He did graduate, though. That little sheepskin may seem only like a small thing, but the difference between having it and not having it should not be underestimated. He also had parental support, which, until you live without it - in the US, it's many people's "safety net of first resort" - you just cannot imagine the benefits it gives you. You can fail in all sorts of ways and still come back - you have a place to lay your head when it comes down to it, and that counts for a lot. The difference between that and thinking "hm, homelessness actually possible!" is so stark it's hard to overstate. The poster "floated by" and is doing great; I can share some experiences on what it's like on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I didn't go to college because I had to leave home early (was told I had to be out at 16, was out by 17) to support myself, and received no parental support when I left. I did, however, manage to work myself from a tech support hamster at 17 to sysadmin, then junior developer, then finally senior developer. I never lacked for work, and have made OK, but not amazing money. That all sounds great, but it comes with serious costs, especially if you're just "decent" or "pretty good." Here are my experiences:
- You're probably going to have to work 2-3x as hard as an equivalently skilled person to prove that you deserve to be there.
- You may have to deal with much lower raises, or deal with simply being passed up for them altogether. This one can be more subtle, so can be hard to prove. So, you may be picked for the challenging work, asked to lead teams, told you're the best on the team by the boss(es), and receive the company awards, but when it comes to raise time, you wonder why you just went from 80 to 85k, and the people below you in rank went from 80 to 110 (and aren't happy with that and leave anyway. Heh.) This one sucks the most, because it's the one you have the least control over, and will ultimately impact the number of choices available to you later on.
- You may experience another subtle thing. This: "we know you're good, but you don't have a degree, so we believe you're less likely to leave because the hoops for you to change jobs is higher, so we can ask you for more than your degreed peers - and we're probably right about it." You will be the person on-call more often (if that applies to you - sysadmin/devops), you will be "expected" to stay later, and just generally push harder to prove yourself.
- You're going to spend a LOT of your free time teaching yourself knew things, honing your skills, and brushing up on the theory you never learned in a setting that allowed you to immerse. Now, maybe you have superior learning capabilities and can just sponge this stuff up in just a couple of your after-work learning sessions, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that for those of us who aren't, we spend a lot of time making them stick over the years. Now, we know that everyone needs to do this stuff these days, and that it's becoming more necessary every day. No question about it. However, you will have to do it even more to make sure you're at the top of your game. You may have annoying gaps in your knowledge, and will have to go back (in some cases, WAY back) to fill that stuff in. (Now that there's Khan/Udacity/MIT OCW/others, this is actually a LOT easier to do.) If you're only decent/pretty good, you're going to have run significantly faster to stay in place. Forget most of your social life. Again, this does not apply to you if you happen to just be an superhumanly fast learner, but for the decent/pretty good, it probably does.
- Culturally, your degreed peers may have some trouble adjusting to you. Of course this happens at every level (people who went to state school treated differently than those who went to a top university, for example), but you'll be the strangest of the bunch. People may wonder if you know anything at all(!), not just about your field (which is easy enough to prove), but about the world around you: politics, economics, sociology, literature, the lot of it. Sometimes you may be looked at as a strange feral orphan child. They just may not even have a baseline for what to expect from you. The software world(s) may be more meritocratic and/or egalitarian, but it's not utopia. Now, this sounds /all/ bad, but I actually have always liked this one; if you are a dedicated self-learner, you can blow people away pretty easily. They expect you to not be able to tie your shoes, but then you rattle off your knowledge X, Y, and Z and show them your elegant, well-structured code and they are agape. This one is fun!
- Remember that the degree acts as a proxy. It's a way for organizations to outsource not only judgment about your knowledge, but your socio-economic background (in most cases), your "level of socialization", your ability to "follow-through" (and your personal story about how you had to leave home early and support yourself alone and spend all your free time learning unfortunately will not count in many/most places. Sorry!), and how "convincing" you are. You may not be listened to (even if you turn out to be right, at least for a time), your opinions may be given less weight, people may feel more comfortable cutting you off when you're talking, etc. This one can be surmounted: if you are right enough times when others are wrong you may start be taken very seriously. Still, the bar is higher for you. Much higher. This one is probably obvious, but is worth stating.
- You may have to content yourself with smaller and/or less-respected organizations. I know, I know meritocracy, etc. If you're amazing, you can most certainly get into Google and friends, but again, if you're only decent/pretty good, you /probably/ won't. For those of you who have ever wondered "who works /would want to work at crappy place X?", it's not just CS grads who couldn't hack it at Google or the 'printer guy' who got promoted to LOB programming. Sometimes it's smart, pretty good devs who are either just short of what's needed for the bigger players or are incredibly intimidated by the interview processes/hiring filters. It's funny to think that these places are (based on comments I've read here on HN) inundated with resumes from people who are nowhere even close to qualified, but people who are qualified, or at least could be with some knowledge gaps filled in/"senior-level" mentoring don't even apply in the first place. Doesn't surprise me that something like Starfighters now exists to (maybe?) try to reach these people and mop them up. I would also say that you can be very valued at startups. You may be one of those great "get things off the ground" people, like many self-starters, and if you are, your metaphorical phone will ring a lot. I wouldn't say it evens things out, but it sure helps (and feels good to be real a go-to person!)
- Unless you really are one of the best, expect to always be questioned. You probably will need to psych yourself up a lot, because it's very easy to get disheartened and discouraged when you feel like you're never quite good enough/people are always going to assume there's "a lot he/she probably just doesn't know if we're honest" (even if you have been working for decades and proven yourself with real work)/you don't ever quite fit in culturally because you've never had the "college experience." You need to be tougher (psychologically) than your degreed peers, because you will have to work much harder to earn respect.
So this person floated, others swim upstream to get to where he is. It can be done for people without degrees, but it actually is hard. You really can't imagine what that little piece of paper - even if you just "barely" earned it - can do you for you. It's not just about getting hired.
"I’m already starting to see some really smart high schoolers skip college to get into the workforce because they know what they want, and good for them."
If these "smart high schoolers" have the ability to have someone else pay for their education, I recommend that they go to school. If they have Zuckerberg-parent level of support or are already mindblowingly skilled/knowledgeable, OK, sure, don't bother. They're probably going to succeed no matter what. If they are on the margin, though - parents wealthy enough to send them to a real university, but not wealthy enough to Zuck them, tell them to go instead. Or at least work for a couple of years, then go back. If someone gave me a few hundred thousand to go to a great university, I'd still go in a heartbeat. You cannot replace the quality of networks you'll get there. You cannot replace the immersion. You cannot replace the prestige. You just can't. The magic of university is being surrounded by "brilliant, ambitious, well-connected elites." I'm probably right in the sweet spot of the target of today's alternative education: I couldn't go to college, I'm a regular user of MOOCs, I do self-directed learning, I'm a devourer of books, I'm someone who does coding challenges, I'm fairly smart, AND I've managed some level of success, which proves it's possible, and yet I would still tell these people to go to college.
My goals would be for getting deep knowledge in an area of study, more than I'm able to do on my own. After becoming an expert in that area, I would like to apply that to business. Examples: MIT robotics->start robotics company / work with roboticists at an existing company or Columbia Computer Science and Logistics and Supply Chain Optimization->start a company optimizing delivery/pickup routes for delivery drivers and providing 'deep' dashboards to monitor and reroute as needed. Also, I would invite everyone to look at this comment from Clare Corthell from Mattermark for something closely related, and important:
The thing that spurred me to write this was the realization that there are probably hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in this country that could be making incredible contributions to science, technology, business, and society in general, but don't have the ability to realize that potential. It's one of those funny things where understanding you have a problem, even at a detailed level, does not imbue you with the tools to fix it. I think that's what makes me the angriest. Society should be falling over trying to help people push things ahead, contribute to the advancement of society (I read that some countries pay people to go to college), but instead it tells you 'have rich parents, go into incredible debt, be a lucky unicorn, or tough luck.' How many other people are sitting around doing some dreary job that does little (like the ad clicks example), who, if given the resources, would provide society (and themselves) with so much more? It's a colossal waste.
Hammerbacher's quote resonated with me when I first read it, but now it really hits home: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," Hammerbacher once said. "That sucks."
I really appreciate your comment. That's the sort of response I was hoping for. Other people who have experienced this, and what they did/are doing. Thank you.
The "dream" is to immerse in learning while being surrounded by a critical mass of intelligent, driven, and most importantly well-connected people. There's a reason a large majority of the top entrepreneurs seem to have come from the same set of schools.
Sam Altman - Stanford
Paul Graham - Harvard, Cornell
Jeff Bezos - Princeton
Larry Page - Stanford
Peter Thiel, who despite his current ideological stance, also went to Stanford
We all know about the exceptions, sure - but they are exceptions. Most of the top ones (Google your favorite entrepreneurs aside from the well known ones like Zuck, Jobs, and Gates) - most of them have prestigious backgrounds, and those without do much worse:
Now, I've read Graham's (http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html) essay about this, which is interesting for the subset of people who happen to apply to YC, but it doesn't touch on the main point: that a top-tier institution where you can be completely immersed, be surrounded by incredible people you can network with, and not think about paying rent gives you astronomical advantages. I don't think there's really any credible debate around this particular point. You can't do that while you're working; immersion happens only when you can truly focus. If you're thinking about rent, food, bills, etc. you're not focusing. You're also not going to get the kind of network at a state school - you might get lucky, but for spending 4-6 years of your life, that's a huge gamble on top of the money you're spending. I've tried to work while going to school once, and it ended in disaster (it can wreck your physical health, mental health, and knowledge retention. It's awful, and those of you you have done it, I applaud you, but not everyone has what it takes to do that.)
To your third point: that's the excuse we use to tell everyone they should suck it up and be happy with what they have, and it's awful. You go down that ladder, and you're telling people who "only" get beat up once a week that they should be happy not getting shot. The benchmark we should be using is the world we'd like to create, not "at least you can eat." Come on.
That all said, I appreciate your comment even I disagree with you. I know you don't have answers, nor does anyone else here (but if someone does, of course I'd love to hear about it!) I certainly don't expect that. I know the state of things. I came here to vent and commiserate. I'm angry, and I'm envious. That's all.
I didn't go to college because I had to leave home early (was told I had to be out at 16, was out by 17) to support myself, and received no parental support when I left. I did, however, manage to work myself from a tech support hamster at 17 to sysadmin, then junior developer, then finally senior developer. I never lacked for work, and have made OK, but not amazing money. That all sounds great, but it comes with serious costs, especially if you're just "decent" or "pretty good." Here are my experiences:
- You're probably going to have to work 2-3x as hard as an equivalently skilled person to prove that you deserve to be there.
- You may have to deal with much lower raises, or deal with simply being passed up for them altogether. This one can be more subtle, so can be hard to prove. So, you may be picked for the challenging work, asked to lead teams, told you're the best on the team by the boss(es), and receive the company awards, but when it comes to raise time, you wonder why you just went from 80 to 85k, and the people below you in rank went from 80 to 110 (and aren't happy with that and leave anyway. Heh.) This one sucks the most, because it's the one you have the least control over, and will ultimately impact the number of choices available to you later on.
- You may experience another subtle thing. This: "we know you're good, but you don't have a degree, so we believe you're less likely to leave because the hoops for you to change jobs is higher, so we can ask you for more than your degreed peers - and we're probably right about it." You will be the person on-call more often (if that applies to you - sysadmin/devops), you will be "expected" to stay later, and just generally push harder to prove yourself.
- You're going to spend a LOT of your free time teaching yourself knew things, honing your skills, and brushing up on the theory you never learned in a setting that allowed you to immerse. Now, maybe you have superior learning capabilities and can just sponge this stuff up in just a couple of your after-work learning sessions, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that for those of us who aren't, we spend a lot of time making them stick over the years. Now, we know that everyone needs to do this stuff these days, and that it's becoming more necessary every day. No question about it. However, you will have to do it even more to make sure you're at the top of your game. You may have annoying gaps in your knowledge, and will have to go back (in some cases, WAY back) to fill that stuff in. (Now that there's Khan/Udacity/MIT OCW/others, this is actually a LOT easier to do.) If you're only decent/pretty good, you're going to have run significantly faster to stay in place. Forget most of your social life. Again, this does not apply to you if you happen to just be an superhumanly fast learner, but for the decent/pretty good, it probably does.
- Culturally, your degreed peers may have some trouble adjusting to you. Of course this happens at every level (people who went to state school treated differently than those who went to a top university, for example), but you'll be the strangest of the bunch. People may wonder if you know anything at all(!), not just about your field (which is easy enough to prove), but about the world around you: politics, economics, sociology, literature, the lot of it. Sometimes you may be looked at as a strange feral orphan child. They just may not even have a baseline for what to expect from you. The software world(s) may be more meritocratic and/or egalitarian, but it's not utopia. Now, this sounds /all/ bad, but I actually have always liked this one; if you are a dedicated self-learner, you can blow people away pretty easily. They expect you to not be able to tie your shoes, but then you rattle off your knowledge X, Y, and Z and show them your elegant, well-structured code and they are agape. This one is fun!
- Remember that the degree acts as a proxy. It's a way for organizations to outsource not only judgment about your knowledge, but your socio-economic background (in most cases), your "level of socialization", your ability to "follow-through" (and your personal story about how you had to leave home early and support yourself alone and spend all your free time learning unfortunately will not count in many/most places. Sorry!), and how "convincing" you are. You may not be listened to (even if you turn out to be right, at least for a time), your opinions may be given less weight, people may feel more comfortable cutting you off when you're talking, etc. This one can be surmounted: if you are right enough times when others are wrong you may start be taken very seriously. Still, the bar is higher for you. Much higher. This one is probably obvious, but is worth stating.
- You may have to content yourself with smaller and/or less-respected organizations. I know, I know meritocracy, etc. If you're amazing, you can most certainly get into Google and friends, but again, if you're only decent/pretty good, you /probably/ won't. For those of you who have ever wondered "who works /would want to work at crappy place X?", it's not just CS grads who couldn't hack it at Google or the 'printer guy' who got promoted to LOB programming. Sometimes it's smart, pretty good devs who are either just short of what's needed for the bigger players or are incredibly intimidated by the interview processes/hiring filters. It's funny to think that these places are (based on comments I've read here on HN) inundated with resumes from people who are nowhere even close to qualified, but people who are qualified, or at least could be with some knowledge gaps filled in/"senior-level" mentoring don't even apply in the first place. Doesn't surprise me that something like Starfighters now exists to (maybe?) try to reach these people and mop them up. I would also say that you can be very valued at startups. You may be one of those great "get things off the ground" people, like many self-starters, and if you are, your metaphorical phone will ring a lot. I wouldn't say it evens things out, but it sure helps (and feels good to be real a go-to person!)
- Unless you really are one of the best, expect to always be questioned. You probably will need to psych yourself up a lot, because it's very easy to get disheartened and discouraged when you feel like you're never quite good enough/people are always going to assume there's "a lot he/she probably just doesn't know if we're honest" (even if you have been working for decades and proven yourself with real work)/you don't ever quite fit in culturally because you've never had the "college experience." You need to be tougher (psychologically) than your degreed peers, because you will have to work much harder to earn respect.
So this person floated, others swim upstream to get to where he is. It can be done for people without degrees, but it actually is hard. You really can't imagine what that little piece of paper - even if you just "barely" earned it - can do you for you. It's not just about getting hired.
"I’m already starting to see some really smart high schoolers skip college to get into the workforce because they know what they want, and good for them."
If these "smart high schoolers" have the ability to have someone else pay for their education, I recommend that they go to school. If they have Zuckerberg-parent level of support or are already mindblowingly skilled/knowledgeable, OK, sure, don't bother. They're probably going to succeed no matter what. If they are on the margin, though - parents wealthy enough to send them to a real university, but not wealthy enough to Zuck them, tell them to go instead. Or at least work for a couple of years, then go back. If someone gave me a few hundred thousand to go to a great university, I'd still go in a heartbeat. You cannot replace the quality of networks you'll get there. You cannot replace the immersion. You cannot replace the prestige. You just can't. The magic of university is being surrounded by "brilliant, ambitious, well-connected elites." I'm probably right in the sweet spot of the target of today's alternative education: I couldn't go to college, I'm a regular user of MOOCs, I do self-directed learning, I'm a devourer of books, I'm someone who does coding challenges, I'm fairly smart, AND I've managed some level of success, which proves it's possible, and yet I would still tell these people to go to college.