9 ms·

All Rockstars Went to Julliard

108 points by LockeWatts 14y ago

raverbashing 14y ago
I assume HN reaction to the headline is "Julliwhat?!" But maybe they go here first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School Edit: wrong info about an Alumnus, but there are plenty of famous artists from there
- dwc 14y ago
  Julliard is pretty well known even among non-musicians.
tylermenezes 14y ago
I don't understand what point he's trying to make. For one, he starts off by talking about some specific school, but very few people have ever claimed that going to some specific ivy-league school makes you a great programmer. In fact, I often see people claim the opposite, especially in startups. You could certainly write an article about Google's bad hiring practices, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article - he pulls up two examples, and then completely moves on from that point. Second, he misses the point of looking for people who are self-led. It's not to get people who produce good code - it's to get people to can produce good code, but can also _think for themselves_. And what better way to get people to think for themselves, than by looking for people already doing it.
- jedberg 14y ago
  I think his point is that you have to have money to be a rock star because even if you are amazingly good at {music,programming} you still need food and shelter before you can practice your craft.
- aristus 14y ago
  Anecdotal, but I often interact with people who went to elite schools. A large number of them are convinced that the world is run by their classmates. It's sometimes tiring to hear, especially as having that kind of network does help. Of course every company wants the "best", and credentials are a shortcut to satisfying that. False positives are more of a danger than false negatives. There are plenty of exceptions to this elitism -- I recently found out that a long-time coworker not only went to a top school but is also a tenured professor. It doesn't show. :) This post is by an undergrad at a state school, and I gather the main purpose is to get employers interested in him, and probably to vent some frustration against the very real blindspot that many recruiters and employers have. It's not intended to be an essay for the ages.
  - enjo 14y ago
    The world is run by their classmates. That's a real problem. If you went to a middle of the road state school (in my case in the south), then you face a lot of additional challenges that my Stanford buddies do not. I have a real win on my resume. I can point to products that I've built and things that I've done. I'm even a published author. Yet when it comes to fund-raising or trying to find a leadership role there is a definite boys-club that is difficult for me to break into. For a great many investors they see my education and the rest just doesn't matter. It means I've had to swim faster and work far harder than these top-tier grads. Even today, more than a decade out of college, it remains an issue. I'll continue to show through my work that I'm a top-tier talent, and hopefully one day that will be enough all on its own. tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18.
    - majormajor 14y ago
      "tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18." I wish I had known that when I was 14/15 and cruising through high school, buying the feel-good talk about "paying that much for a top-name education wouldn't be worth it anyway." So instead I got a very good education (you get out of it what you put into it, after all) that actually cost more in practice than a heavily-subsidized-by-the-school Ivy one and yet comes with a lower-value degree. I'm happy where I am, so I'm not complaining. But the system is fairly screwy.
- LockeWatts 14y ago
  Perhaps we're talking to different people then. It's something I regularly observe: Good programmers went to Ivy Leagues, Stanford, etc. The rest are just mediocre.
troels 14y ago
Oh. Sure the rich and beautiful have it easier, but what does that have to do with you? You say you want to pursue your own ideas? Great - Then do that. What's the worst that could happen anyway? A bit of debt perhaps? A slightly less flashy car? Fewer money come time to retirement? It's not like you and your family would die from starvation if you fail - Unlike most of the rest of the world. You're already uniquely privileged.
Terretta 14y ago
More of those developers who made it before the dot com boom (in the 90's) seem to have "made their luck". In general, they seem to have taken leaps of faith, or gone out of their way to pursue something of significant risk not because of expectation of disproportionate reward, but because of drive to create. After the dot com bust, in the aughts, certainly such cases still exist, but a larger share of success stories seem to trend more cynical, arising out of an almost inwardly focused ecosystem of investors and pursuers of investment, looking to systematize the replication of success. User adoption remains the primary driver of ultimate success, but the opportunity to have a product in front of sizable number of users seems now less about first mover advantage or technical edge, and more about correctly (whether through luck or deliberate action) leveraging finance.
izak30 14y ago
You're wasting effort with this. It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you. It's not about money, it's about positive indicators. An Ivy League school is a positive indicator, starting a company is a positive indicator. Kicking Ass on your own personal or side projects is a positive indicator. Open Source contributions are a positive indicator. Previous work experience that you can explain well and brag about is a positive indicator. Build your positive indicators, and don't complain about others building theirs. Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".
- crusso 14y ago
  I came here to say that, but you said it better than I might have. I would like to add that his/her post reeked of rationalization fueled by insecurity. In real life, there are sometimes reasons we fail that are beyond our control. There are always excuses for failure that have some truth in them. There are always ways that we can look at the successful as lucky SOBs and the unsuccessful as victims of cruel fate. While it's interesting to contemplate the roles of skill and luck in success on a Sunday afternoon -- I've never met a really successful person who didn't have a positive outlook on her ability to mold her opportunities, to watch for chances to make a move, and to sieze those moments that were right and ride them to success. To glorify happenstance (the particular school you can afford to go to) and self-victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy and guaranteed way to minimize your own chances of ever being successful at anything. Are we our knowledge and experiences? Are we our genetic potential? Are we our upbringing? Are we just products of random chance and our environment? The more I learn in life, the more I become convinced that we are our ATTITUDE. Attitude is the prime factor in success or failure. It is the leading indicator to me when I go to hire someone or decide whether or not I want to work with him. I don't care what school you went to -- if success is your goal, then start with attitude. Adopt one that drives you to focus on yourself and your own improvement every day of your life. Good things will follow.
  - LockeWatts 14y ago
ihodes 14y ago
The myth of a top-notch education costing six-figures is getting a little old. The price tag is over $200k. The actual cost is under $50k, with the price dropping as you go to school with bigger endowments/better financial aid. Many schools graduate students with less than $20k in debt. At current rates, students pay about $100-200 a month to pay off these loans on time. Just some facts.
- Jd 14y ago
  Yep, Ivy league undergrad here. I came from a lower middle class family, total cost of year about 45K with my family expected to pay about 10K per annum for the four years of college, with an additional 4.5K debt/year on top of that. Took me about 7 years after college to pay off my 18K in debt (I also locked in my interest rates at under 4%) -- I think that was a 137 dollar payment a month if I paid it off at the minimum rate.
  - stephencanon 14y ago
    I was in the same situation as an undergrad at an Ivy. It has only improved since then. A student starting at an Ivy today with a similar family situation will graduate owing nothing.
- enjo 14y ago
  I came from a upper-middle class family. We were wealthy enough that qualifying for financial aid at an ivy was basically impossible. We were poor enough (with 3 of us in college at once) that it wasn't possible. This was particularly problematic because my dad (a military doctor) had only been out of the military for a couple of years. Meaning the salary he we were being pegged at for financial aid was something he had only been earning for 2 years or so. He mad significantly less in the military. Point being: For some folks, in some situations.. the cost is well beyond reach.
  - ihodes 14y ago
    The Ivys and liberal arts places I know take multiple children going to school at the same time well into account. I'm sorry for the trouble, but I'm not sure if you didn't look into it, or if you are talking about a situation well into the past. That's just not the case anymore. EDIT: Hell, look at the comment below; the net price calculator (http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/ http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/) even has a drop-down for number of children in college.
larsberg 14y ago
Two things: 1) Yield is a big issue. At larger companies, they track how many people they get from different universities, how long they last, how far they go, etc. Most recruiting efforts are then focused on the few schools that give the most graduates that are the best fit for the company. And yes, there are all sorts of long-term issues with this. Speaking as a former hiring manger, it was just a lot of work to go some of the other schools (especially some of the large state schools with non-top-tier CS programs) because even though we would find 1-2 candidate, we would have to filter through a huge number of candidates to do so. For those schools, we generally relied on personal recommendations from faculty to recent alumni. 2) I went to and am now a PhD student at a very expensive private university. Many of the students, like myself, are middle class, getting very little aid (other than merit) while their parents are forced to share the living-on-ramen experience during college. But, those huge loans (I think I had somewhere between 60-80k when I graduated many years ago) are quickly paid off if you continue living on little money working for a top firm. Most of my peers' loans were all paid off in the first 2-3 years of working. It's a huge worry, but in practice turns out not to be a big deal for CS majors from top schools. Certainly, it drives many job decisions, though. A low-pay startup job was not in the cards while I had all that debt hanging over my head, and I assume that's true for other middle class folks.
- temuze 14y ago
  I think it's also worth mentioning that financial aid at most Ivy League schools ar incredible. Look at Princeton - the goal of their financial aid office is to make sure that everyone who needs financial aid (middle class or not), get financial aid. It's very common that graduates come out of school without any debt at all.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    I also know from having worked at Harvard that most Harvard students these days graduate with little or no debt due to a generous financial aid system there. I wish it had been like that when I went to MIT. (MIT did have plenty of financial aid, but not to the no-debt level.)
  - 14y ago
hinting 14y ago
It'd be great if all these articles making big claims about what developers do and don't do included some actual, you know, evidence. It shouldn't even be that hard to collect. LinkedIn in a massive data repository about what jobs people have had. Should be a fun analysis.
- throwaway_95014 14y ago
  Say I've been at Obvious Company for a while. Maybe a long while. LinkedIn, Github, none of these things have anything on me. I can't talk about what I've done in the last couple of years because it's all still confidential (and I'm not ratting one employer in front of a prospective - I'd like them to think I can be trusted). How do I convince you that I'm enough of a rockstar (and I am, for reals) to get a foot in the door? I can blow your socks off in an interview by fixing your product and your business model on a whiteboard, but until we talk I'm just another pasty white guy in an ironic shirt. You aren't going to recognize the schools I went to, or care, because I was out before you were eating solid food. I don't even have the beard and suspenders. How do I sell me to you?
  - boboblong 14y ago
    Perhaps you could contact the company you want to work for via a throwaway email so that they don't see you and prejudge you as an "old guy"? If you can fix someone's product and business model on a whiteboard, you should be able to use their product, find a flaw, and send them an incisive email about it.
EricDeb 14y ago
As a counter to one of his points I've seen developers who are completely oblivious to money management and are always working on their own projects despite having loans and having gone to an expensive school. I'm like you though buddy I did undergrad and just finished a Master's degree from two schools that barely crack the top 50 in CS. I chose to go the less expensive route (read: basically free) as opposed to an Ivy-League education. It's too early to tell whether it will hinder my job prospects or not.
timsally 14y ago
The subtext here is that those without elite credentials are at some disadvantage because they don't have a convenient signaling mechanism of quality to prospective employers. Stipulated. But if you have the talent to compete, this disadvantage is merely a speedbump. In 2012 you're just a git pull away from interacting with the decision makers at your next job. It's never been easier for programmers with top talent to convey their qualities to employers. One community that has always worked this way is the community surrounding the Linux kernel. Credentials are not even mentioned. It's all about the code and people routinely get hired on that basis alone.
Alex3917 14y ago
The reason people like people who went to Ivy league schools is largely that it's a proxy for having had good parents/values. The idea that you'd have a better network or education might be partly true, but it's mostly just a justification. Once you understand this, you should be able to work around it.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  Going to Ivy League schools is a proxy for having good parents/values? I went to Amherst (not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts college). I wouldn't use it as a proxy for good parents or values at all. Hell, one of my classmates stole an ambulance, drove it around the freshman quad, and crashed it into a tree. Another embezzled $13,000 from the school newspaper. The latter had a parent who was on the board of trustees. A third was the author of this infamous breakup letter: http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp In my experience, the people who really had good parents & values were the ones who came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds and managed to make it into Amherst despite them. Succeeding despite adversity says a lot about your character. Succeeding because daddy's a legacy and donated a few million dollars to the school doesn't say anything other than that your parents have money.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  I don't understand in any way how you get from "Ivy League" to "good values." There are some real scumbags who went through Ivy League schools. That shouldn't even be surprising or contentious.
ynniv 14y ago
Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship). Not saying that you won't find good people at UGA (biting my GT tongue!), but following his rationale and years of work experience in Atlanta (showing Georgia residency), his story seems a little thin. Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders, and ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used. Not every rockstar went to Julliard, but they were good at what they did.
- iopuy 14y ago
  Off topic but I think the HOPE scholarship and Bright Futures in Florida are outstanding forms of financial aid.
  - ynniv 14y ago
    Yes! They were not available to me, but I am glad they exist. HOPE could be improved by easing up the 3.0 requirement for GT, tho.
    - astrange 14y ago
      HOPE is only getting more exclusive, not less, because they can't afford the old system. I think it's on a sliding scale vs GPA now.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Tech was ridiculously cheap as an in-state student in the late 80s. Pretty much everyone graduated with no debt even then. MIT was $16,000 a year when I looked at it at the time, I believe. I'm having a hard time remembering the details of their financial aid, but they had some need-based assistance on a sliding scale. You'd end up owing several $10s of thousands, which everyone said you'd "easily" pay off once you got a job out of there, which is likely mostly true. Still, it was an intimidating amount to a lower-middle class kid. It's telling I didn't go there and still have the cost fixed in my head. My high school counselors/teachers were sort of limited in their knowledge of the upper end of the scale. MIT was all I ever heard about in terms of out-of-state tech schools. All the rich kids went Ivy League, and all the other smart kids went to GT. The Naval Academy had a special aura for a few. A couple people in my class went to Harvard, but no one ever talked about it in terms of a technical education. No one from my high school went to a school in California. I was aware of Caltech, not that I could have found Pasadena on a map. I knew the name Stanford, but only because of its physics department, and literally did not know what state it was in. I've made sure my teenage niece is at least aware of what the top schools are.
mustpax 14y ago
Yes, getting out of the resume pile is harder without a name brand college degree but you shouldn't be going in the resume pile in the first place. Make connections, build your network, get referrals. Once you actually make it to the on-site interview, your performance in the interview will trump almost all else. The resume pile is where good ideas go to die. Faced with the fact that resumes are 99% useless, hiring managers latch on to things that are cozy and familiar, keywords, GPAs, brand-name school. This sucks, but don't let others' mistakes keep you from demonstrating your potential.
lazyBilly 14y ago
I understand the frustration, and there are a lot more unfair things waiting for you out in the business world. So opt out. Invent your own job and take no shit from anybody. Get a consultancy running and freelance. It's not complicated, just a lot of work to get started. Then transition off writing code for others into your own projects. You're young, it'll be fine. It won't be as sexy as doing yc and living the life in the valley, but you could probably move down and do it there if you were hungry enough. Fuck the student loans, if you can't eat and pay them it'll just fuck up your credit till you get square. Don't be more emotionally attached to your debt than the bank is to its own. The upshot is, yeah, if you didn't go to an ivy, you're going to have a tougher road in some capacities. Some. And mostly if you're trying to convince somebody that you're going to do something cool someday. Do something and remove all doubt, or build something so that youre the guy deciding what's good enough or not.
subwindow 14y ago
Amen. Almost. I was in a startlingly similar position a few years ago- I graduated from Georgia State. I went there not because it was the best school, but because tuition was paid (HOPE scholarship) and the classes were offered at flexible times so I could work while going to school. I had to turn down an acceptance from Tech because of that. While it hurt my career initially, I think the value of education is drastically diminished in just a few short years. By the time I was 25 what I'd accomplished professionally mattered far more than where I went to school. Sure, I was still in debt from school so starting a company is difficult, but open source contributions and side projects are a signifcant part of my "resume" and far outweigh my schooling.
rgbrgb 14y ago
The truth is, rockstars didn't "look for jobs". They didn't submit their resume to some big rockstar company and hope to get a place as a cog in some corporate Googlish wheel. If you go to Julliard, it's a lot easier to get a job in music that is more like working at Google. You can join a symphony or something that you just could not do without a deep understanding of theory and a skill set that is very similar to the other musicians you are working with. But if you think you're hot shit, take the time you spend on whining about the privileged and make something great (for rockstars this often involves whining about privilege). Rockstars didn't get permission to make their art, and none of us have to either.
TillE 14y ago
Actually, I've noticed that a large fraction of my favorite (rock) musicians were classically trained, at least as children. Not all of them, but enough to surprise me. Self-teaching is overrated.
LargeWu 14y ago
Whether or not Ivy League or other top schools charge too much is basically irrelevant; the real hard part is getting accepted in the first place. These schools get so many applications in a year, and many of the applicants are so thinly differentiated, that acceptance is virtually indistinguishable from a lottery. Saying graduates of these schools are the best of the best misses the mark a bit. A more accurate description would be they had access to generally superior education. This is an important distinction.
tytso 14y ago
"Life is unfair. Deal with it." There is no doubt that if someone's parents had the means to give them a computer, and that grade school student or high school students was able to start practicing the craft of programming early, they will have a huge leg up on someone who didn't have that opportunity. For better or worse, that's the world that we live in. Accept it, and move on. OK, you weren't someone who had the opportunity to learn Cisco IOS at an early age, and was configuring core Internet backbone routers as a job and wearing a pager in high school, before you started at MIT as a freshman. OK, you're not someone who contributed so much to the Linux kernel in high school that you were invited to the annual Kernel Summit, which brings together the top 75 or so linux kernel developers, the summer before you started at MIT. These are two real people that I know. There's nothing I can do to change society to make things "fair"; and there's nothing you can do about either. So stop whining about it. I've looked at LockeWatts's resume, and the problem as someone who has been a hiring manager, is there's absolutely no signal in his resume that he would actually be a someone who could "compete with the best of them". He's made that assertion, but lots of people have made that assertion. And while he might be really bright, unfortunately, I've met many people who claimed to be super bright, but then when I asked them to code up a simple function on the whiteboard, they couldn't do something incredibly basic. Furthermore, although it will no doubt be painful for him to hear this, I very much doubt he is a rockstar. He might have the potential to be a rockstar, but takes a huge amount of practice to get there. It is rare, and no doubt requires privilege, for someone to have that status right out of college, or in the cases I detailed above, before they even started college. The good news is that this is something that time and experience, and a lot of determination on Colin's part, can fix. You can't change your family circumstances; but you can control how much time you spend honing your art and your craft. Sure, you need to focus on bringing home your biweekly paycheck. But you can control whether you go to movies, or go out drinking with your buddies, or whether you spend that working on open source projects, or learning new computer languages, or taking time to read self-help books to do what Stevey Covey called "Sharpening the Saw" (cf 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Maybe it will take you an extra 2 or 3 or even 5 years. But you can give yourself rockstar-like skills and experience, if you are willing to make the appropriate choices and sacrifices.
- LockeWatts 14y ago
jiggy2011 14y ago
At the crux of this issue is the question about correlation of intelligence and ambition with wealth. I would be surprised if there was no correlation at all, on the other hand it would be interesting to see what the relationship really is but I can't think of an experiment that could be done in a way which would be both accurate and ethical (for example switching poor and rich children at birth). This seems to be one of the arguments around keeping taxes low for the rich (or "job creators") the implicit assumption seems to be "rich people are smart, therefor they should be put in charge of money distribution". As an example, there was somebody I grew up with who is now running a ~$1 million turnover web design company at 27. He is sometimes invited to speak at events as a successful entrepreneur and demonstrated as an example of how hard work can pay off etc. Unfortunately if you know the real story it is somewhat less impressive. He graduated from university with a fairly average degree and was having trouble finding employment at any job that he was interested in working at. He comes from a wealthy background however, so had little time constraints on his job search. After some time he decided to give up looking for work and establish himself as a freelance designer, his family gave him a chunk of money with which to establish himself. For the first few years his business was not too successful and was draining capital, he was having difficulty finding clients as his portfolio of work was not really comparable to other established companies who were charging similar rates. After a few years his family sold one of the businesses they owned which freed up a bunch of extra capital, a chunk of this they gave to him. He was able to use this money to hire some talented designers who did excellent work and won him a bunch of awards and bigger contracts, this was really the catalyst that made him successful. Of course if the guy was a complete idiot he would have squandered even that opportunity, he was intelligent enough to run a business day-to-day but there was no way he would have managed that without such a capital injection. Would be interesting to think about how many people in his position would have failed and how many would have been successful earlier.
richcollins 14y ago
If he's an academically qualified hacker but can't afford an Ivy, why'd he go to Georgia instead of Georgia Tech?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jberryman 14y ago
Jesus Christ, it's spelled "Juilliard". Anyway, horrible analogy.
stephencanon 14y ago
"An Ivy League education is almost certainly a 6 figure sum of some kind, depending on where you go. They have need based scholarships, but if you’re in the middle class those aren’t really applicable to you, and your parents can’t afford to send you to that expensive a school" At nearly any of the ivies, you will graduate nearly debt-free if your parents make less than $100k-$120k. $100k household income puts a family in the top 15%, which is at least "upper middle class" if not "rich" (though clearly not "super rich"). There are precisely two ways to be unable to afford to attend one of the ivies: be an international student, or have wealthy parents who are unwilling to contribute to your educational expenses. This wasn't always true, but at this point, if the parents are willing it is essentially always affordable.
jfarmer 14y ago
Nothing it stopping you from writing a great article, building great software, contributing something amazing to an open source project, etc. Your time would be better spent focusing on doing good work and sharing it. Assuming you do do good work and learn how to share effectively, the rest will come.
johnkchow 14y ago
I can say I understand where you're coming from, and if you carry that chip on your shoulder for the rest of your life, you'll do just fine. I want to share my personal story, since I felt the same way you did when I was in college. Coming out of school 2 years ago, I thought I was screwed. I had a shitty GPA, I had no work experience (not even internships), and I never took on a personal programming project. While my friends were getting offers months before graduation, I was still applying to companies (and not hearing back from any of them). Finally, a small .NET web shop gave me a call, and I royally screwed up the technical questions. The interviewer, with a disappointed sigh, asked me if I had any questions for him before we end the call. This was my opening, my chance to show him that indeed I did care about his company and, ultimately, programming. Prior to the call, I had done a lot of research on the company and who their big clients are, so I told him how cool that was and then asked what was the coolest project they've worked on. Impressed, the interviewer immediately changed his tone, and it was as if the interview restarted over. I pressed on, showing him my enthusiasm not only for the company, but for programming and how I wanted to become a better engineer tomorrow than the day before. The director, listening in on the call, pretty much gave me an offer. The offer was severely under market rate, and I was on a very short leash (3 month trial), but I was so happy, I cried. I knew that the next step was to impress the shit out of them. So starting day 1, I'd gobble up everything about the tech stack and the domain. I'd subscribe to every .NET blog I could find. I bought and read books about design pattern and enterprise architecture. I listened to programming podcasts as I drove back and forth from work, and sometimes I'd listen to it as I tried to fall asleep. I'd constantly ask questions to my senior engineers about the .NET nuances, IoC containers, and good engineering practices. I questioned why we didn't do TDD, why we didn't switch from the Web Forms to MVC framework, why we're still using LinqToSQL instead of Entity Framework. In three months, I got a raise, and within 6 months after that, I got another raise. My director called me the "rising star" in our company. I worked my ass off not because I wanted to prove to the world that I was good, but I wanted to prove to myself that I'm not a chump programming monkey. A year after my first job, I got an offer to work at a friend's startup in SF, despite the fact it was on a Rails stack with WAY different architecture/requirement. Again, paid under market rate because of my lack of experience. Applied the same work ethic and dedication to the job. Learned how to scale, how to design web apps top to bottom, how to architect our systems topology, and how to get shit done. On my personal time, I decided to build a website that would help the alumni members of my college fraternity keep in touch with each other for networking and inspirational purposes. Leveraging my knowledge from my job, built the entire damn thing, from the DB schemas, to the domain logic, to even the HTML/CSS. Initially it was built on ASP.NET MVC, then rebuilt the whole thing in Rails to improve our development speed. Now, I'm asking around other student orgs to see if they'd be interested in using our website. Now, I guess I am that rockstar programmer, even though I don't really think that. Recruiters are constantly messaging me for job openings. I just got two offers from both a big, respectable company, and from another startup. It's surreal. I never thought I'd see this day, but I still have that chip on my shoulder to constantly improve. The point I'm trying to get is that it's not about where you start but it's the journey you're willing to take to get where you want to be. Earlier, tytso commented that you have to start at the bottom with an entry-level job, and it probably won't be the glamorous FB/Google/Apple/blahblahblah job that you so want. But that doesn't matter as long as you work in a place that you can get really fired up about. In my experience, a lot of managers would hire passionate, inexperienced guys over talented yet indifferent engineers because company culture is a big deal. So what is it that you can do to prepare yourself right now? First, network the shit out of your school. Make as many friends as you can, regardless of their majors or background. I guarantee you you'll find other people who are smarter and more motivated than you are. Surrounding yourself with ambitious or A+ kids will a) in the short term inspire you to work harder and b) in the long term, they'll become valuable assets for your career. Then start a programming project. Right. Now. In my last year of college, I built a beer pong tournament website on LAMP. It wasn't the prettiest thing, visually/architecturally, but still proud of that thing. (For fun, I'm trying to rebuild it again with backbone, Rails, and MongoDB.) Never forget this moment of frustration. In fact, embrace it. Use it as your motivating fuel. And then go do what makes you happy.
pnathan 14y ago
Fundamentally, as someone who went to a Public State University, I feel your pain. Let me take a look (based on my experiences of reviewing resumes)... Analysis of your "about me" section: Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA isn't listed. Resume: If I ask you in-depth, hard questions about any language or tech on your resume, I expect an answer. If you can't give me a deep answer, I will give you negative points in my mind. You listed those techs, so you better have something to show. WRT Technologies. I am a bit idiosyncratic: I want to know your preferred OS and whether you can handle source control. Everything else is noise. You have too much noise. Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's too generic. Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can do for me. I don't really care about your in-progress work unless you have a github. You should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight your Honors courses. In summary, you are an above-average candidate compared to most CS resumes I've seen. Probably in the 80th percentile of the last batch of resumes I looked through. However, you are not a must-hire in my opinion. --- In order to get to "must hire" state in my mind, you need something like the following: * Mastery of written communication. * Explanation of what you have done at each position, why you uniquely made it happen, and what you can do for me and my team. * Public code repo with a long history and a decent amount of loc in it. You've developed at least a small system (1-10KLoC) and maintained it for years. You support users of it. * You have studied a "far out" technology - one that may never be written on the job. The more depth is shown here, the more commitment to your craft is demonstrated. At a minimum, this would be, for instance, learning Perl 6 or Haskell. At the higher end, it might be something like writing a working simulator of the CM-2. * You have extensive internships at well-known companies. While this is limited by location and funds somewhat, it demonstrates that you can play ball with the big boys. --- Understand that you can better your marketing quickly - set up a github and upload a project, wipe out the placeholder links, rewrite your resume to better express your capabilities. But then the slog starts. You need to commit to building your craft, constantly, in a visibly demonstrable way. Some of that might be expressed via open source, or it might be expressed by a portfolio of shipped software. That's up to you. And, further - express yourself in a more careful fashion. No one wants to take the risk of hiring someone who complains life is unfair. While I am not a hiring manager, I do assist with technical hiring. I am always happy to look at your resume (or anybody else's) and provide feedback and critique. My contact email is in my HN profile. Best wishes for your future.
aidenn0 14y ago
Both cheaper than Ivy League, both are as good a signal in my book: University of Illinois Carnegie Mellon
- tikhonj 14y ago
  Erm, is CMU actually cheaper than an Ivy League university? I was under the impression that they are fairly expensive and do not provide nearly as much financial aid as at least the top Ivy League schools like Harvard or Princeton. At the very least, CMU has a far smaller endowment (an order of magnitude smaller) than most of the universities it competes with. I imagine this has a real impact on how much financial aid it can offer. Also, no love for Berkeley? We're public and have a pretty good CS department :). Admittedly being out of state makes it rather expensive and harder to get in, but I imagine that's the same at UIUC.
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    Yeah, Berkeley is great, I didn't mention them since when I graduated HS (a while ago) they were harder to get into from out-of-state than some of the Ivys
    - tikhonj 14y ago
      For better or worse, that's still true, at least for engineering. I think the acceptance rate over all (for both in- and out-of-state students) to the EECS major is actually below 10%. However, getting into CMU CS is also similarly difficult.
benthumb 14y ago
>I read that a NASA subcontrator wanted someone to design high-efficiency power supplies for the Space Shuttle. So I wrote up a decent design and showed up. There were maybe 20 candidates at the office, all equipped with advanced degrees. But I didn't have a degree, I had a design. They hired me on the spot and sent all the degree holders away. True story. http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_former_nasa_space_shuttle_engineer/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_for...
mindcrime 14y ago
Don't worry about the Ivy League stuff, and just keep working on your projects and learning. Most of the comments here about "signalling" are true but largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you have your sights set on a job at one specific company (say, Google) then it's probably true that you're more likely to get in with a degree from an Ivy League school. But if you just want to have a great career, work on cool stuff, do well for yourself and maybe even be an entrepreneur one day, you can do all of that without ever sniffing an Ivy League campus. The tech industry is, despite what some people may say, still fairly meritorious. If you have talent, and you work hard, your ability will - over time - dominate the signalling effect of your degree and what-not. OK, maybe it means your first job is writing CRUD applications in the IT department for a shoe manufacturing company in Bumfuckville, GA, and not doing machine learning stuff at Google. Big deal. Take the shoe manufacturing job, keep learning on your own time (don't get married or have kids too young though, if you have high aspirations career wise), start an open-source project and/or contribute to some well known projects. Blog, write a book, do screencasts, whatever you can do to demonstrate your ability. If you are truly talented, and have indomitable spirit, you'll make your way where you want to go.
bane 14y ago
Sorta, but all rockstars also have in common that they all have a band, practice a lot, tour a lot and make lots of decent songs...most rockstars played in 30 seat dive bars at one point or another. The Goo Goo Dolls dwelt in obscurity for about a decade before making it big. Radiohead has a similar story. What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against the wall until it stuck. It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often, and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs. Some examples: John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't think so). Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal. Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days, before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in obscurity. D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the planet. and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all produced and in the end that's all anybody cares about.

108 points by LockeWatts 14y ago

I assume HN reaction to the headline is "Julliwhat?!" But maybe they go here first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School Edit: wrong info about an Alumnus, but there are plenty of famous artists from there

dwc 14y ago
Julliard is pretty well known even among non-musicians.

tylermenezes 14y ago

I don't understand what point he's trying to make. For one, he starts off by talking about some specific school, but very few people have ever claimed that going to some specific ivy-league school makes you a great programmer. In fact, I often see people claim the opposite, especially in startups. You could certainly write an article about Google's bad hiring practices, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article - he pulls up two examples, and then completely moves on from that point. Second, he misses the point of looking for people who are self-led. It's not to get people who produce good code - it's to get people to can produce good code, but can also _think for themselves_. And what better way to get people to think for themselves, than by looking for people already doing it.

jedberg 14y ago
I think his point is that you have to have money to be a rock star because even if you are amazingly good at {music,programming} you still need food and shelter before you can practice your craft.
aristus 14y ago
Anecdotal, but I often interact with people who went to elite schools. A large number of them are convinced that the world is run by their classmates. It's sometimes tiring to hear, especially as having that kind of network does help. Of course every company wants the "best", and credentials are a shortcut to satisfying that. False positives are more of a danger than false negatives. There are plenty of exceptions to this elitism -- I recently found out that a long-time coworker not only went to a top school but is also a tenured professor. It doesn't show. :) This post is by an undergrad at a state school, and I gather the main purpose is to get employers interested in him, and probably to vent some frustration against the very real blindspot that many recruiters and employers have. It's not intended to be an essay for the ages.
- enjo 14y ago
  The world is run by their classmates. That's a real problem. If you went to a middle of the road state school (in my case in the south), then you face a lot of additional challenges that my Stanford buddies do not. I have a real win on my resume. I can point to products that I've built and things that I've done. I'm even a published author. Yet when it comes to fund-raising or trying to find a leadership role there is a definite boys-club that is difficult for me to break into. For a great many investors they see my education and the rest just doesn't matter. It means I've had to swim faster and work far harder than these top-tier grads. Even today, more than a decade out of college, it remains an issue. I'll continue to show through my work that I'm a top-tier talent, and hopefully one day that will be enough all on its own. tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    "tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18." I wish I had known that when I was 14/15 and cruising through high school, buying the feel-good talk about "paying that much for a top-name education wouldn't be worth it anyway." So instead I got a very good education (you get out of it what you put into it, after all) that actually cost more in practice than a heavily-subsidized-by-the-school Ivy one and yet comes with a lower-value degree. I'm happy where I am, so I'm not complaining. But the system is fairly screwy.
LockeWatts 14y ago
Perhaps we're talking to different people then. It's something I regularly observe: Good programmers went to Ivy Leagues, Stanford, etc. The rest are just mediocre.

troels 14y ago

Oh. Sure the rich and beautiful have it easier, but what does that have to do with you? You say you want to pursue your own ideas? Great - Then do that. What's the worst that could happen anyway? A bit of debt perhaps? A slightly less flashy car? Fewer money come time to retirement? It's not like you and your family would die from starvation if you fail - Unlike most of the rest of the world. You're already uniquely privileged.

Terretta 14y ago

More of those developers who made it before the dot com boom (in the 90's) seem to have "made their luck". In general, they seem to have taken leaps of faith, or gone out of their way to pursue something of significant risk not because of expectation of disproportionate reward, but because of drive to create. After the dot com bust, in the aughts, certainly such cases still exist, but a larger share of success stories seem to trend more cynical, arising out of an almost inwardly focused ecosystem of investors and pursuers of investment, looking to systematize the replication of success. User adoption remains the primary driver of ultimate success, but the opportunity to have a product in front of sizable number of users seems now less about first mover advantage or technical edge, and more about correctly (whether through luck or deliberate action) leveraging finance.

izak30 14y ago

You're wasting effort with this. It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you. It's not about money, it's about positive indicators. An Ivy League school is a positive indicator, starting a company is a positive indicator. Kicking Ass on your own personal or side projects is a positive indicator. Open Source contributions are a positive indicator. Previous work experience that you can explain well and brag about is a positive indicator. Build your positive indicators, and don't complain about others building theirs. Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".

crusso 14y ago
I came here to say that, but you said it better than I might have. I would like to add that his/her post reeked of rationalization fueled by insecurity. In real life, there are sometimes reasons we fail that are beyond our control. There are always excuses for failure that have some truth in them. There are always ways that we can look at the successful as lucky SOBs and the unsuccessful as victims of cruel fate. While it's interesting to contemplate the roles of skill and luck in success on a Sunday afternoon -- I've never met a really successful person who didn't have a positive outlook on her ability to mold her opportunities, to watch for chances to make a move, and to sieze those moments that were right and ride them to success. To glorify happenstance (the particular school you can afford to go to) and self-victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy and guaranteed way to minimize your own chances of ever being successful at anything. Are we our knowledge and experiences? Are we our genetic potential? Are we our upbringing? Are we just products of random chance and our environment? The more I learn in life, the more I become convinced that we are our ATTITUDE. Attitude is the prime factor in success or failure. It is the leading indicator to me when I go to hire someone or decide whether or not I want to work with him. I don't care what school you went to -- if success is your goal, then start with attitude. Adopt one that drives you to focus on yourself and your own improvement every day of your life. Good things will follow.
- LockeWatts 14y ago

ihodes 14y ago

The myth of a top-notch education costing six-figures is getting a little old. The price tag is over $200k. The actual cost is under $50k, with the price dropping as you go to school with bigger endowments/better financial aid. Many schools graduate students with less than $20k in debt. At current rates, students pay about $100-200 a month to pay off these loans on time. Just some facts.

Jd 14y ago
Yep, Ivy league undergrad here. I came from a lower middle class family, total cost of year about 45K with my family expected to pay about 10K per annum for the four years of college, with an additional 4.5K debt/year on top of that. Took me about 7 years after college to pay off my 18K in debt (I also locked in my interest rates at under 4%) -- I think that was a 137 dollar payment a month if I paid it off at the minimum rate.
- stephencanon 14y ago
  I was in the same situation as an undergrad at an Ivy. It has only improved since then. A student starting at an Ivy today with a similar family situation will graduate owing nothing.
enjo 14y ago
I came from a upper-middle class family. We were wealthy enough that qualifying for financial aid at an ivy was basically impossible. We were poor enough (with 3 of us in college at once) that it wasn't possible. This was particularly problematic because my dad (a military doctor) had only been out of the military for a couple of years. Meaning the salary he we were being pegged at for financial aid was something he had only been earning for 2 years or so. He mad significantly less in the military. Point being: For some folks, in some situations.. the cost is well beyond reach.
- ihodes 14y ago
  The Ivys and liberal arts places I know take multiple children going to school at the same time well into account. I'm sorry for the trouble, but I'm not sure if you didn't look into it, or if you are talking about a situation well into the past. That's just not the case anymore. EDIT: Hell, look at the comment below; the net price calculator (http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/ http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/) even has a drop-down for number of children in college.

larsberg 14y ago

Two things: 1) Yield is a big issue. At larger companies, they track how many people they get from different universities, how long they last, how far they go, etc. Most recruiting efforts are then focused on the few schools that give the most graduates that are the best fit for the company. And yes, there are all sorts of long-term issues with this. Speaking as a former hiring manger, it was just a lot of work to go some of the other schools (especially some of the large state schools with non-top-tier CS programs) because even though we would find 1-2 candidate, we would have to filter through a huge number of candidates to do so. For those schools, we generally relied on personal recommendations from faculty to recent alumni. 2) I went to and am now a PhD student at a very expensive private university. Many of the students, like myself, are middle class, getting very little aid (other than merit) while their parents are forced to share the living-on-ramen experience during college. But, those huge loans (I think I had somewhere between 60-80k when I graduated many years ago) are quickly paid off if you continue living on little money working for a top firm. Most of my peers' loans were all paid off in the first 2-3 years of working. It's a huge worry, but in practice turns out not to be a big deal for CS majors from top schools. Certainly, it drives many job decisions, though. A low-pay startup job was not in the cards while I had all that debt hanging over my head, and I assume that's true for other middle class folks.

temuze 14y ago
I think it's also worth mentioning that financial aid at most Ivy League schools ar incredible. Look at Princeton - the goal of their financial aid office is to make sure that everyone who needs financial aid (middle class or not), get financial aid. It's very common that graduates come out of school without any debt at all.
- nessus42 14y ago
  I also know from having worked at Harvard that most Harvard students these days graduate with little or no debt due to a generous financial aid system there. I wish it had been like that when I went to MIT. (MIT did have plenty of financial aid, but not to the no-debt level.)
- 14y ago

hinting 14y ago

It'd be great if all these articles making big claims about what developers do and don't do included some actual, you know, evidence. It shouldn't even be that hard to collect. LinkedIn in a massive data repository about what jobs people have had. Should be a fun analysis.

throwaway_95014 14y ago
Say I've been at Obvious Company for a while. Maybe a long while. LinkedIn, Github, none of these things have anything on me. I can't talk about what I've done in the last couple of years because it's all still confidential (and I'm not ratting one employer in front of a prospective - I'd like them to think I can be trusted). How do I convince you that I'm enough of a rockstar (and I am, for reals) to get a foot in the door? I can blow your socks off in an interview by fixing your product and your business model on a whiteboard, but until we talk I'm just another pasty white guy in an ironic shirt. You aren't going to recognize the schools I went to, or care, because I was out before you were eating solid food. I don't even have the beard and suspenders. How do I sell me to you?
- boboblong 14y ago
  Perhaps you could contact the company you want to work for via a throwaway email so that they don't see you and prejudge you as an "old guy"? If you can fix someone's product and business model on a whiteboard, you should be able to use their product, find a flaw, and send them an incisive email about it.

EricDeb 14y ago

As a counter to one of his points I've seen developers who are completely oblivious to money management and are always working on their own projects despite having loans and having gone to an expensive school. I'm like you though buddy I did undergrad and just finished a Master's degree from two schools that barely crack the top 50 in CS. I chose to go the less expensive route (read: basically free) as opposed to an Ivy-League education. It's too early to tell whether it will hinder my job prospects or not.

timsally 14y ago

The subtext here is that those without elite credentials are at some disadvantage because they don't have a convenient signaling mechanism of quality to prospective employers. Stipulated. But if you have the talent to compete, this disadvantage is merely a speedbump. In 2012 you're just a git pull away from interacting with the decision makers at your next job. It's never been easier for programmers with top talent to convey their qualities to employers. One community that has always worked this way is the community surrounding the Linux kernel. Credentials are not even mentioned. It's all about the code and people routinely get hired on that basis alone.

Alex3917 14y ago

The reason people like people who went to Ivy league schools is largely that it's a proxy for having had good parents/values. The idea that you'd have a better network or education might be partly true, but it's mostly just a justification. Once you understand this, you should be able to work around it.

nostrademons 14y ago
Going to Ivy League schools is a proxy for having good parents/values? I went to Amherst (not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts college). I wouldn't use it as a proxy for good parents or values at all. Hell, one of my classmates stole an ambulance, drove it around the freshman quad, and crashed it into a tree. Another embezzled $13,000 from the school newspaper. The latter had a parent who was on the board of trustees. A third was the author of this infamous breakup letter: http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp In my experience, the people who really had good parents & values were the ones who came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds and managed to make it into Amherst despite them. Succeeding despite adversity says a lot about your character. Succeeding because daddy's a legacy and donated a few million dollars to the school doesn't say anything other than that your parents have money.
slurgfest 14y ago
I don't understand in any way how you get from "Ivy League" to "good values." There are some real scumbags who went through Ivy League schools. That shouldn't even be surprising or contentious.

ynniv 14y ago

Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship). Not saying that you won't find good people at UGA (biting my GT tongue!), but following his rationale and years of work experience in Atlanta (showing Georgia residency), his story seems a little thin. Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders, and ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used. Not every rockstar went to Julliard, but they were good at what they did.

iopuy 14y ago
Off topic but I think the HOPE scholarship and Bright Futures in Florida are outstanding forms of financial aid.
- ynniv 14y ago
  Yes! They were not available to me, but I am glad they exist. HOPE could be improved by easing up the 3.0 requirement for GT, tho.
  - astrange 14y ago
    HOPE is only getting more exclusive, not less, because they can't afford the old system. I think it's on a sliding scale vs GPA now.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Tech was ridiculously cheap as an in-state student in the late 80s. Pretty much everyone graduated with no debt even then. MIT was $16,000 a year when I looked at it at the time, I believe. I'm having a hard time remembering the details of their financial aid, but they had some need-based assistance on a sliding scale. You'd end up owing several $10s of thousands, which everyone said you'd "easily" pay off once you got a job out of there, which is likely mostly true. Still, it was an intimidating amount to a lower-middle class kid. It's telling I didn't go there and still have the cost fixed in my head. My high school counselors/teachers were sort of limited in their knowledge of the upper end of the scale. MIT was all I ever heard about in terms of out-of-state tech schools. All the rich kids went Ivy League, and all the other smart kids went to GT. The Naval Academy had a special aura for a few. A couple people in my class went to Harvard, but no one ever talked about it in terms of a technical education. No one from my high school went to a school in California. I was aware of Caltech, not that I could have found Pasadena on a map. I knew the name Stanford, but only because of its physics department, and literally did not know what state it was in. I've made sure my teenage niece is at least aware of what the top schools are.

mustpax 14y ago

Yes, getting out of the resume pile is harder without a name brand college degree but you shouldn't be going in the resume pile in the first place. Make connections, build your network, get referrals. Once you actually make it to the on-site interview, your performance in the interview will trump almost all else. The resume pile is where good ideas go to die. Faced with the fact that resumes are 99% useless, hiring managers latch on to things that are cozy and familiar, keywords, GPAs, brand-name school. This sucks, but don't let others' mistakes keep you from demonstrating your potential.

lazyBilly 14y ago

I understand the frustration, and there are a lot more unfair things waiting for you out in the business world. So opt out. Invent your own job and take no shit from anybody. Get a consultancy running and freelance. It's not complicated, just a lot of work to get started. Then transition off writing code for others into your own projects. You're young, it'll be fine. It won't be as sexy as doing yc and living the life in the valley, but you could probably move down and do it there if you were hungry enough. Fuck the student loans, if you can't eat and pay them it'll just fuck up your credit till you get square. Don't be more emotionally attached to your debt than the bank is to its own. The upshot is, yeah, if you didn't go to an ivy, you're going to have a tougher road in some capacities. Some. And mostly if you're trying to convince somebody that you're going to do something cool someday. Do something and remove all doubt, or build something so that youre the guy deciding what's good enough or not.

subwindow 14y ago

Amen. Almost. I was in a startlingly similar position a few years ago- I graduated from Georgia State. I went there not because it was the best school, but because tuition was paid (HOPE scholarship) and the classes were offered at flexible times so I could work while going to school. I had to turn down an acceptance from Tech because of that. While it hurt my career initially, I think the value of education is drastically diminished in just a few short years. By the time I was 25 what I'd accomplished professionally mattered far more than where I went to school. Sure, I was still in debt from school so starting a company is difficult, but open source contributions and side projects are a signifcant part of my "resume" and far outweigh my schooling.

rgbrgb 14y ago

The truth is, rockstars didn't "look for jobs". They didn't submit their resume to some big rockstar company and hope to get a place as a cog in some corporate Googlish wheel. If you go to Julliard, it's a lot easier to get a job in music that is more like working at Google. You can join a symphony or something that you just could not do without a deep understanding of theory and a skill set that is very similar to the other musicians you are working with. But if you think you're hot shit, take the time you spend on whining about the privileged and make something great (for rockstars this often involves whining about privilege). Rockstars didn't get permission to make their art, and none of us have to either.

TillE 14y ago

Actually, I've noticed that a large fraction of my favorite (rock) musicians were classically trained, at least as children. Not all of them, but enough to surprise me. Self-teaching is overrated.

LargeWu 14y ago

Whether or not Ivy League or other top schools charge too much is basically irrelevant; the real hard part is getting accepted in the first place. These schools get so many applications in a year, and many of the applicants are so thinly differentiated, that acceptance is virtually indistinguishable from a lottery. Saying graduates of these schools are the best of the best misses the mark a bit. A more accurate description would be they had access to generally superior education. This is an important distinction.

tytso 14y ago

"Life is unfair. Deal with it." There is no doubt that if someone's parents had the means to give them a computer, and that grade school student or high school students was able to start practicing the craft of programming early, they will have a huge leg up on someone who didn't have that opportunity. For better or worse, that's the world that we live in. Accept it, and move on. OK, you weren't someone who had the opportunity to learn Cisco IOS at an early age, and was configuring core Internet backbone routers as a job and wearing a pager in high school, before you started at MIT as a freshman. OK, you're not someone who contributed so much to the Linux kernel in high school that you were invited to the annual Kernel Summit, which brings together the top 75 or so linux kernel developers, the summer before you started at MIT. These are two real people that I know. There's nothing I can do to change society to make things "fair"; and there's nothing you can do about either. So stop whining about it. I've looked at LockeWatts's resume, and the problem as someone who has been a hiring manager, is there's absolutely no signal in his resume that he would actually be a someone who could "compete with the best of them". He's made that assertion, but lots of people have made that assertion. And while he might be really bright, unfortunately, I've met many people who claimed to be super bright, but then when I asked them to code up a simple function on the whiteboard, they couldn't do something incredibly basic. Furthermore, although it will no doubt be painful for him to hear this, I very much doubt he is a rockstar. He might have the potential to be a rockstar, but takes a huge amount of practice to get there. It is rare, and no doubt requires privilege, for someone to have that status right out of college, or in the cases I detailed above, before they even started college. The good news is that this is something that time and experience, and a lot of determination on Colin's part, can fix. You can't change your family circumstances; but you can control how much time you spend honing your art and your craft. Sure, you need to focus on bringing home your biweekly paycheck. But you can control whether you go to movies, or go out drinking with your buddies, or whether you spend that working on open source projects, or learning new computer languages, or taking time to read self-help books to do what Stevey Covey called "Sharpening the Saw" (cf 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Maybe it will take you an extra 2 or 3 or even 5 years. But you can give yourself rockstar-like skills and experience, if you are willing to make the appropriate choices and sacrifices.

LockeWatts 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

At the crux of this issue is the question about correlation of intelligence and ambition with wealth. I would be surprised if there was no correlation at all, on the other hand it would be interesting to see what the relationship really is but I can't think of an experiment that could be done in a way which would be both accurate and ethical (for example switching poor and rich children at birth). This seems to be one of the arguments around keeping taxes low for the rich (or "job creators") the implicit assumption seems to be "rich people are smart, therefor they should be put in charge of money distribution". As an example, there was somebody I grew up with who is now running a ~$1 million turnover web design company at 27. He is sometimes invited to speak at events as a successful entrepreneur and demonstrated as an example of how hard work can pay off etc. Unfortunately if you know the real story it is somewhat less impressive. He graduated from university with a fairly average degree and was having trouble finding employment at any job that he was interested in working at. He comes from a wealthy background however, so had little time constraints on his job search. After some time he decided to give up looking for work and establish himself as a freelance designer, his family gave him a chunk of money with which to establish himself. For the first few years his business was not too successful and was draining capital, he was having difficulty finding clients as his portfolio of work was not really comparable to other established companies who were charging similar rates. After a few years his family sold one of the businesses they owned which freed up a bunch of extra capital, a chunk of this they gave to him. He was able to use this money to hire some talented designers who did excellent work and won him a bunch of awards and bigger contracts, this was really the catalyst that made him successful. Of course if the guy was a complete idiot he would have squandered even that opportunity, he was intelligent enough to run a business day-to-day but there was no way he would have managed that without such a capital injection. Would be interesting to think about how many people in his position would have failed and how many would have been successful earlier.

richcollins 14y ago

If he's an academically qualified hacker but can't afford an Ivy, why'd he go to Georgia instead of Georgia Tech?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jberryman 14y ago

Jesus Christ, it's spelled "Juilliard". Anyway, horrible analogy.

stephencanon 14y ago

"An Ivy League education is almost certainly a 6 figure sum of some kind, depending on where you go. They have need based scholarships, but if you’re in the middle class those aren’t really applicable to you, and your parents can’t afford to send you to that expensive a school" At nearly any of the ivies, you will graduate nearly debt-free if your parents make less than $100k-$120k. $100k household income puts a family in the top 15%, which is at least "upper middle class" if not "rich" (though clearly not "super rich"). There are precisely two ways to be unable to afford to attend one of the ivies: be an international student, or have wealthy parents who are unwilling to contribute to your educational expenses. This wasn't always true, but at this point, if the parents are willing it is essentially always affordable.

jfarmer 14y ago

Nothing it stopping you from writing a great article, building great software, contributing something amazing to an open source project, etc. Your time would be better spent focusing on doing good work and sharing it. Assuming you do do good work and learn how to share effectively, the rest will come.

johnkchow 14y ago

I can say I understand where you're coming from, and if you carry that chip on your shoulder for the rest of your life, you'll do just fine. I want to share my personal story, since I felt the same way you did when I was in college. Coming out of school 2 years ago, I thought I was screwed. I had a shitty GPA, I had no work experience (not even internships), and I never took on a personal programming project. While my friends were getting offers months before graduation, I was still applying to companies (and not hearing back from any of them). Finally, a small .NET web shop gave me a call, and I royally screwed up the technical questions. The interviewer, with a disappointed sigh, asked me if I had any questions for him before we end the call. This was my opening, my chance to show him that indeed I did care about his company and, ultimately, programming. Prior to the call, I had done a lot of research on the company and who their big clients are, so I told him how cool that was and then asked what was the coolest project they've worked on. Impressed, the interviewer immediately changed his tone, and it was as if the interview restarted over. I pressed on, showing him my enthusiasm not only for the company, but for programming and how I wanted to become a better engineer tomorrow than the day before. The director, listening in on the call, pretty much gave me an offer. The offer was severely under market rate, and I was on a very short leash (3 month trial), but I was so happy, I cried. I knew that the next step was to impress the shit out of them. So starting day 1, I'd gobble up everything about the tech stack and the domain. I'd subscribe to every .NET blog I could find. I bought and read books about design pattern and enterprise architecture. I listened to programming podcasts as I drove back and forth from work, and sometimes I'd listen to it as I tried to fall asleep. I'd constantly ask questions to my senior engineers about the .NET nuances, IoC containers, and good engineering practices. I questioned why we didn't do TDD, why we didn't switch from the Web Forms to MVC framework, why we're still using LinqToSQL instead of Entity Framework. In three months, I got a raise, and within 6 months after that, I got another raise. My director called me the "rising star" in our company. I worked my ass off not because I wanted to prove to the world that I was good, but I wanted to prove to myself that I'm not a chump programming monkey. A year after my first job, I got an offer to work at a friend's startup in SF, despite the fact it was on a Rails stack with WAY different architecture/requirement. Again, paid under market rate because of my lack of experience. Applied the same work ethic and dedication to the job. Learned how to scale, how to design web apps top to bottom, how to architect our systems topology, and how to get shit done. On my personal time, I decided to build a website that would help the alumni members of my college fraternity keep in touch with each other for networking and inspirational purposes. Leveraging my knowledge from my job, built the entire damn thing, from the DB schemas, to the domain logic, to even the HTML/CSS. Initially it was built on ASP.NET MVC, then rebuilt the whole thing in Rails to improve our development speed. Now, I'm asking around other student orgs to see if they'd be interested in using our website. Now, I guess I am that rockstar programmer, even though I don't really think that. Recruiters are constantly messaging me for job openings. I just got two offers from both a big, respectable company, and from another startup. It's surreal. I never thought I'd see this day, but I still have that chip on my shoulder to constantly improve. The point I'm trying to get is that it's not about where you start but it's the journey you're willing to take to get where you want to be. Earlier, tytso commented that you have to start at the bottom with an entry-level job, and it probably won't be the glamorous FB/Google/Apple/blahblahblah job that you so want. But that doesn't matter as long as you work in a place that you can get really fired up about. In my experience, a lot of managers would hire passionate, inexperienced guys over talented yet indifferent engineers because company culture is a big deal. So what is it that you can do to prepare yourself right now? First, network the shit out of your school. Make as many friends as you can, regardless of their majors or background. I guarantee you you'll find other people who are smarter and more motivated than you are. Surrounding yourself with ambitious or A+ kids will a) in the short term inspire you to work harder and b) in the long term, they'll become valuable assets for your career. Then start a programming project. Right. Now. In my last year of college, I built a beer pong tournament website on LAMP. It wasn't the prettiest thing, visually/architecturally, but still proud of that thing. (For fun, I'm trying to rebuild it again with backbone, Rails, and MongoDB.) Never forget this moment of frustration. In fact, embrace it. Use it as your motivating fuel. And then go do what makes you happy.

pnathan 14y ago

Fundamentally, as someone who went to a Public State University, I feel your pain. Let me take a look (based on my experiences of reviewing resumes)... Analysis of your "about me" section: Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA isn't listed. Resume: If I ask you in-depth, hard questions about any language or tech on your resume, I expect an answer. If you can't give me a deep answer, I will give you negative points in my mind. You listed those techs, so you better have something to show. WRT Technologies. I am a bit idiosyncratic: I want to know your preferred OS and whether you can handle source control. Everything else is noise. You have too much noise. Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's too generic. Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can do for me. I don't really care about your in-progress work unless you have a github. You should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight your Honors courses. In summary, you are an above-average candidate compared to most CS resumes I've seen. Probably in the 80th percentile of the last batch of resumes I looked through. However, you are not a must-hire in my opinion. --- In order to get to "must hire" state in my mind, you need something like the following: * Mastery of written communication. * Explanation of what you have done at each position, why you uniquely made it happen, and what you can do for me and my team. * Public code repo with a long history and a decent amount of loc in it. You've developed at least a small system (1-10KLoC) and maintained it for years. You support users of it. * You have studied a "far out" technology - one that may never be written on the job. The more depth is shown here, the more commitment to your craft is demonstrated. At a minimum, this would be, for instance, learning Perl 6 or Haskell. At the higher end, it might be something like writing a working simulator of the CM-2. * You have extensive internships at well-known companies. While this is limited by location and funds somewhat, it demonstrates that you can play ball with the big boys. --- Understand that you can better your marketing quickly - set up a github and upload a project, wipe out the placeholder links, rewrite your resume to better express your capabilities. But then the slog starts. You need to commit to building your craft, constantly, in a visibly demonstrable way. Some of that might be expressed via open source, or it might be expressed by a portfolio of shipped software. That's up to you. And, further - express yourself in a more careful fashion. No one wants to take the risk of hiring someone who complains life is unfair. While I am not a hiring manager, I do assist with technical hiring. I am always happy to look at your resume (or anybody else's) and provide feedback and critique. My contact email is in my HN profile. Best wishes for your future.

aidenn0 14y ago

Both cheaper than Ivy League, both are as good a signal in my book: University of Illinois Carnegie Mellon

tikhonj 14y ago
Erm, is CMU actually cheaper than an Ivy League university? I was under the impression that they are fairly expensive and do not provide nearly as much financial aid as at least the top Ivy League schools like Harvard or Princeton. At the very least, CMU has a far smaller endowment (an order of magnitude smaller) than most of the universities it competes with. I imagine this has a real impact on how much financial aid it can offer. Also, no love for Berkeley? We're public and have a pretty good CS department :). Admittedly being out of state makes it rather expensive and harder to get in, but I imagine that's the same at UIUC.
- aidenn0 14y ago
  Yeah, Berkeley is great, I didn't mention them since when I graduated HS (a while ago) they were harder to get into from out-of-state than some of the Ivys
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    For better or worse, that's still true, at least for engineering. I think the acceptance rate over all (for both in- and out-of-state students) to the EECS major is actually below 10%. However, getting into CMU CS is also similarly difficult.

benthumb 14y ago

>I read that a NASA subcontrator wanted someone to design high-efficiency power supplies for the Space Shuttle. So I wrote up a decent design and showed up. There were maybe 20 candidates at the office, all equipped with advanced degrees. But I didn't have a degree, I had a design. They hired me on the spot and sent all the degree holders away. True story. http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_former_nasa_space_shuttle_engineer/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/qaqr3/table_iama_for...

mindcrime 14y ago

Don't worry about the Ivy League stuff, and just keep working on your projects and learning. Most of the comments here about "signalling" are true but largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you have your sights set on a job at one specific company (say, Google) then it's probably true that you're more likely to get in with a degree from an Ivy League school. But if you just want to have a great career, work on cool stuff, do well for yourself and maybe even be an entrepreneur one day, you can do all of that without ever sniffing an Ivy League campus. The tech industry is, despite what some people may say, still fairly meritorious. If you have talent, and you work hard, your ability will - over time - dominate the signalling effect of your degree and what-not. OK, maybe it means your first job is writing CRUD applications in the IT department for a shoe manufacturing company in Bumfuckville, GA, and not doing machine learning stuff at Google. Big deal. Take the shoe manufacturing job, keep learning on your own time (don't get married or have kids too young though, if you have high aspirations career wise), start an open-source project and/or contribute to some well known projects. Blog, write a book, do screencasts, whatever you can do to demonstrate your ability. If you are truly talented, and have indomitable spirit, you'll make your way where you want to go.

bane 14y ago

Sorta, but all rockstars also have in common that they all have a band, practice a lot, tour a lot and make lots of decent songs...most rockstars played in 30 seat dive bars at one point or another. The Goo Goo Dolls dwelt in obscurity for about a decade before making it big. Radiohead has a similar story. What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against the wall until it stuck. It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often, and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs. Some examples: John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't think so). Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal. Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days, before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in obscurity. D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the planet. and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all produced and in the end that's all anybody cares about.