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Techies Saying No To College
peter303 writes: "Todays NYTimes reports (annoying free subscription required) how many young men are skipping formal college to pursue high paying IT jobs.
Is this a wise move?" Every fall this debate comes back up. I enjoyed college, but I don't know how much of what it taught me will be relevant in my career. But should techies skip out?
I also used to stay up late running a BBS, hacking, engaging in drawn-out philosophical discussions with friends, reading, and such in high school. In fact, I was probably much like you. I had started my own business in high school, and likely could have continued that full-time, or perhaps gotten a job as a programmer. I had a lot of contempt for higher education, and, like you, thought that since I was smart and motivated enough to learn a lot on my own, it would be a waste of money to attend University. Yet I chose to go that route anyway, did very well in first year, and have now become very academics-oriented, a side of me I did not know existed. I am now very happy with the path I chose for myself, and realize how completely misinformed I was previously. To think that I might have drudged through life, never knowing what I was missing out on makes me appreciate this experience much more.
It disappoints me to read these comments on Slashdot along the lines of "I'm smart, so I don't need a University education", or "a lot of University graduates are stupid, therefore a degree is useless", etc. In my experience, this notion is incredibly wrong. I think if you are smart, that's all the more reason to get a degree! It's not about learning to code, it's not about getting a piece of paper. Higher education is about enlightenment, appreciation, and thinking. If you are smart, you'll be a better thinkiner, and be able to better appreciate the field you are studying, leading to enlightenment. I think it's a crime to be too stubborn to take advantage of one's intellectual ability in this way -- you are cheating yourself. A large portion of the most brilliant people on this planet are to be found in academia. I have had the good fortune, through attending a well-respected institution, of being exposed to some of the most brilliant minds in mathematics and computer science. I sincerely doubt that there are many people that smart in the "real world", as such a truly bright individual would simply not be able to find satisfaction in an ordinary line of work. So this begs the question: if academia is good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for you?
Regrettably, I find it difficult to put into words precisely what I am getting out of my University education. I KNOW that when I graduate, my academic accomplishments will be meaningless and insignificant to anyone else in the real world. But I take great pride and interest in them anyway. I don't feel this is born out of any psychological need to justify my chosen path. I actually disliked my first two years of University, and thought it was largely a waste of time (except for the social aspects). Had I not attained top grades, I may even have dropped out. But now I've become more comfortable with the academic life, and am beginning to find the experience more enjoyable and more rewarding as I study my field in greater depth. In fact, I wish I didn't have to stop soon in order to graduate. But when I do graduate, I know that the PROCESS of getting a degree will have made me a better person -- I already see that.
P.S. if you go into mechanical or computer engineering, as I believe you said in another message in this thread, you likely will not experience what I'm talking about. At least at my University, the engineering programs tend to be too practical, and in particular, lacking in intellectual content. You will study a broad range of subjects, but never in much depth. In my opinion, to truly get the most out of a University education, one must study some kind of art, such as philosophy or mathematics (which I would consider more of an art than a science, and computer science is essentially a branch of mathematics). I know several extremely intelligent people who have started in engineering programs, and virtually all of them have hated it. Some are struggling through and not getting much out of their university experience, whereas others have transferred to other programs and begun to enjoy it more. Engineering programs are great if you want to get a job or learn practical things, and you certainly do learn interesting things, but they are definitely not for everyone, particularly those looking to be challenged intellectually.
To return to your point, I did not get any offers of entrance scholarships either. MIT was certainly not an option. Yet I managed to put together pretty decent grades in high school, and be admitted to a University that is highly respected in its own right. Since then, I have been awarded a couple of upper year scholarships, which I didn't need because co-op jobs covered all my expenses anyway. Seriously, it sounds like you're just looking for excuses. There ARE options other than Harvard you realize, and if you have the skills to get a decent tech job right out of high school, then you certainly have the means to cover all of your school-related expenses by working during the summers. The bottom line, is that it's worth it. I would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars by now had I not attended University, but I have no regrets.
In the united states at least there is a decent segment of the population (mostly working class families) that are above the level where they can get financial aid, and way below the level where they could afford to pay for school on their own without taking on unmanagable amounts of debt.
This comes in part from reigional differences in wages and cost of living. Where I grew up (and still live (working as a programmer)) in Ithaca, NY there are a sufficient number of college students that have come for the ivy league experience at Cornell that they raise the cost of living quite a bit, and then there are also grad students that are starving enough to build a nuke, program the next greatest software suite, run your network, etc... for $8/hour. A small (less than 15' x 15' ) studio apartment in a lousy neighborhood (across the street from a crackhouse actually) is $350/month. I got lucky and snagged a tech job by knowing the right people and being in the right place, and after 4 years i've worked my way up to 36k/year as a consultant...
In any case, i decided to put off college indefinitely because i couldn't afford it, neither could my parents, and i wasn't ready enough to pick a field to go into, since i'd pretty much be locked in after i finished until i could pay off a massive (probably $50-100k loan)... with the constantly shifting future of the tech industry it is hard to pick a feild to go into that is both interresting, having new developments, and is going to be able to provide you with a job 4-6 years later and ofr long enough to pay off a loan.
My reasoning for not going to college right after high school was more born of a pragmatic evaltuation of my options, with many options and not very many known variables, i took the one which gave me the least chance of making a catastrophic mistike. For me this was to settle into a 9-5er until i could either afford to go to college (and had a good idea of what i wanted to go for...), or until i found a neat enough and stable enough job not to care.
As it is now, after passing the 4 year experience mark i've had a lot more offers for work (and good stuff too) than i can take, so i'm okay for the moment.
I guess i just wanted to be a voice for people who didn't go to school, because i've seen a lot of people putting that decision down as irresponsible, impatient, or just poorly though out. I'm seeing a lot of people writing off the non-degreed people as a bunch of idiots, which i think is a particularly narrow view. A good portion of the programmers i know have taken a similar path, and most of them have been successful. Several have found their calling and gone to school, several have saved up and bought or build houses and settled down in the community, and several of the younger ones (me included) are still feeling things out.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
We almost hired a very bright young programmer who hadn't gone to college. He scored VERY high on the BrainBrench.com C and C++ skills tests, and had other good credentials.
I asked him to provide some example code for me to look at, and he gave me a a short example where he had to optimize a C++ program that did a string rewrite (ie. convert character "A" into "BC", etc.) for a specified number of times. He precomputed the translation once, and gave up there, not realizing that he had taken steps toward moving from a O(N) algorithm to an O(N lg N) algorithm.
It was clear that he had never been drilled in recognizing certain algorithmic patterns, and thus his optimizations employed many language speed up tricks to make C++ faster, but largely ignored using a simple but better algorithm to improve the speed. I rewrote it to use the better algorithm (compute string replacements for levels 2, 4, 8, etc., when needed, rather than 1-N) and eliminate the repeated string copy (by rewriting front to back, then back to front, in a single buffer), and beat his "optimized" version.
In short, while he was great with language skills, particularly w/ C++, he had a lot to learn about algorithms in general, which is the kind of formalism that a university will drill you in, and which is very helpful. For the type of numerical and graphical software development we are doing, it is almost critical.
Still, we would have hired him anyway, but he decided to work elsewhere. Language skills alone made him quite valuable to many employers. But for someone who seemed as talented and bright as he was, he could really achieve much more.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
RANT
Everyone who says that going to college is falling behind in the field is adding to my growing list of reasons to bring back clinical lobotomies. Pure and simple.
They think that learning to hack out a shopping cart is what CS is about. Sure, they can learn that without college. They probably learned to do all these things from ``Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours'' or some other shit book.
This sentiment infuriates me. They think they're not going to learn anything by going to college... Okay, then, these 37331 boyz know how to write CGI scripts. It'll land them their dream $70K webmaster jobs. Now, maybe they could explain to me briefly Turing's Halting Theorem and present an informal proof in a paragraph or less. Or maybe explain the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm and present a proof of correctness. Or... how about implementing user-level multithreading with continuations and briefly explaining what basic problems need to be overcome once the basic operators (fork et al.) are implemented.
These people can't do those things, whereas a college undergrad could, probably starting around sophomore year. And guess what, that college kid knows more about better coding and theoretical CS than the high-school dropouts ever will. College educations make for much better programmers, even if graduates do not choose to become computer scientists per se. Having a college education is not about falling back by four years, it's about spending four years learning about how to be very very good at what you do.
Sadly, these 18-year old high school kids are probably more likely to get hired than a 23-year old college graduate for some jobs. The reasons are that (1) they don't need to be paid as much, and (2) that they know all the latest buzzword languages (Java, C#, Delphi, etc.). The college kid will have the background to pick up this buzzword crap quickly, but will not necessarily have it on his resume. Very sadly, that makes a huge difference when it comes to hiring, though the college graduate will be doing a far better job simply because he will have learned e.g., good coding techniques.
Aside from these purely practical considerations, the kids who go from high school into the workforce are missing out on other things. Ever hear the phrase ``well-rounded?'' Well, I personally know of no more boring entity than someone who can only talk about computers. A college graduate will at least have been forced to learn something about art, history, literature, and science (other than CS). That makes for far better people.
I've always though what's important about school in general is not to memorize how to code, etc, but rather to learn how to work. Thinks like how to manage time effectively, how to get the job done even if you don't want to, how to effectively use available resources, how to ask for help, etc. These are things that do you a lot more good in the real world than a class on C...
It all comes down to what you know and how far you want to go. Without a degree upper management is pretty much out of reach. Some senior technical positions are out of reach. You basically have to go a lot farther to prove yourself to those around you, but once you do prove yourself, nobody cares if you do or don't have a degree.
There are companies that require degrees for decent jobs. Do some research into where you want to work. Do some research into if you want to work for such a narrow-minded company.
I've tried going to college 4 times. I have about 60 credits. Sure I want a degree eventually, but it's just not worth it at this point.
The worst part about college is paying thousands of dollars for classes where you occasionally know more about the subject (or at least the current state of the art) than the professor.
Make your own decision about college, nobody else really cares.
chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
(Apologies to Frater 219, for some reason I could not find a link to the individual post.)
What follows is a post that discussed this very issue over a year ago. I took it to heart and have enjoyed college ever since. It has opened my eyes up to a whole new world, one I would have never seen if I'd kept my nose buried in a keyboard. People should not go to college just to help them start a career. They should go to college to learn about life.
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Geeks, go to college. (Score:5)
by Frater 219 on Monday April 12, @01:05PM EDT
(User Info) http://
Don't go to college to learn to be a better geek. Academic computer science won't turn you into a system administrator, Web designer, or Perl hacker. You won't learn how to optimize a kernel configuration, recover files from a crashed disk, build a fast database, or tell your boss nicely that his ideas about information technology are stupid or violate the laws of physics. You may learn a lot of good theory -- but you could pick that up elsewhere, too.
Go to college to learn about culture, or history, or philosophy, or literature. Go to college to sit up late nights screaming at your best friends about what an idiot Rene Descartes was. Go to college to watch your best friends do the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Go to college to find out what the hell this postmodernism thing is that Larry Wall's always on about. Go to college to refute postmodernism, and to be called postmodern for doing it. Go to college to meet people who will be impressed with your intelligence instead of thinking of it as threatening.
Don't go to an easy college, and don't go to a place that lets you get by doing nothing but technical stuff. Go to a place that makes you do a lot of heavy reading and writing. Take tough courses. Learn to write well; not only will it help when your boss asks you to document your project, but it'll also help you sound better on Slashdot and USENET. Don't scorn "well-roundedness" or "communications skills"; the stars of geek culture are no bunch of illiterates.
Study music. Music, as Pythagoras demonstrated, is a form of mathematics, and musicians, like hackers, keep pounding on their work in search of the Right Thing. Study psychology and sociology. They represent our attempts to figure out how the systems called the human mind and human society work, so that we can make them work better.
Read Nietzsche. Refute your parents' religion. Then refute your refutation.
Get into politics. Which politics don't really matter -- be a socialist, or a libertarian, or even a Republican if you have to. Go to activist events. Take politics courses. Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes. Derive the Debian Free Software Guidelines from the works of John Locke.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
I found college fun, and it was a good way for me to hook up with some job experience in computers. But other than that, it was a waste of money. I didn't graduate because I got hired before I graduated and the company that hired me didn't care. Most IT places are looking for people with experience and brains anyway. Just because you have a college degree or any other kind of certification doesn't mean you know jack shit.
My brother just took one of those 6 month crash course Oracle/VB/Powerbuilder thing that says they have a 99% placement rate. He doesn't have any real job experience in IT, and no one will hire him because of that. Crash course certs are usually useless anyway, but it does go to show that most place want experience above anything else.
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A long-standing professor once shared his opinion with me that a college degree didn't mean that you were trained in a certain profession or pursuit, but that you were trainable.
Not sure if I 100% agree with him, but when I look to hire someone, I really can see the difference between somebody who pursued advanced education and someone who didn't. That's not the only criteria of course, but college courses add a good dose of structured learning that high school just doesn't do.
From an AI point of view, it's like comparing a procedural solution to a neural net: the procedural solution has a better chance of reflection, of telling you HOW they got to a certain conclusion.
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And how many of them will know anything about philosophy, or psychology, or history, or any of the other things that a higher education can offer? College isn't just about job training, it's about expanding your mind and your knowledge, of discovering areas that you didn't know existed.
Most of the managers I've worked for, the good ones at any rate, preferred to hire software engineers who had degrees in subjects other than Computer Science, because they knew that they would bring a richer mix of experience and creativity to their work.
--meredith
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis
As a student who is just beginning his Freshman year in CS at Cornell, I have to admit that this was a question that I had to consider over the past year and will probably grapple with all four years of college. Each month, when I write a check to make the monthly tuition payment, I wonder whether I would be better off earning about 2 1/2 - 3 times more each month than I am currently giving away. And each month I come to the same conclusion--no.
While most of what you learn in college will not in any way relate to your future career, the people you meet and the experiences you have will be carried with you the rest of your life. If you always dreamed of working in a shared office space as a UNIX sysadmin, then maybe college is not for you--but, if you have ever wanted to start your own business or do high-level research in CS, then there is no better place to be than a major university.
In college, classes only occupy a small portion of your day. Unlike work in an IT department, which we leave you drained and too tired to really do meaningful independent work, college will leave you with plenty of time to pursue whatever you want. If you have any aspirations or career goals that extend beyond IT, then you can use the extra time that you have in college to get a leg up. For instance, I want to develop my own web network; where will I be better able to begin--working 40+ hour weeks for an established company or in my bountiful free time at college (especially considering that there is nothing else to do in Ithaca). If I acheive my objectives and reach a point where I would be better served by dropping out, I have no qualms about doing so. Remember, it is easier to drop out of a good college after getting in than it is to reapply to a BS program after going directly to work.
For those who aspire to nothing more than the IT life, go ahead, college has little to offer you. But if you would like to meet smart people, learn interesting things, and get a leg up on a future career in your free time, then give college a chance. I think Bill Gates answered this question best when he said that college is an excellent option that should only be dismissed in favor of the opportunity of a lifetime. Take his advice if you ignore mine.
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You may never experience speeds so high elsewhere. Your poxy ADSL lines can't compare to a fight pipe. Of course you'll have to be up at around midnight to get it but there's nothing like downloading a redhat image at 600k+/s...
--Ben
*This is not to say that nuclear weapons were the wrong thing at the time but too many of the scientists involved weren't considering the outcome of their work.
I think that the vast majority of techies you see in the industry without a degree are because they are genuinely smart people. You never hear about the stupid tech who dropped out of college and is now working at McDonalds, because the fact that he's working at McDonalds removes him from the tech industry.
There was I niavely thinking it was about opening one's mind. You should study what fascinates you, not what's going to pay the most when you leave college, uh I mean university. It's no wonder there's so many ignorant college grads walking around, I can see the t-shirt now 'I want to college and all I got was this lousy job'.
First, excuse me while I LMAO and make a note to myself to start marketing these shirts on college campuses everywhere.
I used to think that was what college was about too, but that's one of the hardest lessons that I learned while getting my degree. It's about getting the piece of paper so you can get your foot in the door. If you're lucky, you learn a lot about yourself and about how the world works in a relatively safe environment. At my alma mater, they seem to be more caught up in their own finances (and they're a public university). The education was just meeting their end of the agreement, but it was clear that their heart wasn't in it (with the exception of a few individual professors). It's quite sad. I guess it comes from a college degree being the status quo. Nowadays, the average college student is just an average person of average intellegence. When universities deal with that kind of quantity, what's their incentive to create a challenging curriculum for the above average student?
This has gotten me thinking recently that this mediocrity has seeped into the tech industry. It has become a popular career choice, encouraged by schools and government (in the U.S. at least). Back before it was popular, most of the programmers out there were folks who got into it in spite of how unpopular it was. Now, I am underwhelmed by so much of the programming talent that I see. Of course, there are still many traditional geeks, but they're so much harder to find when they're standing in a crowd of people who got into programming for all of the wrong reasons.
Even worse, I've noticed that the CS curriculums seem to be dumbing down a bit to accomodate this new breed of programmer. For example, teaching Java as Programming I, without bothering to teach object oriented thinking and skipping over many of the useful basics like trees and linked lists. What's next? Drop assembly because it's too hard and nobody uses it anyway? (For those who are sarcasm-impaired, I realize that all programmers should be exposed to at least a little assembly or machine code, if for no other reason than to give you a real understanding of what is happening when your code executes. And yes, I know assembly for various archetectures is still used.)
-Jennifer