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>What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you." Sorry about that. It's hypocri

>What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you." Sorry about that. It's hypocritical of me to implement a system like this instead of just showing my email address. I actually wrote a blog post about why you shouldn't do what I did with this website: http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contact-forms http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contac... >I, too, look forward to meeting you! But that probably won't happen. There's a good chance that would've been true had you not made this comment :) I hope to meet everyone I receive an email from but to be honest I did not expect this to get so much attention. I am used to my projects getting very little to no visitors. >college... I started typing a long response to this explaining the circumstances around my decision but I've decided against it. The bottom line is that I've made the decision to not go to university and I'm perfectly happy with that. Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, it just means I have to teach myself, which is what I've always done and will continue to do. People may judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at peace with that. Surprisingly, my father is a professor and my mother is a university director, and yet they both support me in what I'm doing. My mother wrote about her feelings on the matter here if you're curious: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2014/0619/Why-I-said-yes-when-my-son-said-no-to-college http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthoo... Thanks for taking the time to write out your thoughts, I'd love to go over the details with you in person. >credit card... The day I turned 18, I signed a lease for an apartment and got a secured credit card, which I use exactly the same as I would a debit card. I still need to get a second credit card to help continue building my credit but I definitely got started as soon as I could. My credit could be better, but there's not much more than waiting that I can do at this point. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Your mother's blog post is mostly about salary, which seems to be beside the point. There's more to life than money. If your long-term goals include (or will ever include) "Start my own company," the odds are overwhelmingly not in your favor. First, when you're in university, you have a unique opportunity to become known as the smartest person in the class, and thus build a ridiculously valuable network. But you could do that at work too, right? Well, not really. There are legal issues at play: it's not so easy to just pack up with a coworker and start your own company. California makes this easier, but it's still hairy. Whereas you almost never have to worry about that as a student. Plus, your student network will be gigantic in comparison to a network you can build from work alone. Someday you'll be old, and without a degree you'll be doubly vulnerable to ageism. If you're not a manager by then, you may be out of a job. While it's nice to think you'd be retired by then, reality has a funny way of making that unlikely. In particular, if you meet someone and fall in love, your finances and other ambitions tend to become affected. You may be interested that I once interviewed at Justin TV, which eventually transformed into Twitch and was recently sold for a lot of money. Maybe I would've had an equity stake, maybe not. I didn't make the cut. Official reason for passing on me? Kan met with me and said that his investors recommended they not hire anyone without a degree when they were in such early stages. Now, that could have just been a convenient social excuse; at the time I remember not really demonstrating enough value during the interview stage, otherwise I'm sure that wouldn't have stopped them. On the other hand, if I was a borderline "hire" with a degree, then maybe that would have been enough to push me into the zone of "Let's try this person out and see how he does," which would have let me demonstrate my abilities directly, rather than by solving interview puzzles like "how would you implement a way to evaluate 2 + 3 = 5?" (At the time, being self-taught, I wasn't very versed in lexers, parsers, etc, so I had to flub my way through that particular question.) You can have a wonderful life without a degree, but the vast majority of startups are started by people who went through universities. You know how Sam Altman has given a series of wonderful lectures at Stanford? Pg has also written at length about universities and startups: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups+college+OR+university https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups... I've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. If you set up those conditions within the US, startups will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece of metal. I've been operating under the assumption that you moved out to SF to go live the startup dream. The fact is, that dream is much less likely when you haven't attended university. It's unlikely in terms of raw statistics (I'm personally aware of only a few people who have made a successful startup without having been through university, tptacek being one of the notable counterexamples) and in terms of your network. As a student, you're a potential founder. As an employee, usually you're going to remain an employee. Isn't it interesting that Loopt was objectively not as big of a success as once was hoped, but Sam still succeeded brilliantly from it? I wonder if his network had anything to do with that, or the fact that he attended a top-tier university? By the way, if you don't really care about starting a startup, please just disregard everything I've said, since your current path may in fact be optimal, as your parents noted. But if you're going the startup route... Well, "the rest of your life" is a long, long time, yet you only have a very narrow timeframe to reconsider. I hope I'm wrong, though! One of the most important points that I don't think I stressed enough, which took me a long time to fully accept, is that university isn't really about learning. Not when it comes to software. Yes, your education will be well-rounded and you'll have a much deeper knowledge of architecture and theory and etc, but the primary value to you as a potential founder is the network and the social acceptance that comes from attending a top tier university. Prestige. It's lame to an extent, and maybe someday the world will be different, but that day likely won't be in the next decade, which is the timeframe you care about the most. Also, consider this: All of the opportunities before you now will still be there, enhanced, after university. Ever play poker? It's probably best to follow the path of highest EV. There's almost no way that university is anything but the highest EV in this situation. I wish you the best of luck. I apologize for coming across as negative.
- milesokeefe 12y ago
  You make good, valid points. My perspective is that as a student, I don't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc are not very exceptional. However, as a "rogue" (for lack of a better term) developer, I do stand out. I started making websites in 4th grade, I've worked professionally as a developer since a year after I was legally able to have a job at all, I have an entrepreneurial spirit, I have a history of shipping software, etc. Read that in the least egotistical tone you can (if at all possible) please; I'm walking imposter syndrome in reality. I'd really like to continue this conversation right now but I think it'll stretch out too long, can we pick back up at this point in person? I'll email you right after I post this. >I apologize for coming across as negative I also struggle with wording what I say to sound positive, but you have nothing to worry about, your tone has been very neutral. EDIT: I sent an email to the address in your profile, if that's not your current email, please tell me so I can send it to the right one.
  - jbooth 12y ago
    If you're better as a rogue than as a student, that's like 10x the time to work on being a student. The real world? It sucks, and brilliant rogues are frequently punished shortly after saving the day. You've got 40-50 years after school to learn those lessons. Go to school for the experience while you're young enough to do it. Learn some philosophy, history, art or music while you're at it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - eslaught 12y ago
    > My perspective is that as a student, I don't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc are not very exceptional. I was such a student in high school; ok grades, but nothing that would get me into Stanford (I applied; they rejected me). Then I went to college (at UCSD), and suddenly the entire world turned around. In high school, being good meant mostly skills that had nothing to do with subject matter. In college, being good meant being good at CS, which (hey!) I was actually good at. So almost overnight, I became one of the top students in my cohort, and one of the most well-known in my year in the department. I am now a Ph.D. student at Stanford (yes, the irony...). Admittedly, I never followed the path from high school straight to working, so I wouldn't know if something similar is possible there, and maybe it is. But I wouldn't underestimate the social network effects that others have talked about here. Standing out in your major has substantially more impact in college than it does in high school.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Not to be pedantic but this: > Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, > it just means I have to teach myself, which is what > I've always done and will continue to do. People may > judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at > peace with that. Like many people fresh out of high school you do not know what college is, or what it is for. The challenge though is that you have this blank spot in your understanding, there is ample evidence that you have this blank spot (lots of people go to college for some reason and the ones who are successful are vastly more likely to have a degree than not have a degree, etc etc.) and yet you choose you own reasoning over that of what you can observe to make your choice. This particular issue is rampant with really smart kids because of the misconception that college is about learning as opposed to being about thinking. Your learning skills can be quite strong and completely subverted by a lack of thinking skills. Anyway, it is not up to us to walk the path for you but you did post here so you get advice for free :-)
- toolz 12y ago
  I just want to know when college became some holy grail of uncovering your true potential. I've been to college. It absolutely and utterly pales in comparison to the knowledge base I'll never have time to consume for free on the internet. As for networking and thinking. I find an IRC channel and a few conferences in a single year introduced me to more like minded people than I met in the whole of my college experience. I'm sure we could all make the argument you get into college what you put into it. The same goes for my preference of meeting people and networking. The difference is I wouldn't be tens of thousands of dollars in the hole if I had known that earlier.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    For me, the most important thing about college was 1) setting aside such a massive block of time to learn, and 2) being in a place with a bunch of other people who were also there mostly to learn. That's not to say it's necessarily worth it for everyone, and depending what you're bringing to it it's certainly possible to fail to get much out of it. I think different groups of people over- and undervalue it, in weird ways.
genwin 12y ago
I think you'll find that your lack of degree is almost inconsequential. A few job doors will close and otherwise it'll likely be a non-issue.
- midnightclubbed 12y ago
  I have to disagree. At some point in your 30-40 year career you may well want to leave the start-up treadmill and join a big company. At that point you'll hit HR pay-grade limits based on your degree (or lack thereof). Big companies do sexy work too. You'll also be un-attractive to start-ups once you get over 40 because, well, you're old and they're not. Have a friend in his 40s having to plough through a degree (while holding down a full time job, and family duties) for just this reason.
  - genwin 12y ago
    Once while applying for a major company I asked if my lack of degree was an issue, since it was supposedly a requirement. The interviewer said "Our CEO is a college drop-out. We don't care!" When the OP needs to work for Big Corp., he could apply to jobs that say "degree or equivalent experience". There are thousands of them. A degree is nice to have, but for the price plus opportunity cost (perhaps $200K for the OP) it may be a net negative. I too have a 40-something friend finishing his degree. He does feel it would have helped his career.
mtalantikite 12y ago
I'm sure you've heard it again and again, but university really isn't about learning topics or skills. Many classes are a waste of time, taught by TAs that might not even grasp the subject they're teaching all that well. I definitely skipped a whole lot of classes and instead spent the time in the library getting lost in the stacks finding random books to read on my own. Once you hit the upper levels and find a major or two with professors you love that changes of course, but it definitely happens more often than most admit. The main thing you can't replace is everything else, like meeting really smart people that are working on things that are totally foreign to your day to day studies. Maybe you walk into a room at 11pm on a Tuesday because you hear someone listening to music you've never heard before. Or someone brings you to a reading of an author and the discussion makes you reevaluate beliefs you didn't even know you had. Maybe you take a class for a gen-ed that you just know will be terrible but the professor ends up being amazing and becomes a mentor to you. Or maybe you stay up for 24 hours straight with classmates studying for a final and somehow you all ace it even though you really thought solving problem 3 was going to kill you. It seems like you know that network is important, otherwise you wouldn't be attempting this experiment, but there really is no replacement for spending four years forcing yourself to be exposed to tons of new ideas and people every day. There's no other time in life you're allowed to do whatever you want surrounded by so many people in the same situation as you. Money can wait.
- genwin 12y ago
  I must've gone to the wrong college. Mine was like high school except there was even more busy work to do, and it wasn't free. With most kids focused on their phones nowadays, could anywhere be like you say? I suspect those days are over.
  - mtalantikite 12y ago
    There are certainly many institutions that aren't worth attending, especially if you tend to be a highly intelligent autodidact. But if you are that type of person, you'll probably be able to find a great university that will accept you and give you scholarships. I can't speak to kids being on their phones all day, we only had flip phones when I was in school, but you can make personal choices to avoid those things. I personally made a choice to not live anywhere with a TV, for instance, but there sure were a lot of kids in certain circles wasting away in front them.
marknadal 12y ago
Good for you, man. Don't let all these cynical Hacker News people get you down or discourage you. They are all whining and complaining about the mistakes they made. If you don't do what you feel convicted about, and just do what others "advise" you to do... you'll one day become the same cynical person they are. But you are choosing to do what you are passionate about. So keep fighting!
- milesokeefe 12y ago
  Thanks, I appreciate the support :)
borkt 12y ago
I had a terrible experience with college. I am a lifelong learner and extremely enthusastic, and my time spent in college were both my least productive and totally reduced my confidence in my abilities as I didn't conform with the "department way". I came out of it with a degree and debt free, but I know many people who had worse as well as better experiences. I am now learning civil engineering on the job (materials engineering was my major) and I have a passion for the practical applied sciences (my wife is an assistant winemaker and I took the entire courseload with her start to finish, just couldnt realistically afford to have two of us make a career in it). We aren't even big wine drinkers but it is really an extremely rewarding and suprisingly complex systems engineering challenge to make fine wine. If you are interested in anything I mentioned feel free to contact me
djyaz1200 12y ago
"but it's a mistake to drop out of one of the most effective social networks ever devised by humankind." Listen to this guy, he is giving you great advice!
Lambdanaut 12y ago
I'm in an extremely similar position to you Miles, and don't worry about college. I just turned 22 and all of my friends are graduating college while I'm making bank because I jumped into the industry early rather than throwing my money at school. The college route works for many, but I feel like I get along with people better that decide they're more fit to rough it and teach themselves. You know what's better at making you a social network of industry peers than college? The actual industry. Get an entry level position and work your way up, while spending your free time to develop your skills. I'm in WA right now but I'm taking a road trip while working remote this winter. I'll be in the Bay Area for a short period in January and will send you an email for the coffee request if you're not inundated with acquaintances by that time haha.
- eropple 12y ago
  > I'm in an extremely similar position to you Miles, and don't worry about college. I just turned 22 and all of my friends are graduating college while I'm making bank because I jumped into the industry early rather than throwing my money at school. The long-term impact of not having a degree, by and large, doesn't appear to really show up until your 30's or 40's. It makes continuing in a technical role progressively harder (because it's one area where you negatively stand out to the rest of the candidates passing by) and makes moving into management much harder because, like it or not, things like MBAs are still effective signaling tools for moving into management (and also teach you a lot, but on HN the idea of an MBA having useful lessons to teach is considered madness, so disregard that as you will). Getting there is much, much harder without a degree, and going back for that first degree is by all accounts really hard when you're already in the real world. > You know what's better at making you a social network of industry peers than college? The actual industry. The point isn't to have a social network of industry peers. It's to have a social network of people who are not industry peers. I like many people I know in the industry--but I don't go to them when I need to know about law or business or deep-magic political science (it has come up more than you think).
wodenokoto 12y ago
>>What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you." > Sorry about that. It's hypocritical of me to implement a system like this instead of just showing my email address. I actually wrote a blog post about why you shouldn't do what I did with this website: >http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contac.. http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contac.... I disagree. On most computers that I have ever used, clicking an e-mail link will open a setup process for the default email client. Most users I have ever encountered do not know what to do with that prompt. There's a lot of talk about "fixing" email, but I've yet to see anyone tackling this problem in a serious fashion. Since websites can't expect mailto: links working for their visitors, they have to put up forms. But more to the point: I think it is quite obvious what is gonna happen when one submit the form on your website: The website owner gets informed about my email address and what time I'm interested in meeting. Whether this information is conveyed by SMS, Whatsapp, e-mail, some internal e-ticketing system is completely irrelevant to the user. PS: I don't know how miles.codes is supposed to look, but it looks horrible in Firefox on Ubuntu. Images are jiggling, text is unreadable, links are not clickable where you'd expect to be able to click.
austenallred 12y ago
I don't know why everyone is lecturing you about not going to college, especially not understanding your personal circumstances. If I were looking at your resume for my startup, the "Oh, he's a great programmer who has been building things since he was four" would outweighs the potential, "Oh, he has a CS degree from Stanford" so much the latter wouldn't even move the needle. I'm probably biased, being a college dropout myself, but the employers who weigh those credentials more highly than raw ability or skill set are probably not the ones you want to work for anyway. And let's be honest -- at least right now, it's a programmer's market. You could tie a sign around your neck that says, "I've been programming since I was four and am looking for a job," spend the day walking around San Francisco, and probably have a job offer by the end of the day. It's probably also valuable to hear about college from a dropout's experience. I went for three years, and I hated every minute of it. Every. Single. Minute. I went to a highly respected/ranked private University, admittedly not something Ivy League, and while I definitely learned a lot and met some cool people, I speculate I would have learned more and faster had I jumped headfirst into startups during those years. I wouldn't have taken a Shakespeare class, but that's just one of the many trade-offs you have to make. I was a couple semesters away from graduation, and was half pulled out by a startup taking off and half just couldn't handle it anymore. Half of college was excruciatingly slow and boring, and 1/4 was worthless. I don't say "worthless" in the, "When am I going to use this in my job/real life" sense, but in the "This is busywork and everyone in this room, including the Professor, knows it." The last 1/4 was solid. I won't pretend like college had nothing to offer - I just wonder how much I would have learned had I used 4/4 of my time effectively instead of 1/4. TL;DR - do whatever you want to, and don't let the hivemind of HN convince you otherwise. But I didn't have to tell you that. Now let's meet up and get coffee next time I'm in the Valley :)
peterwwillis 12y ago
> The bottom line is that I've made the decision to not go to university and I'm perfectly happy with that. Yes, you're happy with it, now. People are always happier and more apt to do something that has immediate gains than something that is far off in the future. > Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, it just means I have to teach myself, You realize the purpose of teachers is to inform you of things so you don't have to figure them out yourself, right? It takes a lot longer to accumulate the knowledge by yourself. People have already figured complicated things out, and they can tell you in a minute, versus you spending hours/days/weeks trying to come to the same conclusion. > which is what I've always done and will continue to do. People may judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at peace with that. Nobody will judge you on a lack of a college degree. If anything, people will think you are more amazing for never going to college, but that's beside the point. A degree has nothing to do with going to college. Forget the degree. Actually, go to college and then drop out. Yes, i'm actually telling you not to get a degree, but still to go to college. > Surprisingly, my father is a professor and my mother is a university director, and yet they both support me in what I'm doing. My mother wrote about her feelings on the matter here if you're curious: My parents also supported me, but probably because they thought they had no way to force me to go. Honestly, this was a big mistake on their part. -- I never went to college, and started working for myself about the same age as you. I've since hit a wall several times in terms of professional advancement because I never got a CS degree. But it's not the degree that held me back, it's the lack of academic knowledge about computer science, security/crypto and other topics. How was I supposed to know I needed to explain in a job interview the big-O notation advantages of one algorithm over another? How was I supposed to know I needed to know how to draw a flow chart of the architecture of a network application? Could I have been studying CS every week of my life throughout my career to eventually build up the knowledge equivalent of a degree? Sure. But who the fuck wants to study every week of their life? That's why college is only (about) four years: you burn up that studying time all at once so you don't have to stretch it out for the rest of your life. Then there's the personal/social aspect, where my personal growth was stunted for many years from not having a group of my peers to interact with on a daily basis. I also lacked perspective from not learning multiple subjects such as art, history, foreign language, economics, philosophy, psychology, etc. I've accumulated a lot of knowledge over the last 10 years, but still lack so much because I never went to college. What nobody told me when I was younger was that your youth is the best time for you to 'waste' your time with school, with travel, with learning inane skills/trades, with romance, whatever. You should waste your youth as much as you can on doing the things that will be rewarding later on. I can sum up the reason you should go to college in one word: exposure. Nowhere in your life will you ever find a place where is it easier to be exposed to the variety of knowledge and culture and people than in college. Don't work. Do anything you can to avoid work. You'll be working for the rest of your life. -- Some more reflections: I have a couple of good friends, and some of them have many friends. I ask them, where did you make these friends? "In college, of course." I have friends who are married. Where did they meet their wife? "In college, of course." I have friends who play music, or used to be in bands. Where did they learn to play? [..] I know people who draw amazing portraits when they're bored. Where did they learn to draw? [..] I know people who have done every drug under the sun, and have a wider view of cognition, of reality, of authority. Where did they get the drugs, and who did they have fun doing them with? [..] Steve Jobs dropped out of college after six months, but kept auditing creative classes. At a commencement address he gave at Stanford, he said: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Your mother's blog post is mostly about salary, which seems to be beside the point. There's more to life than money. If your long-term goals include (or will ever include) "Start my own company," the odds are overwhelmingly not in your favor. First, when you're in university, you have a unique opportunity to become known as the smartest person in the class, and thus build a ridiculously valuable network. But you could do that at work too, right? Well, not really. There are legal issues at play: it's not so easy to just pack up with a coworker and start your own company. California makes this easier, but it's still hairy. Whereas you almost never have to worry about that as a student. Plus, your student network will be gigantic in comparison to a network you can build from work alone. Someday you'll be old, and without a degree you'll be doubly vulnerable to ageism. If you're not a manager by then, you may be out of a job. While it's nice to think you'd be retired by then, reality has a funny way of making that unlikely. In particular, if you meet someone and fall in love, your finances and other ambitions tend to become affected. You may be interested that I once interviewed at Justin TV, which eventually transformed into Twitch and was recently sold for a lot of money. Maybe I would've had an equity stake, maybe not. I didn't make the cut. Official reason for passing on me? Kan met with me and said that his investors recommended they not hire anyone without a degree when they were in such early stages. Now, that could have just been a convenient social excuse; at the time I remember not really demonstrating enough value during the interview stage, otherwise I'm sure that wouldn't have stopped them. On the other hand, if I was a borderline "hire" with a degree, then maybe that would have been enough to push me into the zone of "Let's try this person out and see how he does," which would have let me demonstrate my abilities directly, rather than by solving interview puzzles like "how would you implement a way to evaluate 2 + 3 = 5?" (At the time, being self-taught, I wasn't very versed in lexers, parsers, etc, so I had to flub my way through that particular question.) You can have a wonderful life without a degree, but the vast majority of startups are started by people who went through universities. You know how Sam Altman has given a series of wonderful lectures at Stanford? Pg has also written at length about universities and startups: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups+college+OR+university https://www.google.com/search?q=site:paulgraham.com+startups... I've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. If you set up those conditions within the US, startups will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece of metal. I've been operating under the assumption that you moved out to SF to go live the startup dream. The fact is, that dream is much less likely when you haven't attended university. It's unlikely in terms of raw statistics (I'm personally aware of only a few people who have made a successful startup without having been through university, tptacek being one of the notable counterexamples) and in terms of your network. As a student, you're a potential founder. As an employee, usually you're going to remain an employee. Isn't it interesting that Loopt was objectively not as big of a success as once was hoped, but Sam still succeeded brilliantly from it? I wonder if his network had anything to do with that, or the fact that he attended a top-tier university? By the way, if you don't really care about starting a startup, please just disregard everything I've said, since your current path may in fact be optimal, as your parents noted. But if you're going the startup route... Well, "the rest of your life" is a long, long time, yet you only have a very narrow timeframe to reconsider. I hope I'm wrong, though! One of the most important points that I don't think I stressed enough, which took me a long time to fully accept, is that university isn't really about learning. Not when it comes to software. Yes, your education will be well-rounded and you'll have a much deeper knowledge of architecture and theory and etc, but the primary value to you as a potential founder is the network and the social acceptance that comes from attending a top tier university. Prestige. It's lame to an extent, and maybe someday the world will be different, but that day likely won't be in the next decade, which is the timeframe you care about the most. Also, consider this: All of the opportunities before you now will still be there, enhanced, after university. Ever play poker? It's probably best to follow the path of highest EV. There's almost no way that university is anything but the highest EV in this situation. I wish you the best of luck. I apologize for coming across as negative.

milesokeefe 12y ago
You make good, valid points. My perspective is that as a student, I don't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc are not very exceptional. However, as a "rogue" (for lack of a better term) developer, I do stand out. I started making websites in 4th grade, I've worked professionally as a developer since a year after I was legally able to have a job at all, I have an entrepreneurial spirit, I have a history of shipping software, etc. Read that in the least egotistical tone you can (if at all possible) please; I'm walking imposter syndrome in reality. I'd really like to continue this conversation right now but I think it'll stretch out too long, can we pick back up at this point in person? I'll email you right after I post this. >I apologize for coming across as negative I also struggle with wording what I say to sound positive, but you have nothing to worry about, your tone has been very neutral. EDIT: I sent an email to the address in your profile, if that's not your current email, please tell me so I can send it to the right one.
- jbooth 12y ago
  If you're better as a rogue than as a student, that's like 10x the time to work on being a student. The real world? It sucks, and brilliant rogues are frequently punished shortly after saving the day. You've got 40-50 years after school to learn those lessons. Go to school for the experience while you're young enough to do it. Learn some philosophy, history, art or music while you're at it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eslaught 12y ago
  > My perspective is that as a student, I don't stand out. My grades/ECs/etc are not very exceptional. I was such a student in high school; ok grades, but nothing that would get me into Stanford (I applied; they rejected me). Then I went to college (at UCSD), and suddenly the entire world turned around. In high school, being good meant mostly skills that had nothing to do with subject matter. In college, being good meant being good at CS, which (hey!) I was actually good at. So almost overnight, I became one of the top students in my cohort, and one of the most well-known in my year in the department. I am now a Ph.D. student at Stanford (yes, the irony...). Admittedly, I never followed the path from high school straight to working, so I wouldn't know if something similar is possible there, and maybe it is. But I wouldn't underestimate the social network effects that others have talked about here. Standing out in your major has substantially more impact in college than it does in high school.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Not to be pedantic but this: > Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, > it just means I have to teach myself, which is what > I've always done and will continue to do. People may > judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at > peace with that. Like many people fresh out of high school you do not know what college is, or what it is for. The challenge though is that you have this blank spot in your understanding, there is ample evidence that you have this blank spot (lots of people go to college for some reason and the ones who are successful are vastly more likely to have a degree than not have a degree, etc etc.) and yet you choose you own reasoning over that of what you can observe to make your choice. This particular issue is rampant with really smart kids because of the misconception that college is about learning as opposed to being about thinking. Your learning skills can be quite strong and completely subverted by a lack of thinking skills. Anyway, it is not up to us to walk the path for you but you did post here so you get advice for free :-)

toolz 12y ago
I just want to know when college became some holy grail of uncovering your true potential. I've been to college. It absolutely and utterly pales in comparison to the knowledge base I'll never have time to consume for free on the internet. As for networking and thinking. I find an IRC channel and a few conferences in a single year introduced me to more like minded people than I met in the whole of my college experience. I'm sure we could all make the argument you get into college what you put into it. The same goes for my preference of meeting people and networking. The difference is I wouldn't be tens of thousands of dollars in the hole if I had known that earlier.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  For me, the most important thing about college was 1) setting aside such a massive block of time to learn, and 2) being in a place with a bunch of other people who were also there mostly to learn. That's not to say it's necessarily worth it for everyone, and depending what you're bringing to it it's certainly possible to fail to get much out of it. I think different groups of people over- and undervalue it, in weird ways.

genwin 12y ago

I think you'll find that your lack of degree is almost inconsequential. A few job doors will close and otherwise it'll likely be a non-issue.

midnightclubbed 12y ago
I have to disagree. At some point in your 30-40 year career you may well want to leave the start-up treadmill and join a big company. At that point you'll hit HR pay-grade limits based on your degree (or lack thereof). Big companies do sexy work too. You'll also be un-attractive to start-ups once you get over 40 because, well, you're old and they're not. Have a friend in his 40s having to plough through a degree (while holding down a full time job, and family duties) for just this reason.
- genwin 12y ago
  Once while applying for a major company I asked if my lack of degree was an issue, since it was supposedly a requirement. The interviewer said "Our CEO is a college drop-out. We don't care!" When the OP needs to work for Big Corp., he could apply to jobs that say "degree or equivalent experience". There are thousands of them. A degree is nice to have, but for the price plus opportunity cost (perhaps $200K for the OP) it may be a net negative. I too have a 40-something friend finishing his degree. He does feel it would have helped his career.

mtalantikite 12y ago

I'm sure you've heard it again and again, but university really isn't about learning topics or skills. Many classes are a waste of time, taught by TAs that might not even grasp the subject they're teaching all that well. I definitely skipped a whole lot of classes and instead spent the time in the library getting lost in the stacks finding random books to read on my own. Once you hit the upper levels and find a major or two with professors you love that changes of course, but it definitely happens more often than most admit. The main thing you can't replace is everything else, like meeting really smart people that are working on things that are totally foreign to your day to day studies. Maybe you walk into a room at 11pm on a Tuesday because you hear someone listening to music you've never heard before. Or someone brings you to a reading of an author and the discussion makes you reevaluate beliefs you didn't even know you had. Maybe you take a class for a gen-ed that you just know will be terrible but the professor ends up being amazing and becomes a mentor to you. Or maybe you stay up for 24 hours straight with classmates studying for a final and somehow you all ace it even though you really thought solving problem 3 was going to kill you. It seems like you know that network is important, otherwise you wouldn't be attempting this experiment, but there really is no replacement for spending four years forcing yourself to be exposed to tons of new ideas and people every day. There's no other time in life you're allowed to do whatever you want surrounded by so many people in the same situation as you. Money can wait.

genwin 12y ago
I must've gone to the wrong college. Mine was like high school except there was even more busy work to do, and it wasn't free. With most kids focused on their phones nowadays, could anywhere be like you say? I suspect those days are over.
- mtalantikite 12y ago
  There are certainly many institutions that aren't worth attending, especially if you tend to be a highly intelligent autodidact. But if you are that type of person, you'll probably be able to find a great university that will accept you and give you scholarships. I can't speak to kids being on their phones all day, we only had flip phones when I was in school, but you can make personal choices to avoid those things. I personally made a choice to not live anywhere with a TV, for instance, but there sure were a lot of kids in certain circles wasting away in front them.

marknadal 12y ago

Good for you, man. Don't let all these cynical Hacker News people get you down or discourage you. They are all whining and complaining about the mistakes they made. If you don't do what you feel convicted about, and just do what others "advise" you to do... you'll one day become the same cynical person they are. But you are choosing to do what you are passionate about. So keep fighting!

milesokeefe 12y ago
Thanks, I appreciate the support :)

borkt 12y ago

I had a terrible experience with college. I am a lifelong learner and extremely enthusastic, and my time spent in college were both my least productive and totally reduced my confidence in my abilities as I didn't conform with the "department way". I came out of it with a degree and debt free, but I know many people who had worse as well as better experiences. I am now learning civil engineering on the job (materials engineering was my major) and I have a passion for the practical applied sciences (my wife is an assistant winemaker and I took the entire courseload with her start to finish, just couldnt realistically afford to have two of us make a career in it). We aren't even big wine drinkers but it is really an extremely rewarding and suprisingly complex systems engineering challenge to make fine wine. If you are interested in anything I mentioned feel free to contact me

djyaz1200 12y ago

"but it's a mistake to drop out of one of the most effective social networks ever devised by humankind." Listen to this guy, he is giving you great advice!

Lambdanaut 12y ago

I'm in an extremely similar position to you Miles, and don't worry about college. I just turned 22 and all of my friends are graduating college while I'm making bank because I jumped into the industry early rather than throwing my money at school. The college route works for many, but I feel like I get along with people better that decide they're more fit to rough it and teach themselves. You know what's better at making you a social network of industry peers than college? The actual industry. Get an entry level position and work your way up, while spending your free time to develop your skills. I'm in WA right now but I'm taking a road trip while working remote this winter. I'll be in the Bay Area for a short period in January and will send you an email for the coffee request if you're not inundated with acquaintances by that time haha.

eropple 12y ago
> I'm in an extremely similar position to you Miles, and don't worry about college. I just turned 22 and all of my friends are graduating college while I'm making bank because I jumped into the industry early rather than throwing my money at school. The long-term impact of not having a degree, by and large, doesn't appear to really show up until your 30's or 40's. It makes continuing in a technical role progressively harder (because it's one area where you negatively stand out to the rest of the candidates passing by) and makes moving into management much harder because, like it or not, things like MBAs are still effective signaling tools for moving into management (and also teach you a lot, but on HN the idea of an MBA having useful lessons to teach is considered madness, so disregard that as you will). Getting there is much, much harder without a degree, and going back for that first degree is by all accounts really hard when you're already in the real world. > You know what's better at making you a social network of industry peers than college? The actual industry. The point isn't to have a social network of industry peers. It's to have a social network of people who are not industry peers. I like many people I know in the industry--but I don't go to them when I need to know about law or business or deep-magic political science (it has come up more than you think).

wodenokoto 12y ago

>>What does clicking "Let's meet" do? I clicked it to find out and it said "Message sent, thanks! I look forward to meeting you." > Sorry about that. It's hypocritical of me to implement a system like this instead of just showing my email address. I actually wrote a blog post about why you shouldn't do what I did with this website: >http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contac.. http://blog.milesokeefe.com/post/56981311556/dont-use-contac.... I disagree. On most computers that I have ever used, clicking an e-mail link will open a setup process for the default email client. Most users I have ever encountered do not know what to do with that prompt. There's a lot of talk about "fixing" email, but I've yet to see anyone tackling this problem in a serious fashion. Since websites can't expect mailto: links working for their visitors, they have to put up forms. But more to the point: I think it is quite obvious what is gonna happen when one submit the form on your website: The website owner gets informed about my email address and what time I'm interested in meeting. Whether this information is conveyed by SMS, Whatsapp, e-mail, some internal e-ticketing system is completely irrelevant to the user. PS: I don't know how miles.codes is supposed to look, but it looks horrible in Firefox on Ubuntu. Images are jiggling, text is unreadable, links are not clickable where you'd expect to be able to click.

austenallred 12y ago

I don't know why everyone is lecturing you about not going to college, especially not understanding your personal circumstances. If I were looking at your resume for my startup, the "Oh, he's a great programmer who has been building things since he was four" would outweighs the potential, "Oh, he has a CS degree from Stanford" so much the latter wouldn't even move the needle. I'm probably biased, being a college dropout myself, but the employers who weigh those credentials more highly than raw ability or skill set are probably not the ones you want to work for anyway. And let's be honest -- at least right now, it's a programmer's market. You could tie a sign around your neck that says, "I've been programming since I was four and am looking for a job," spend the day walking around San Francisco, and probably have a job offer by the end of the day. It's probably also valuable to hear about college from a dropout's experience. I went for three years, and I hated every minute of it. Every. Single. Minute. I went to a highly respected/ranked private University, admittedly not something Ivy League, and while I definitely learned a lot and met some cool people, I speculate I would have learned more and faster had I jumped headfirst into startups during those years. I wouldn't have taken a Shakespeare class, but that's just one of the many trade-offs you have to make. I was a couple semesters away from graduation, and was half pulled out by a startup taking off and half just couldn't handle it anymore. Half of college was excruciatingly slow and boring, and 1/4 was worthless. I don't say "worthless" in the, "When am I going to use this in my job/real life" sense, but in the "This is busywork and everyone in this room, including the Professor, knows it." The last 1/4 was solid. I won't pretend like college had nothing to offer - I just wonder how much I would have learned had I used 4/4 of my time effectively instead of 1/4. TL;DR - do whatever you want to, and don't let the hivemind of HN convince you otherwise. But I didn't have to tell you that. Now let's meet up and get coffee next time I'm in the Valley :)

peterwwillis 12y ago

> The bottom line is that I've made the decision to not go to university and I'm perfectly happy with that. Yes, you're happy with it, now. People are always happier and more apt to do something that has immediate gains than something that is far off in the future. > Not being in college doesn't mean I can't still learn, it just means I have to teach myself, You realize the purpose of teachers is to inform you of things so you don't have to figure them out yourself, right? It takes a lot longer to accumulate the knowledge by yourself. People have already figured complicated things out, and they can tell you in a minute, versus you spending hours/days/weeks trying to come to the same conclusion. > which is what I've always done and will continue to do. People may judge me based on my lack of college degree, I am at peace with that. Nobody will judge you on a lack of a college degree. If anything, people will think you are more amazing for never going to college, but that's beside the point. A degree has nothing to do with going to college. Forget the degree. Actually, go to college and then drop out. Yes, i'm actually telling you not to get a degree, but still to go to college. > Surprisingly, my father is a professor and my mother is a university director, and yet they both support me in what I'm doing. My mother wrote about her feelings on the matter here if you're curious: My parents also supported me, but probably because they thought they had no way to force me to go. Honestly, this was a big mistake on their part. -- I never went to college, and started working for myself about the same age as you. I've since hit a wall several times in terms of professional advancement because I never got a CS degree. But it's not the degree that held me back, it's the lack of academic knowledge about computer science, security/crypto and other topics. How was I supposed to know I needed to explain in a job interview the big-O notation advantages of one algorithm over another? How was I supposed to know I needed to know how to draw a flow chart of the architecture of a network application? Could I have been studying CS every week of my life throughout my career to eventually build up the knowledge equivalent of a degree? Sure. But who the fuck wants to study every week of their life? That's why college is only (about) four years: you burn up that studying time all at once so you don't have to stretch it out for the rest of your life. Then there's the personal/social aspect, where my personal growth was stunted for many years from not having a group of my peers to interact with on a daily basis. I also lacked perspective from not learning multiple subjects such as art, history, foreign language, economics, philosophy, psychology, etc. I've accumulated a lot of knowledge over the last 10 years, but still lack so much because I never went to college. What nobody told me when I was younger was that your youth is the best time for you to 'waste' your time with school, with travel, with learning inane skills/trades, with romance, whatever. You should waste your youth as much as you can on doing the things that will be rewarding later on. I can sum up the reason you should go to college in one word: exposure. Nowhere in your life will you ever find a place where is it easier to be exposed to the variety of knowledge and culture and people than in college. Don't work. Do anything you can to avoid work. You'll be working for the rest of your life. -- Some more reflections: I have a couple of good friends, and some of them have many friends. I ask them, where did you make these friends? "In college, of course." I have friends who are married. Where did they meet their wife? "In college, of course." I have friends who play music, or used to be in bands. Where did they learn to play? [..] I know people who draw amazing portraits when they're bored. Where did they learn to draw? [..] I know people who have done every drug under the sun, and have a wider view of cognition, of reality, of authority. Where did they get the drugs, and who did they have fun doing them with? [..] Steve Jobs dropped out of college after six months, but kept auditing creative classes. At a commencement address he gave at Stanford, he said: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."