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> Already a veteran of several start-ups at the tender age of 17 > Groom attended Dev Bootcamp straight out of high school, skipping college to move to Silicon

> Already a veteran of several start-ups at the tender age of 17 > Groom attended Dev Bootcamp straight out of high school, skipping college to move to Silicon Valley. On the other hand, college could be pretty useful if you aren't already selling startups in high school...

randomdata 14y ago
From a career perspective, I believe not going to college was the best choice I could have made. Not even for the startup life, just the regular 9-5. From a personal growth perspective though, I probably missed out on a lot. It's impossible to have everything in life. I optimized for my career, but those who optimize for other areas of their life are to be respected too. The hard part is figuring out what you want from life straight out of high school, with very little real-world experience.
- enjo 14y ago
  That personal growth translates to your career as well. I find that the liberal arts education I had forced upon me (I just wanted math/physics dammit!) helps me more than any other part of my education. Even the philosophy classes I took shape me as a programmer and help me to see and model things from a different and very useful perspective. I really do believe I'd be far less effective as a programmer if I had missed on all of that. It's funny, in the end I never finished my major classes and I don't think I lost much for never doing it.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    Speaking as one who holds a degree in philosophy, I concur. :) Many of the effective developers I know of didn't have math/cs backgrounds. Music, Art, Philosophy, Languages - they're all there. Do they understand the ins and outs of all data structures and algorithms? No. Do they have the ability to break down problems and create solutions for those problems? Absolutely.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    That personal growth translates to your career as well. Well, sure. It's not like my time not in school was void of personal growth. I see where my college-graduated friends are at and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes, career wise. The time I was able to maximize during those years has put me at a competitive advantage. Not to knock what they have done. I'm sure their education comes with many non-career benefits.
- timr 14y ago
  The idea of someone skipping a CS degree to learn some Ruby on Rails and start as a web developer makes me ill. It's classic short-term thinking: web development (in Rails, in particular) is today's hotness, but tomorrow it'll be something else. Since I've started coding, I've watched the waxing and waning of so many technology hype cycles that it makes me dizzy: Hypercard, Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, Win32, Windows MFC, Perl, PHP, Flash, Flex...and now iOS, Android, Javascript, etc. And you know what? This, too, shall pass. For every New Hotness, there's and Old Hotness, and there will be fans of the New Hotness who will be making fun of the cult of the Old Hotness, and how its vision of the future was laughably wrong. This is as predictable as the seasons. Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that dominate this industry. Because ultimately, there's always a new generation of cheap, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 20-somethings who know the latest fad better than you do. Yet there are surprisingly few people who can create new recommendation algorithms or build massively parallel systems that scale to thousands of nodes without downtime. Nearly everyone who complains about CS degrees being a waste of time is complaining that college isn't a vocational school. And, it's not -- but that's a feature, not a bug.
  - untog 14y ago
    Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that dominate this industry. I don't believe so. I never studied CS at college, but have had no trouble learning new languages. I cannot write recommendation algorithms (though I'd wager that I could set up a massively parallel system using existing tools), but not every programmer needs to. I don't doubt that a CS graduate is a better programmer than I am, but it's disingenuous to suggest that a non-CS grad will be unable to keep up with the industry. It just isn't true.
    - timr 14y ago
      So you're arguing that you don't need to know anything more than a steady stream of new languages to survive? That's not a matter of belief -- there's ample evidence to the contrary. The knowledge requirements for industry programmers has been rising steadily for as long as I've been coding. "Web developer" is today's equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer" in the early 90s. Those kinds of jobs will always exist, but they'll be increasingly marginalized -- just as they have been since the early 90s. I expected someone to argue that university isn't necessary to learn CS. I didn't expect someone to argue that CS knowledge isn't necessary to have a career in software. Yikes. Whither hacker news?

randomdata 14y ago

From a career perspective, I believe not going to college was the best choice I could have made. Not even for the startup life, just the regular 9-5. From a personal growth perspective though, I probably missed out on a lot. It's impossible to have everything in life. I optimized for my career, but those who optimize for other areas of their life are to be respected too. The hard part is figuring out what you want from life straight out of high school, with very little real-world experience.

enjo 14y ago
That personal growth translates to your career as well. I find that the liberal arts education I had forced upon me (I just wanted math/physics dammit!) helps me more than any other part of my education. Even the philosophy classes I took shape me as a programmer and help me to see and model things from a different and very useful perspective. I really do believe I'd be far less effective as a programmer if I had missed on all of that. It's funny, in the end I never finished my major classes and I don't think I lost much for never doing it.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Speaking as one who holds a degree in philosophy, I concur. :) Many of the effective developers I know of didn't have math/cs backgrounds. Music, Art, Philosophy, Languages - they're all there. Do they understand the ins and outs of all data structures and algorithms? No. Do they have the ability to break down problems and create solutions for those problems? Absolutely.
- randomdata 14y ago
  That personal growth translates to your career as well. Well, sure. It's not like my time not in school was void of personal growth. I see where my college-graduated friends are at and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes, career wise. The time I was able to maximize during those years has put me at a competitive advantage. Not to knock what they have done. I'm sure their education comes with many non-career benefits.
timr 14y ago
The idea of someone skipping a CS degree to learn some Ruby on Rails and start as a web developer makes me ill. It's classic short-term thinking: web development (in Rails, in particular) is today's hotness, but tomorrow it'll be something else. Since I've started coding, I've watched the waxing and waning of so many technology hype cycles that it makes me dizzy: Hypercard, Visual Basic, C, C++, Java, Win32, Windows MFC, Perl, PHP, Flash, Flex...and now iOS, Android, Javascript, etc. And you know what? This, too, shall pass. For every New Hotness, there's and Old Hotness, and there will be fans of the New Hotness who will be making fun of the cult of the Old Hotness, and how its vision of the future was laughably wrong. This is as predictable as the seasons. Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that dominate this industry. Because ultimately, there's always a new generation of cheap, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 20-somethings who know the latest fad better than you do. Yet there are surprisingly few people who can create new recommendation algorithms or build massively parallel systems that scale to thousands of nodes without downtime. Nearly everyone who complains about CS degrees being a waste of time is complaining that college isn't a vocational school. And, it's not -- but that's a feature, not a bug.
- untog 14y ago
  Deep knowledge of general CS concepts -- the things emphasized by a good CS program -- are what allow an engineer to survive the fad-driven cycles that dominate this industry. I don't believe so. I never studied CS at college, but have had no trouble learning new languages. I cannot write recommendation algorithms (though I'd wager that I could set up a massively parallel system using existing tools), but not every programmer needs to. I don't doubt that a CS graduate is a better programmer than I am, but it's disingenuous to suggest that a non-CS grad will be unable to keep up with the industry. It just isn't true.
  - timr 14y ago
    So you're arguing that you don't need to know anything more than a steady stream of new languages to survive? That's not a matter of belief -- there's ample evidence to the contrary. The knowledge requirements for industry programmers has been rising steadily for as long as I've been coding. "Web developer" is today's equivalent of "Visual Basic programmer" in the early 90s. Those kinds of jobs will always exist, but they'll be increasingly marginalized -- just as they have been since the early 90s. I expected someone to argue that university isn't necessary to learn CS. I didn't expect someone to argue that CS knowledge isn't necessary to have a career in software. Yikes. Whither hacker news?