12 ms·

College Dropouts Thrive in Tech

95 points by porter 11y ago

vonklaus 11y ago
paywalled.
- j1e 11y ago
  FYI: If you Google the article title the search result will bypass the paywall.
kdamken 11y ago
Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.
- kisna72 11y ago
  same here.
- wololongong 11y ago
  Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.
  - southphillyman 11y ago
    Are there any similar tricks for getting around the Economist paywall?
    - new1234567 11y ago
      The Economist is great. I highly recommend a subscription.
    - ch4s3 11y ago
      Incognito mode, but if you read it a lot consider a subscription.
  - _superposition_ 11y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Dropouts+Thrive+in+Tech https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Dropouts+Thrive+in+T...
    - _lce0 11y ago
      with this search it worked, but not with yours .. not sure why https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Dropouts%20Thrive%20in%20Tech https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Drop...
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the full text. The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission: http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-1433323802 http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-... [EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]
    - jacalata 11y ago
      Its supposed to show the full article if the referrer URL is google. Try limiting the search domain to WSJ? I'm not sure why that wodnt be showing up for you in the normal results.
    - squeaky-clean 11y ago
      The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- scrabble 11y ago
  If you use DDG, use !gn which is the Google News bang before searching for it. No paywall through Google News.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  The WSJ lost their ability to influence me, and any value they had to me, when they prevented me from reading their articles. Paywalls are damage. If it's an important enough event or public opinion, I'll hear about it from some other medium - another news company, another HN article, Imgur, Facebook, Twitter, coworkers, etc. It's the Redundant Array of Independent Information Sources.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
nish1500 11y ago
Either the proportion of people with a WSJ subscription, or who up vote the title, is unusually high here.
- blueblob 11y ago
  The trick is to paste the url into google and then click a link to it. Note to other duckduckgo users, it has to be google.com, not encrypted.google.com.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Three spring to mind: Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates
- dylanjermiah 11y ago
  There success is more related with their superior IQ than their college attendance.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    They're probably not all that smart. They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking. But I've seen Bill Gate's code, and its bad. Typically its B students that run the world.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      You know that GWbasic was developed without the hardware on a PDP and cross complied.
    - dylanjermiah 11y ago
      >"They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking" And intelligent. Those qualities are not independent of intelligence. Gates = 1590 SAT (out of than 1600), Zuckerberg = 1590 SAT, Drew Houston = 1600 SAT, Travis Kalanick = 1580 SAT, Chris Sacca = Doing college grade math in 6th grade. Look into Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Roelof Botha, and many more I am definitely forgetting of the top of my head. >"Typically its B students that run the world." I disagree. Any examples?
      - Bostonian 11y ago
        George W. Bush was president for 8 years.
  - rquantz 11y ago
    You forgot to add their extreme luck. Also, don't forget Gates was born a millionaire. That makes it a lot easier to drop out of college.
dopamean 11y ago
The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses. That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an entrepreneurial spirit. A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn (Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to give programming a go as a career. My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them). With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters. I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.
- Nicholas_C 11y ago
  >My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these freelance opportunities?
  - dopamean 11y ago
    I was pretty lucky. By time I was ready to try out coding for a living everyone I knew in college had graduated and was working on the street. I leveraged my connections there and it worked out pretty well. It happened mostly accidentally really. I had contracts with several banks and hedge funds and it call came through word of mouth.
jasode 11y ago
Some observations... I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.) Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity. If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years. It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one? [1]http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393247686 http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakar...
- convexfunction 11y ago
  College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence. Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...
wesleyy 11y ago
Has there ever been a college dropout article in the past 3 years that didn't involve Dave Fontenot?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lordnacho 11y ago
If you're able to write code, that's relatively easily provable. You'll be found out quite fast by other coders if you can't do it, maybe a few weeks if you can pretend onboarding is going badly. So at a time when there's loads of demand for techies, there will always be some people who are happy to give you a go. Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap, how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor thought enough of him to not send him down.
- rjsw 11y ago
  Political parties do hire people who just talk a good game [1] so that isn't a great example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps
  - walshemj 11y ago
    Party Chairman are different they are meant to be backroom establishment fixers with tons of contact's who will pony up 100k -1 million. Grant wasn't that at all. At one industry conference in Brighton the other year when his name got mentioned 1500 people collectively groaned.
imgabe 11y ago
I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them. It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.
- brighton36 11y ago
  There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.
  - sz4kerto 11y ago
    Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg, Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k followers on GH.
  - lambdaelite 11y ago
    Respectfully, that doesn't apply to regulated industries.
  - rpcope1 11y ago
    I feel like this is sort of absurdly wrong. I don't think it's really possible to convey a lot of EE knowledge like accelerators, magnetics, and RF on Github (not easily anyways), but that's just as much if not more of a "tech qualification" than any software ability is. There's also a lot of software I've worked on that you can't open source, but is rather technical. Really Github might be able to tell me if you can roll webapps, but for more sophisticated things, when I have been doing hiring in the past, it's really not been a great indicator. Some of the better developers I've met don't spend every waking hour programming (and don't want to), and don't contribute on the regular to Github projects.
JackFr 11y ago
It's become like the NBA draft -- if you've spent four years in college, how good can you really be?
- bgribble 11y ago
  Oh, please. Spending 4 years in college just means you are slightly less of an infant when you enter the workforce. Recent college graduates and recent college dropouts are alike in a few things: they are still getting pimples, and they have tunnel vision because they're barely off training wheels and are on their very first trip around the block. They can be tremendously smart, talented, and energetic, but at 21/22, whether they went to college or not, they are not very experienced in either adult life or professional life, and that lack of experience is a real handicap.
humbleMouse 11y ago
I dropped out of college at age 19 and I now do consulting pulling in over 5k/month, and work a 9-5 as a java developer (100k+). I knew college was a waste of time when my information technologies class professor assigned us as homework to look at the best buy ads every sunday morning to keep up to date with technology prices.... I am 22 years old now...
- riveter 11y ago
  How did you start out without having a background from school? I've always been really curious how people were able to gain a reputation in consulting or gain expertise starting off
ChuckMcM 11y ago
During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically, those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a bachelors degree were having a hard time. I know of at least two people who went back to school to finish their degrees (one essentially having redo their entire bachelor's program because their previous credits would not transfer). My takeaway from that experience was that during boom times it doesn't matter, but during lean times it does.
- solve 11y ago
  It's always good to have, no matter what, and it would be extremely easy to just say you don't have it if it was a negative or worthless. The problem is - opportunity cost.
  - lsc 11y ago
    >The problem is - opportunity cost. Yeah. It was the late 90s before I got anything but a desktop support job. If I had gone to college rather than getting a real job in '97-98? I would have been looking for my first real job in 2001-2002. I would have been so screwed. As it was, I had a few years to prove my competence, and with some help from some contacts (okay, okay, my dad's contacts) I stayed fairly well-employed through the bust. Part of me kind of wishes that I took some time out later, after I had established myself, to go back to college. Mostly for social and "personal enrichment" reasons. but I totally don't regret getting a job right out of high school. I think that made the difference between me and my brothers.
- mullethunter 11y ago
  This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees. Four years ago it happened again, and I had enough. I went back to school (working full time with side projects, as well as 2 year old and newborn in my life), losing two years of credits to study business. I graduated last month with over $40k in student loans at 37 years old just so the next time I don't get the brush off for having completed 3.5 years of university. The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.
dataker 11y ago
As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my only fear is on what's next(on my career). b Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that. Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.
- a1k0n 11y ago
  I never finished my bachelor's and Google hired me for a senior position. There were several intervening years of experience though. And while I don't regret leaving the college program I was in, do regret not completing a decent advanced CS degree.
nmyk 11y ago
"If money is all that you love, then that's what you'll receive." - Leia
anuraj 11y ago
It is just confirmation bias.
rconti 11y ago
“It’s almost a bigger risk to stay in school and let people like me drop out and start things before you have a chance,” he says. That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset. College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. But it's a great experience for most people, and education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits. I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Either path is fine. I'm glad I went to college, even though it didn't directly prepare me for my career.
- Zelphyr 11y ago
  education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits I completely agree (despite being a college dropout) and it speaks to my thought that we've been selling secondary education the wrong way. "Go to college and get a good job!" seems to be progressively becoming "Go to college and have a lot of debt!" Perhaps we should be selling it as "Go to college and get a great education that will benefit you in countless ways no matter what vocation you find yourself in."
  - geoelectric 11y ago
    The debt is my major issue with portraying college as something everyone should (or worse, needs to) do, no matter how you want to sell the benefit. It's not just the number itself, it's about training young people that being tens of thousands of dollars in undischargable debt without capital collateral to back it up is a normal thing.
    - Zelphyr 11y ago
      Its my understanding (someone feel free to correct me) that the cost of a local community college is still perfectly reasonable and you're still getting a decent education. I don't know what the difference is between those and Stanford from a quality of education standpoint but, anecdotally, one of the most brilliant programmers I've ever met went to the local community college.
theVirginian 11y ago
One of the worst antipatterns in web design is a website that asks you "sign in or subscribe" to read this article. Well. I signed in, and it directed me back to the home page, tried searching for the article, now it wants me to sign in again, which I do, then it directs me back to the home page. Now I guess they have one more account but I don't have access to the article. Thanks WSJ Can we get a mirror up?
oscargrouch 11y ago
“I thought he would miss out on the social aspects of college,” says Judy Weinstein. “It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional time.” Bright Mom. College is a important rite of passage.. maybe thats why im kind of a grown up child
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional time. I wish parents would start transitioning their children sooner. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make some big mistakes in high school with respect to driving, money, relationships, and responsibility in general. It's a lot cheaper to make a mistake when your parents are around to help you learn and recover. ...in other words, all of childhood is a built in transition time. The teenage years are supposed to be the runway for takeoff into adulthood. Delaying that process into adulthood is much riskier, IMO. This is part of the reason I'm concerned about teenage employment rates being so low these days.
thoward 11y ago
Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer. Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned over six figures. I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women. I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry. To what extent are these trends linked?
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  In college, in STEM, it seemed like all of the smartest women ran straight to academia and married a rich tech dude. The incentives are aligned nicely there. The smartest guys on the whole seemed to go into industry or start their own companies. I unfortunately was not smart enough for academia, and as a man have not found a rich woman willing to subsidize my lifestyle.
justinpaulson 11y ago
If you want to do real engineering and solve hard problems, stay in school. If you want to build a flashy media app or a social network, drop out. There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good setting for that learning process.
- conradev 11y ago
  I agree with the last sentence, but not the first and second. The first implies that the only way to learn computer science is in school, and the second attempts to stereotype products built by those who drop out of college. I understand the sentiment, but I think it's possible to both create real value and not go to school. That's one of the points that this article is trying to make. I also think that framing all hard problems as engineering problems is an engineering-centric view. Depending on the product, sometimes designing the user experience to be seamless is just as hard as building the technical foundation.
Futurebot 11y ago
I'm very glad to see that many of the more prestigious companies have loosened their restrictions and are willing to consider skill and experience, rather than formal credentials. Early in my career, this was definitely not the case. Heartening. There are still some less-than-ideal things people who don't go / drop out should be aware of, though. I wrote about some of them here: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1 https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should... Still, this is a heartening development.
bcheung 11y ago
Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.
- stuharvey 11y ago
  There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google the article title and click the top result for wsj.com. Or you could automate that as described [1] here: [1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj-paywall/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...
  - bcheung 11y ago
    Thanks. Good to know.
bcheung 11y ago
My first job straight out of high school at age 18 was working on the development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was self-taught and already knew C and Assembly. There was some serious doubt from some of them about hiring me but I was able to pass every technical test they threw my way so they eventually hired me. I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't have any mention of it on my resume. I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to drop out. I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I did take were so easy they were a waste of time. I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way better experience I'm sure I would have had in college. With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.
cafebeen 11y ago
It doesn't seem surprising these kids are doing well--they're already top students, money's no worry, and they're hooked into the a successful social network. However, these ~100 examples don't characterize college dropouts. There are roughly 30 million total dropouts, and most of them are unemployed and poor: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth-of-the-successful-college-dropout-why-it-could-make-millions-of-young-americans-poorer/273628/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth...
PennyWhistle 11y ago
Every time this debate comes up (online or offline) it really troubles me because I can not help but wonder how can so many smart people be so blissfully ignorant of how the world actually works. I guess this is the engineers "entrepreneur-tunnel-vision-syndrome". Few notes about Gates and Zuck: I don't know why people (media in particular) made such a big deal out of dropping out or rather taking a leave of absence/gap year). They could've always go back if things didn't work out. Dropping out of college is not akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It is just NOT Also: The both came from money. It is easy to say I want to whatever-I-wanna-do when you have a trust fund ready for you. Having very successful parents/families -just in case you were wondering helps... Jobs is a more peculiar case because he didn't have anything. But he got lucky and came upon the other Steve who was/is a genius-mastermind. Third: why the measure of success in tech so extreme? Why do you have to make billions of dollars to be considered successful? In the world today, if you have just a couple thousand dollars in the bank you are living the dream of some six billion other people. I personally would consider anyone who has made more than 1mil out of a business (in profit) to be successful. The rest of it is just the lust for having more for sake of having more. Last: College is supposed to get people ready for life. its not supposed to be a vocational school or diploma mill. It is sad that colleges today have became both. Denying the personal gain that university provides for pupils and the spirit of college amd liberal arts education itself is no worse than denying global warming or evolution. You can become a programmer and make a buck without going to college but chances are you will not be an enlightened individual without attending a decent higher-ed institution. (and of course we have people like Ted Cruz to the contrary but I'm speaking for the majority of population)

95 points by porter 11y ago

vonklaus 11y ago

paywalled.

j1e 11y ago
FYI: If you Google the article title the search result will bypass the paywall.

kdamken 11y ago

Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.

kisna72 11y ago
same here.
wololongong 11y ago
Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.
- southphillyman 11y ago
  Are there any similar tricks for getting around the Economist paywall?
  - new1234567 11y ago
    The Economist is great. I highly recommend a subscription.
  - ch4s3 11y ago
    Incognito mode, but if you read it a lot consider a subscription.
- _superposition_ 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Dropouts+Thrive+in+Tech https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Dropouts+Thrive+in+T...
  - _lce0 11y ago
    with this search it worked, but not with yours .. not sure why https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Dropouts%20Thrive%20in%20Tech https://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=College%20Drop...
- kazinator 11y ago
  Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the full text. The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission: http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-1433323802 http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-... [EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using https://www.google.com/ncr https://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]
  - jacalata 11y ago
    Its supposed to show the full article if the referrer URL is google. Try limiting the search domain to WSJ? I'm not sure why that wodnt be showing up for you in the normal results.
  - squeaky-clean 11y ago
    The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
scrabble 11y ago
If you use DDG, use !gn which is the Google News bang before searching for it. No paywall through Google News.
stephengillie 11y ago
The WSJ lost their ability to influence me, and any value they had to me, when they prevented me from reading their articles. Paywalls are damage. If it's an important enough event or public opinion, I'll hear about it from some other medium - another news company, another HN article, Imgur, Facebook, Twitter, coworkers, etc. It's the Redundant Array of Independent Information Sources.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

nish1500 11y ago

Either the proportion of people with a WSJ subscription, or who up vote the title, is unusually high here.

blueblob 11y ago
The trick is to paste the url into google and then click a link to it. Note to other duckduckgo users, it has to be google.com, not encrypted.google.com.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Three spring to mind: Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates

dylanjermiah 11y ago
There success is more related with their superior IQ than their college attendance.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  They're probably not all that smart. They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking. But I've seen Bill Gate's code, and its bad. Typically its B students that run the world.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    You know that GWbasic was developed without the hardware on a PDP and cross complied.
  - dylanjermiah 11y ago
    >"They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking" And intelligent. Those qualities are not independent of intelligence. Gates = 1590 SAT (out of than 1600), Zuckerberg = 1590 SAT, Drew Houston = 1600 SAT, Travis Kalanick = 1580 SAT, Chris Sacca = Doing college grade math in 6th grade. Look into Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Roelof Botha, and many more I am definitely forgetting of the top of my head. >"Typically its B students that run the world." I disagree. Any examples?
    - Bostonian 11y ago
      George W. Bush was president for 8 years.
- rquantz 11y ago
  You forgot to add their extreme luck. Also, don't forget Gates was born a millionaire. That makes it a lot easier to drop out of college.

dopamean 11y ago

The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses. That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an entrepreneurial spirit. A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn (Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to give programming a go as a career. My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them). With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters. I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.

Nicholas_C 11y ago
>My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these freelance opportunities?
- dopamean 11y ago
  I was pretty lucky. By time I was ready to try out coding for a living everyone I knew in college had graduated and was working on the street. I leveraged my connections there and it worked out pretty well. It happened mostly accidentally really. I had contracts with several banks and hedge funds and it call came through word of mouth.

jasode 11y ago

Some observations... I just finished Fareed Zakaria's "In Defense of a Liberal Education"[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts education was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.) Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity. If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years. It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you must finish those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you must finish medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else. So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one? [1]http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393247686 http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakar...

convexfunction 11y ago
College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence. Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalist...

wesleyy 11y ago

Has there ever been a college dropout article in the past 3 years that didn't involve Dave Fontenot?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lordnacho 11y ago

If you're able to write code, that's relatively easily provable. You'll be found out quite fast by other coders if you can't do it, maybe a few weeks if you can pretend onboarding is going badly. So at a time when there's loads of demand for techies, there will always be some people who are happy to give you a go. Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap, how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor thought enough of him to not send him down.

rjsw 11y ago
Political parties do hire people who just talk a good game [1] so that isn't a great example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps
- walshemj 11y ago
  Party Chairman are different they are meant to be backroom establishment fixers with tons of contact's who will pony up 100k -1 million. Grant wasn't that at all. At one industry conference in Brighton the other year when his name got mentioned 1500 people collectively groaned.

imgabe 11y ago

I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them. It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.

brighton36 11y ago
There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.
- sz4kerto 11y ago
  Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg, Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k followers on GH.
- lambdaelite 11y ago
  Respectfully, that doesn't apply to regulated industries.
- rpcope1 11y ago
  I feel like this is sort of absurdly wrong. I don't think it's really possible to convey a lot of EE knowledge like accelerators, magnetics, and RF on Github (not easily anyways), but that's just as much if not more of a "tech qualification" than any software ability is. There's also a lot of software I've worked on that you can't open source, but is rather technical. Really Github might be able to tell me if you can roll webapps, but for more sophisticated things, when I have been doing hiring in the past, it's really not been a great indicator. Some of the better developers I've met don't spend every waking hour programming (and don't want to), and don't contribute on the regular to Github projects.

JackFr 11y ago

It's become like the NBA draft -- if you've spent four years in college, how good can you really be?

bgribble 11y ago
Oh, please. Spending 4 years in college just means you are slightly less of an infant when you enter the workforce. Recent college graduates and recent college dropouts are alike in a few things: they are still getting pimples, and they have tunnel vision because they're barely off training wheels and are on their very first trip around the block. They can be tremendously smart, talented, and energetic, but at 21/22, whether they went to college or not, they are not very experienced in either adult life or professional life, and that lack of experience is a real handicap.

humbleMouse 11y ago

I dropped out of college at age 19 and I now do consulting pulling in over 5k/month, and work a 9-5 as a java developer (100k+). I knew college was a waste of time when my information technologies class professor assigned us as homework to look at the best buy ads every sunday morning to keep up to date with technology prices.... I am 22 years old now...

riveter 11y ago
How did you start out without having a background from school? I've always been really curious how people were able to gain a reputation in consulting or gain expertise starting off

ChuckMcM 11y ago

During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically, those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a bachelors degree were having a hard time. I know of at least two people who went back to school to finish their degrees (one essentially having redo their entire bachelor's program because their previous credits would not transfer). My takeaway from that experience was that during boom times it doesn't matter, but during lean times it does.

solve 11y ago
It's always good to have, no matter what, and it would be extremely easy to just say you don't have it if it was a negative or worthless. The problem is - opportunity cost.
- lsc 11y ago
  >The problem is - opportunity cost. Yeah. It was the late 90s before I got anything but a desktop support job. If I had gone to college rather than getting a real job in '97-98? I would have been looking for my first real job in 2001-2002. I would have been so screwed. As it was, I had a few years to prove my competence, and with some help from some contacts (okay, okay, my dad's contacts) I stayed fairly well-employed through the bust. Part of me kind of wishes that I took some time out later, after I had established myself, to go back to college. Mostly for social and "personal enrichment" reasons. but I totally don't regret getting a job right out of high school. I think that made the difference between me and my brothers.
mullethunter 11y ago
This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees. Four years ago it happened again, and I had enough. I went back to school (working full time with side projects, as well as 2 year old and newborn in my life), losing two years of credits to study business. I graduated last month with over $40k in student loans at 37 years old just so the next time I don't get the brush off for having completed 3.5 years of university. The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.

dataker 11y ago

As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my only fear is on what's next(on my career). b Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that. Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.

a1k0n 11y ago
I never finished my bachelor's and Google hired me for a senior position. There were several intervening years of experience though. And while I don't regret leaving the college program I was in, do regret not completing a decent advanced CS degree.

nmyk 11y ago

"If money is all that you love, then that's what you'll receive." - Leia

anuraj 11y ago

It is just confirmation bias.

rconti 11y ago

“It’s almost a bigger risk to stay in school and let people like me drop out and start things before you have a chance,” he says. That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset. College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. But it's a great experience for most people, and education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits. I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Either path is fine. I'm glad I went to college, even though it didn't directly prepare me for my career.

Zelphyr 11y ago
education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits I completely agree (despite being a college dropout) and it speaks to my thought that we've been selling secondary education the wrong way. "Go to college and get a good job!" seems to be progressively becoming "Go to college and have a lot of debt!" Perhaps we should be selling it as "Go to college and get a great education that will benefit you in countless ways no matter what vocation you find yourself in."
- geoelectric 11y ago
  The debt is my major issue with portraying college as something everyone should (or worse, needs to) do, no matter how you want to sell the benefit. It's not just the number itself, it's about training young people that being tens of thousands of dollars in undischargable debt without capital collateral to back it up is a normal thing.
  - Zelphyr 11y ago
    Its my understanding (someone feel free to correct me) that the cost of a local community college is still perfectly reasonable and you're still getting a decent education. I don't know what the difference is between those and Stanford from a quality of education standpoint but, anecdotally, one of the most brilliant programmers I've ever met went to the local community college.

theVirginian 11y ago

One of the worst antipatterns in web design is a website that asks you "sign in or subscribe" to read this article. Well. I signed in, and it directed me back to the home page, tried searching for the article, now it wants me to sign in again, which I do, then it directs me back to the home page. Now I guess they have one more account but I don't have access to the article. Thanks WSJ Can we get a mirror up?

oscargrouch 11y ago

“I thought he would miss out on the social aspects of college,” says Judy Weinstein. “It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional time.” Bright Mom. College is a important rite of passage.. maybe thats why im kind of a grown up child

humanrebar 11y ago
> It’s the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional time. I wish parents would start transitioning their children sooner. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make some big mistakes in high school with respect to driving, money, relationships, and responsibility in general. It's a lot cheaper to make a mistake when your parents are around to help you learn and recover. ...in other words, all of childhood is a built in transition time. The teenage years are supposed to be the runway for takeoff into adulthood. Delaying that process into adulthood is much riskier, IMO. This is part of the reason I'm concerned about teenage employment rates being so low these days.

thoward 11y ago

Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer. Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned over six figures. I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women. I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry. To what extent are these trends linked?

meatysnapper 11y ago
In college, in STEM, it seemed like all of the smartest women ran straight to academia and married a rich tech dude. The incentives are aligned nicely there. The smartest guys on the whole seemed to go into industry or start their own companies. I unfortunately was not smart enough for academia, and as a man have not found a rich woman willing to subsidize my lifestyle.

justinpaulson 11y ago

If you want to do real engineering and solve hard problems, stay in school. If you want to build a flashy media app or a social network, drop out. There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good setting for that learning process.

conradev 11y ago
I agree with the last sentence, but not the first and second. The first implies that the only way to learn computer science is in school, and the second attempts to stereotype products built by those who drop out of college. I understand the sentiment, but I think it's possible to both create real value and not go to school. That's one of the points that this article is trying to make. I also think that framing all hard problems as engineering problems is an engineering-centric view. Depending on the product, sometimes designing the user experience to be seamless is just as hard as building the technical foundation.

Futurebot 11y ago

I'm very glad to see that many of the more prestigious companies have loosened their restrictions and are willing to consider skill and experience, rather than formal credentials. Early in my career, this was definitely not the case. Heartening. There are still some less-than-ideal things people who don't go / drop out should be aware of, though. I wrote about some of them here: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1 https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should... Still, this is a heartening development.

bcheung 11y ago

Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.

stuharvey 11y ago
There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google the article title and click the top result for wsj.com. Or you could automate that as described [1] here: [1] http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj-paywall/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th...
- bcheung 11y ago
  Thanks. Good to know.

bcheung 11y ago

My first job straight out of high school at age 18 was working on the development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was self-taught and already knew C and Assembly. There was some serious doubt from some of them about hiring me but I was able to pass every technical test they threw my way so they eventually hired me. I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't have any mention of it on my resume. I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to drop out. I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I did take were so easy they were a waste of time. I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way better experience I'm sure I would have had in college. With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.

cafebeen 11y ago

It doesn't seem surprising these kids are doing well--they're already top students, money's no worry, and they're hooked into the a successful social network. However, these ~100 examples don't characterize college dropouts. There are roughly 30 million total dropouts, and most of them are unemployed and poor: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth-of-the-successful-college-dropout-why-it-could-make-millions-of-young-americans-poorer/273628/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth...

PennyWhistle 11y ago

Every time this debate comes up (online or offline) it really troubles me because I can not help but wonder how can so many smart people be so blissfully ignorant of how the world actually works. I guess this is the engineers "entrepreneur-tunnel-vision-syndrome". Few notes about Gates and Zuck: I don't know why people (media in particular) made such a big deal out of dropping out or rather taking a leave of absence/gap year). They could've always go back if things didn't work out. Dropping out of college is not akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It is just NOT Also: The both came from money. It is easy to say I want to whatever-I-wanna-do when you have a trust fund ready for you. Having very successful parents/families -just in case you were wondering helps... Jobs is a more peculiar case because he didn't have anything. But he got lucky and came upon the other Steve who was/is a genius-mastermind. Third: why the measure of success in tech so extreme? Why do you have to make billions of dollars to be considered successful? In the world today, if you have just a couple thousand dollars in the bank you are living the dream of some six billion other people. I personally would consider anyone who has made more than 1mil out of a business (in profit) to be successful. The rest of it is just the lust for having more for sake of having more. Last: College is supposed to get people ready for life. its not supposed to be a vocational school or diploma mill. It is sad that colleges today have became both. Denying the personal gain that university provides for pupils and the spirit of college amd liberal arts education itself is no worse than denying global warming or evolution. You can become a programmer and make a buck without going to college but chances are you will not be an enlightened individual without attending a decent higher-ed institution. (and of course we have people like Ted Cruz to the contrary but I'm speaking for the majority of population)