I'm exactly the person this article is talking about. Dropped out after a year, helped build a startup for two years afterwards (the dropout was unrelated to th

I'm exactly the person this article is talking about. Dropped out after a year, helped build a startup for two years afterwards (the dropout was unrelated to the startup). You're right, I'm completely unqualified to help make a space shuttle, but because of the on-the-job experience I got writing code for the startup (plus the architectural decisions I had to plan, implement, and handle fallout from), I'm more employable than a lot of my college graduate friends. And the ones who are more employable are so generally because of extracurricular experiences, not coursework. They have more experience with lots of deeper CS topics, but I have yet to work with/for a real company where that's the limiting factor. I'd also say that the dropout method is much less viable for professions other than programming, but that's because there are relatively few hardware startups looking for cheap high-skill workers and because other fields have had vastly longer time to formalize a body of knowledge. We've been building airplanes for 100 years, bridges for thousands, but single page applications are MAYBE double digit years old. College doesn't help if there's nobody with experience.