucked at object orientated program, etc... They would produce code that was just in one big massive single file. It was frustrating because the degree really just made a lot of people book smart, but they weren't actually that hirable. I actually got to help with co-op hiring while I was in school for multiple years at the company I was with. When we would look at resumes the biggest thing I realized is that the degree wasn't really relevant. When almost every applicant has the identical degree it's not meaningful. What mattered was what kinds of things they did outside of school. What personal projects they had, what their github looked like, did they have their own website, were they involved in groups or starting their own sidegig websites, etc... Our best candidates were the ones that did a lot of stuff outside of school. And the funny thing is that the majority of those candidates had bad grades. We got the transcripts with every co-op applicant.

guyzero 5y ago

Not knowing what post-secondary school you went to it's worth saying that not all universities and colleges are equal. Don't go to a bad school. Don't go to a mediocre school even.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
If all you need is an overpriced piece of paper to get your resume past the HR drones then there is little difference in outcome between a good school and a bad school.
- guyzero 5y ago
  Certain schools will get your resume past the "HR drones" when other schools will not, even within the same field of study. We can debate whether top schools actually teach any better or whether they're just skimming off top students out of high school, but there's a significant difference in groups outcomes between schools.
- mcguire 5y ago
  55% of degrees from for-profit schools have a negative ROI, compared to 24% from public schools. Further, "Attending a very elite school and choosing the right field often has a significant payoff. The best program anywhere in the United States is the computer science major at the California Institute of Technology. Graduates of this well-regarded program can expect an ROI of $4.41 million over the course of their careers. Not far behind is the finance major at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School, where lifetime ROI is $4.35 million."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination. Without a degree, employers had to make a snapshot judgement call on whether or not I was good enough. They didn't see me. They saw my disability. After I got a degree, it was like some sort of checkbox had magically been checked, and the man who had fixed modem drivers in his teens was suddenly good enough to hire. I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.

joshstrange 5y ago
> I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination. This isn't what you are talking about but one thing college did that I haven't mentioned is expose me to different people, cultures, etc that I was not exposed to in the bubble I grew up in. That is something I do value and I think there are social aspects of college that are useful. I'll also say that as a white male in the US there are doors that were opened to me that were not open to everyone so I can absolutely believe that college might be necessary (if only for a stupid piece of paper) for some people because of a number of factors outside of their control. I hate that our system works that way. > I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid. 100% agree it's stupid but I just use it as another flag to not work at a company that is that short-sighted or stuck in the past (same way anti-remote-work companies are immediately written off for me).

dj_mc_merlin 5y ago

Hehe, are you me? Dropped out in my 2nd year too. I went to university in Europe though, and have no loans to pay back. Being a student definitely helped me get my break though, mainly due to the tax status. I had been programming for a decade when I got my first job, but everyone's shit and a drain on resources for a couple months regardless. Accepting peanut pay (relatively) + tax benefits made getting that first job easy. The amount I learned in my first couple of months does not compare in any way to university. You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. Meanwhile, it's the job of the senior engineers to be your babysitter at the start (bless the patience of the ones who taught me). And the few times you do get an audience, it's very short (as they have to see 50 other students), and much too vague. There's too little "you idiot, you do that and in 6 months you'll be sorry the DB is deadlocking". More "hm, do you not think you could turn this O(n*log(n) into O(log(n))", which, at the end of the day, I could probably care less for but not by much.

aidenn0 5y ago
> You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. My experience in the US was that you could do exactly that. Except for the week before midterms and the week before finals, the professor's office hours were often empty. I could show up and have at least a 1/4, if not better, chance of getting one-on-one talks with someone skilled in their field about what they are working on. That was worth more than anything else I got out of college (except maybe the magic piece of paper that means more companies will interview me).

Melting_Harps 5y ago

> if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. As a biology major who later had to turn to tech (sadly quite common as it turns out), I can sincerely empathize with this. Unfortunately, in the health sciences you cannot do this, even taking a low level lab position requires some level of college/university credit because of the samples you are dealing with (blood, tissue) and the requirements imposed by Law to ensure they gate-keep even though errors occur regardless of degree level in labs, which is why you take such large samples to begin with. In my foray with tech I've made a career in fintech (co-founder then went to a Megacorp), after spending time in Supply Chain roles the auto Industry. In both of those fields you are encouraged to not follow the predecessor if you want to be successful and move up; it rewards you if can pull it off and bring something novel and add value to the Team/Operation. And that, more than anything I learned in University, stuck with me for reasons that I think you could understand. After COVID derailed my Life, as it did others, I asked myself what I wanted to do and I decided to enroll into a BSc program in AI and Machine Learning, with the aspiration of doing what you just mentioned--getting a role before graduating by leveraging my existing skills and the new skills I'd learn with the brand of a University to back it up. My entrepreneurial habits kicked in during the on-boarding process and I saw a need to create a payment processing system to pay for tuition as so many students (mainly international) at the University in question were forced to pay via a system which resulted in delays, missing deadlines and large fees to process if it were possible. Some students even had to resort to using Western Union to make the deadline! This was at the time that Twitter had launched its Bitcoin tipping feature via iOS on it's platform, so a proof of concept/MVP could have been spun in short order. Eventually the faculty sent out a memo condemning using any alternatives (they became aware of the conversations happeing in Slack chat) saying it would result in further delays (or inability to register at all) if they did, thus making it entirely moot to try and flesh anything out. It wouldn't be anything but a MVP, as being a middleman/clearing house doesn't serve any of my long term goals. But what it could have done is disrupt the model and force progress to be made where it would otherwise remain stagnant. With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears? I mean, I'm guessing YOU would be open to this given what you've said but how would your project managers react to this? I've held developer and consultant status at the aforementioned Megacorp and I had way more friction for more insipid things.

aidenn0 5y ago

Around the time of the dot-com bust, I had been interning at a network equipment company. They went under; those without college degrees to much longer to get new jobs, even one person I know who had over a decade of experience in the workforce. That piece of paper can be worth a significant chunk of change, particularly since the gap on the resume caused by fewer companies hiring non-college grads can cause companies to low-ball their offers to you. Maybe the job market is different now, but, even if it is, maybe it will be that way again in 5-10 years. Predictions are hard and all. Also, CS degrees are varied. Very little of what I learned was outdated given that most of what I learned was discrete math. The more practically focused classes were OS and networking and I've used both of those on the job.

Nasrudith 5y ago

> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. That hints of an underdiscussed pitfall when choosing colleges in "practical" fields like engineering and apparently nursing - the theory:practice orientation of their curriculum. A theory oriented one tends to give you a backing which not eternal or life long, shift far slower. We may not use linked lists as much as hash maps but the same complexity analysis applies. If you are savvy enough you can pick up the specifics as needed backed by theory. The disadvantage of a too heavily theory oriented one is bootstrapping to the workplace is more difficult and it may fail to establish proper habits like say how to properly write commits for version control. A more practice oriented one which is proper for the current is more relevant and avoids the starting pitfalls but leaves the alumni less equiped with theory to deal with shifts. An outdated practical oriented curriculum is the worst of both worlds really.

skeeter2020 5y ago

You shouldn't have been looking for specific technology training is the short answer. I'm not aware of any company that would allow you to pay for employment while you were a drain... sounds like you should have gone to a vocational institution like Devry.

mcguire 5y ago
I still remember the letter that went around UT Austin's CS department when I was in grad school, from an undergraduate complaining that the department didn't teach i386 assembly.