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Working rigorously and wasting your childhood years to flounder and pick CS at Stanford is absurd to me. Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in witho

Working rigorously and wasting your childhood years to flounder and pick CS at Stanford is absurd to me. Tech is one of the few fields you can succeed in without having to go to an elite university or enter higher education at all.

deleted 3y ago
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epicureanideal 3y ago
I generally agree, but having a degree from a top 20 school would definitely make even a software development career easier, just because some companies filter candidates based on that, and some filter even more aggressively. And if you want to start a startup, being friends with connected folks from Stanford would help... assuming connecting with them is possible if they're wealthy and you're not -- assuming you can bridge the cultural gap. A lot of success really is who you know, so going somewhere where you meet a lot of people who are going somewhere can be very useful. But of course, they also need to be people who are open to networking, understand the value of networks, etc., which I suspect is somewhat more true of people who attend Stanford than those who go to UCs just because of the mindset of the folks going in.
screye 3y ago
A CS degree from Stanford is how you get a red carpet entry to a $500k+ entry-level AI/VC/Trading role. An astounding amount of tribal knowledge is hidden behind elite-CS-spaces. Some high-school hackers are the right combination of lucky, talented-and savvy enough to enter these spaces. But, walking that path without the fallback of an elite university puts you 1 mis-step away from eternal mediocrity.
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- gorjusborg 3y ago
  Having known a number of people taking that route, I don't believe it guarantees success any more than following a less defined path. If ones definition of success is limited to money, then maybe. I don't believe one can be successful and miserable. Accepting misery is accepting failure. You can have money and be miserable. It is actually quite common.

deleted 3y ago

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epicureanideal 3y ago

I generally agree, but having a degree from a top 20 school would definitely make even a software development career easier, just because some companies filter candidates based on that, and some filter even more aggressively. And if you want to start a startup, being friends with connected folks from Stanford would help... assuming connecting with them is possible if they're wealthy and you're not -- assuming you can bridge the cultural gap. A lot of success really is who you know, so going somewhere where you meet a lot of people who are going somewhere can be very useful. But of course, they also need to be people who are open to networking, understand the value of networks, etc., which I suspect is somewhat more true of people who attend Stanford than those who go to UCs just because of the mindset of the folks going in.

screye 3y ago

A CS degree from Stanford is how you get a red carpet entry to a $500k+ entry-level AI/VC/Trading role. An astounding amount of tribal knowledge is hidden behind elite-CS-spaces. Some high-school hackers are the right combination of lucky, talented-and savvy enough to enter these spaces. But, walking that path without the fallback of an elite university puts you 1 mis-step away from eternal mediocrity.

deleted 3y ago
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gorjusborg 3y ago
Having known a number of people taking that route, I don't believe it guarantees success any more than following a less defined path. If ones definition of success is limited to money, then maybe. I don't believe one can be successful and miserable. Accepting misery is accepting failure. You can have money and be miserable. It is actually quite common.