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>Not everyone is going to drop out of high school or college and launch a billion dollar company. Neither did this guy. Most of us without degrees did somethi

• robomartin 13y ago
  Going to school later on isn't a bad idea or impossible. It could be a good idea for some. I would guess for most it is difficult, if not impossible. Throw a couple of kids and a mortgage into the equation and it's really tough to make independent (and risky) decisions. At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a degree. I don't know the answer to this question: How many technical people work at places like SpaceX without having at least a BS? Probably few, if any. You'd have to have a pretty serious track record to get past the filters at companies like that. I am not being elitist here. Not at all. I am merely suggesting that the reader consider want it might mean not to have a degree later in life.
  • lsc 13y ago
    >At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a degree. Really? job security? are you telling me that they are willing to hire people without degrees, but then they take the opportunity to let us go first when they have layoffs? This makes very little sense. The hard part is getting 'em to give you a chance. After you have the job, well, it's easy enough to compete on performance.
    • robomartin 13y ago
      You got what I said exactly backwards. I meant it exactly as you put it. It's about getting the job in the first place and not being eliminated outright in favor of someone else with a degree ("lose it to someone with a degree"). Job security has nothing to do with it. It's about landing a job.
  • lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    I think you're confused. Later in life, it becomes less relevant. If someone is gainfully employed and earning a living that they are satisfied with, I think the only "moron" is the one calling them a moron for not getting a degree. The whole mentality of "one size fits all" for paths through life is pretty narrow minded. That aside, your post is missing the point. Nobody is advocating for not getting a degree or saying that they are a waste.
    • wslh 13y ago
      >I think you're confused. Later in life, it becomes less relevant. If someone is gainfully employed and earning a living that they are satisfied with, I think the only "moron" is the one calling them a moron for not getting a degree. The whole mentality of "one size fits all" for paths through life is pretty narrow minded I completely disagree. You can work for Google and in fifteen years they go bankrupt because Infinootle is using a new hyperrank technique and they employ robots instead of humans. Then you remember that Google was a colossus on the early XXI century. At minimum a degree is an insurance. Not the best but better with it.
• ikonst 13y ago
  The common opinion is that your mental capacity for learning is at peak when you're young and gets worse with age. You might find an engineering degree more frustrating with age. Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college. Not that I recommend schooling for the sake of schooling. I'm now doing it myself at the age of 29 (nearly done), and I keep wondering whether I'm doing something wildly irrational.
  • lsc 13y ago
    >Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college. So how is that working out for you? is it weird being the old student? My guess is that I'd do much better socially now in my early 30s than I would have a decade ago, simply because my social skills are dramatically better. But, I dono. Being the old guy could be kinda weird, too. But my social skills were really, really poor in my early '20s.
• flatline 13y ago
  I went back in my mid-30s, with one kid. I had flirted with a variety of work/school balances up until that point, but working full time and doing school part time was going to require about 8 more years of sustained effort to finish a B.S. With a kid, full time school pretty much precluded me working, as my spouse works full time, so I ended up taking on much more debt than most undergrads, which brings up the next fundamental problem of opportunity cost. I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s. I don't regret doing it at all, I'm very glad to have finally finished the degree, but there are lots of extra costs and obstacles that come up when you have other substantial responsibilities. That being said, the actual schoolwork was way easier in many ways than during my first foray from my 20s. I had time management skills, a supportive wife and stable home situation, and years of experience in the software industry that gave me a reasonable baseline of knowledge.
  • lsc 13y ago
    >I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s Why did you decide to go back to school if your income was already that high? did you change careers? or was this just a social status/personal enrichment project?
    • flatline 13y ago
      Mostly the latter, though I was tired of writing business applications and looking to move into something, broadly, in the domain of scientific research. Which is not terribly straightforward with only a B.S., but seems to be pretty much impossible without one. So for the moment, I'm still on the job hunt in this area.
      • lsc 13y ago
        I've worked with a bunch of folks going the other way; physics BAs who couldn't cut it as a researcher who fell back on programming. From what I've seen, physics majors are more likely than CS majors to have a reasonable level of Linux competency.