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You Are Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
theodp writes "Over at TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa offers some don't-be-a-fool-stay-in-school advice to students that sounds a bit like an old-school Mr. T PSA. TechCrunch CEO Michael Arrington's questioning of whether students need to get any degree or go to college at all may sound appealing — dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did do alright for themselves — but Wadhwa gives some good reasons why you should probably take the school-is-for-chumps argument with a grain of salt. 'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,' and many big companies won't even consider hiring you for that fallback job without a degree. And, believe it or not, you can still become a tech billionaire later in life even if you're cursed with a PhD." Tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson approaches this question slightly differently; here's an analysis he made a few years ago, with the conclusion that the college investment pays off only about half the time.
You don't have to be a beat-the-odds tech celebrity to do well without a college education. When I interview people, their academic degrees play little to no role in my hiring decision. My primary considerations are their portfolio of work (professional or otherwise), how well they can demonstrate their skills during the interview, and how well I believe they would integrate with the team.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Therefore, he could take obscene amounts of risk and never have to worry about ending up in the gutter or having bill collectors after him. And if you add in that his Dad is a high powered attorney ...
Gates was a perfect storm of trust fund, brains, timing, and ambition.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I read your comment thinking "what a dick", but then I reached the last paragraph, and I just feel sorry for you. By the sounds of it, you're so wrapped up in "being successful", that the fact you think you won't be just makes you miserable. The problem you have is that you directly equate "being successful" to "screwing people over". Its possible to do one without the other. I'm not of course saying you can become a multi-billionaire, but why would you want/need more money than you can possibly ever spend? Its possible to run your own buisness, selling to a small niche of the market without screwing people over. Quite simply put, someone else already is, so its easy to undercut them in price while beating them in quality of service. You won't steal their whole customer base, but you can certainly make a size-able dent and a fair bit of money in the process.
;)
Cheer up.
The harshest reality is that the jobs are leaving.
The jobs of the CEO and his/her pals will be staying, of course.
A university degree won't make you less expendable to a corpocracy that wants the cheapest workers. Unless you are willing to cost the same to the employer at 35 as you did at 25 (and use your benefits as little), your days are numbered.
Code Poet, Rockstar Programmer, Unit-Test Guru, Meme Zealot, Jedi Knight of the Latest Methodology, or (what is likeliest) red-tunicked member of the Roddenberry Landing Crew or Storm Trooper cannon-fodder, the real masters of this game are the Bean Counters.
The corpocracy has docile subjects. It has seen that it can lay people off without having to report it (IBM -- for years), take huge local tax breaks (which your family and community paid for) and then ship jobs overseas, and claim to be "a good citizen" while loudly claiming there are "insufficient numbers of skilled workers".
Of course, you can take the Blue Pill and go back to your pasting your face into pictures of Gates and Zuckerberg. (o:
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Plumbers and electricians struggle to find 40 hours of work per week where I live. I was curious about how their incomes compared to mine, and the last couple guys I worked with said they typically had about 25 billable hours of work in 50 hours on the job. The rest was driving from place to place and other forms of non-billable time. So $100/hr for actual work doesn't translate into the same salary as someone who is paid that rate for a 40/hr job.
I used to get paid 65/hr as a software contractor. But I billed 60 hours a week. Care to guess who made more that year, me or the $100/hr plumber?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Amen. I dropped out of comp. sci. in 1989 because a side business I had modifying and making electronics for the handicapped started taking up enough of my time that I couldn't do both. Two years later, I was still barely scraping by, so I wound up the business and went back to university. 20 years later (ouch), I consider that two year stint running my own business to have been a crucial and valuable part of my education (even though I went on to get a PhD and now do completely unrelated research). If I'd burned my bridges in any way when I 'dropped out' of school, I would have been screwed. If you feel your business/idea are good enough, go for it, but always make a plan for what happens when the business doesn't pan out - statistically most first businesses don't.