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If you're a programmer, and it sounds like you are, then degrees DO NOT MATTER for you career wise. Your coding ability matters most and after that your actual

If you're a programmer, and it sounds like you are, then degrees DO NOT MATTER for you career wise. Your coding ability matters most and after that your actual experience in real business. If your startup does not work out and you end up looking for a job somewhere else, the startup founder experience on your resume will help more than any degree. Any of employers that you would really want to work for, like one of the million funded startups out there, will look upon you pursuing a startup fulltime as a founder, win or lose, as a million times more favorable than sticking with some lame Bachelor's degree like the other thousand applicants. You aren't leaving your education, you are leaving the chains of your institution to get a real education in a real business. Universities will always be there teaching the same old curriculum forever, finish your Bachelor's in a decade if you really think it matters at that point, you won't because it doesn't matter, but you could if you wanted and that's nice to know.

greenyoda 11y ago
"If you're a programmer..." There are many different kinds of programmers. If you want to hack web or phone apps for a startup, a degree may not be necessary. But if you want to work on software that requires significant algorithmic or math knowledge (e.g., building something like Photoshop or Google search), the formal knowledge that you'd get from completing a CS degree would probably be helpful. (Remember that the guys who founded Google weren't college dropouts - they were PhD students at Stanford.) The original poster may decide after a few years that they're tired of working for startups (or startup funding may dry up), and having a CS degree would give them many more options on what kind of jobs they could get. Big companies like Google or Facebook have a tendency to hire people with degrees. A degree from a well-known university serves as a signal (whether justified or not) for quickly sorting through the huge stacks of resumes that these companies receive. So I'd agree with the advice that others have already offered: finish the degree to keep your options open; there will be other (perhaps better) startup opportunities in a couple of years.
- honest_joe 11y ago
  The formal knowledge can be obtained elsewhere anyway. A degree from a well-known university is cool but most of us are not 1% and even if you get there it does not mean you can survive. Some people really hate academic soil.

greenyoda 11y ago

"If you're a programmer..." There are many different kinds of programmers. If you want to hack web or phone apps for a startup, a degree may not be necessary. But if you want to work on software that requires significant algorithmic or math knowledge (e.g., building something like Photoshop or Google search), the formal knowledge that you'd get from completing a CS degree would probably be helpful. (Remember that the guys who founded Google weren't college dropouts - they were PhD students at Stanford.) The original poster may decide after a few years that they're tired of working for startups (or startup funding may dry up), and having a CS degree would give them many more options on what kind of jobs they could get. Big companies like Google or Facebook have a tendency to hire people with degrees. A degree from a well-known university serves as a signal (whether justified or not) for quickly sorting through the huge stacks of resumes that these companies receive. So I'd agree with the advice that others have already offered: finish the degree to keep your options open; there will be other (perhaps better) startup opportunities in a couple of years.

honest_joe 11y ago
The formal knowledge can be obtained elsewhere anyway. A degree from a well-known university is cool but most of us are not 1% and even if you get there it does not mean you can survive. Some people really hate academic soil.