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Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad Role Model For Aspiring Tech Execs
coondoggie writes "Want to run a successful high-tech company? Don't drop out of college. The myth of the brilliant Ivy League student who starts a business in his dorm room, drops out of school, and goes on to run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades to come is essentially just that: a myth. Despite a few high-profile exceptions — such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — the vast majority of CEOs running successful U.S. high-tech firms have college degrees, and more than half have at least one graduate degree."
run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades
How can you possibly say that Zuckerberg will run a company for many decades, when he isn't even many decades old? He hasn't even been old enough to drive a car for a decade, let alone old enough to run a company for "many decades". Being as facebook is doing less-than-brilliantly in the stock market, it seems at the very least overly optimistic to say that it will be around for "many decades".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Apart from some small element of skill it is no different from the lottery really.
Be careful not to automatically interpret correlation as causation.
In other words, the degree may not be what's making the CEO, but rather that the odds of CEO material also having a degree is high.
CEOs also tend to own more than one car. Doesn't mean you should go buy a second car to improve your odds of becoming a CEO.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you have a great idea, you should see it through. You can always go back to college later, and the experience of pursuing it will be far more beneficial to you than any class you could possibly take.
If you don't have a great idea, than dropping out of college is stupid and will gain you very little.
Being as big as a Gates or a Zuckerberg is more a function of opportunity than pure education or even talent. Not to underestimate their abilities, of course, but I'd say there are plenty of people with the academic capabilities (or better) of both of those two, but they will never be more than well-paid employees.
The important thing is finding and knowing what to do with opportunities, and then learning what you need to in order to take advantage of it. People with more education will have more specialized knowledge, but interestingly, I'd say that they gain more from the currency of simply having the piece of paper and any networking they can do in the graduate programs. In this way, I'd say that it is 100% true that the higher education *system* helps find more opportunities for advancement, starting with the requirement for a graduate degree for a better job, but going even further than that.
Still, the right opportunity and the means to take advantage of it is what is actually required. The rest of it is just positioning. In the end, you don't get rich being a great practitioner of a particular science or engineering field, you get rich either managing your business, or getting it to the point where others can manage it for you. Of course, dropping out is like buying only one lottery ticket instead of multiple tickets. You can still win it all on the one ticket, but chances are much better you win if you invest more.
There are always going to be exceptions to any rule. But if you are a betting person, you would increase your odds of becoming a tech executive if you have a college education and a senior executive if you have a management degree.
I respectfully disagree. What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniac, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They were smart enough to realize that you have to strike while the iron is hot. All staying in school would have done for these guys is ensure that they missed the boat on their respective opportunities and found themselves in arguably more menial jobs as a result.
This article sounds like it was sponsored by a bunch of universities or something.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
How to be rich and successful in corporate America: be a selfish, backstabbing cunt with no conscience!
That's what we want! That's what we select for! The compassionate, mature guy well he can just go on welfare, fuck him. We love our sociopaths. Sociopath?! Where?!?!?! Here, Mr. Sociopath, let me give you some money and power, yeahhhh that's the stuff.
#1 While Zuckerberg has money now, I want to see if that is still true 3 years from now. The stock market is a cruel mistress.
#2 Ellison, Gates and Jobs are probably three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet, who also lucked into a set of extraordinary circumstances (what would Jobs have been without Woz, and what would Gates have been without rich parents?)
#3 Dropping out of school because your business is far more interesting and time consuming than school is entirely different from dropping out of school because "degrees don't correlate with success).
#4 That's three people. Three people who made it without a degree. There are far more variables that impact success than can be properly identified and isolated through the anecdotal stories of three people.
#5 That's not to say that degrees are necessary - they clearly aren't necessary, by the mathematical definition of the word. But they give you a hell of a leg up on the competition.
Anybody who says that degrees are useless is trying to sell you something else, or is trying to make sure that you won't become competition.
So in that sense, yes, it is a myth that successful entrepreneurs don't need degrees.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
THIS
Forget any minor shit about his education, Zuckerberg is a real-life supervillain, destroying humanity's concept of privacy and commercializing human relationships for his own personal gain.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Education is a microscopic part of it. Being in the right place at the right time, or having the right family is the real multiplier.
Obviously this academic douche bag doesn't understand his own analogy.
"I've met as many successful tech CEOs who have dropped out college as I've met folks who have won the lottery," says Professor Jerry Luftman, managing director of the Global Institute for IT Management, who holds doctorate in Information Systems from Stevens Institute of Technology. "There are always going to be exceptions to any rule. But if you are a betting person, you would increase your odds of becoming a tech executive if you have a college education and a senior executive if you have a management degree."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I don't see any wrong with that. In fact, I control sexy women with my wealth. It works both ways, and if both are happy, so what?
The real thing these guys have in common is they didn't just create companies they helped created industries.
So if you want to start a company that does something other companies do it would make sense to go to school and learn about those industries. But if you want to create an industry that doesn't exist you are not going to learn it in school.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Those are four people. Yes, they have a lot of money, but think of it this way:
Would you prefer a 1 in 10,000,000 chance to be a billionaire (and end up flipping burgers if you fail), or a 1 in 1000 chance to be a millionaire (and end up with a decent paying job if you fail)?
A college degree is both safer and has a higher probability of success. The rewards might be lower, but that cannot be concluded from such a small sample size, and at any rate they're still enough for any reasonable person to live comfortably.
If that passes for a supervillain in your universe, where's the portal to get there?
In my universe the run of the mill villains slaughter people without remorse or conscience; win public office based on lies and then force their demented wills on the people with the full force of government agencies (staffed by personality types that love to get all up in your shit with force) at their backs; wage wars with vague purpose and no end game, or just because someone's great great grandparent did some uncertain bad thing to someone else's great great grandparent; head up thuggish dictatorships that commit genocide and slavery; run hideous anti-science, misogynist religions; leave dozens of decapitated bodies hanging from bridges merely as a warning to others; hire physicists to build economic models that eventually crash the economy; write laws that lead to the hiring of physicists to build models that eventually crash the economy; refuse to see the society destroying fallacies of their own ideologies despite endless empirical evidence, and, oh, so many other things.
Geez, your universe considered some jackass offering a free and voluntary service with dubious fine print a supervillain? Let me pack my bags!
I wouldn't call it a lottery, but it is close. The chaotic nature of capitalism is what rules.
Che Guevara:
The laws of capitalism, which are blind and are invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without he or she being aware of it. One sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon ahead. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of individual success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly.... It is a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Jobs and Wozniak, to name two more...
and did anyone noticed the title is wrong?
"Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad Role Model For Aspiring Tech Execs"
because... he's not? He became his own tech exec, he wasn't elected, he wasn't hired, he didn't go to college to study business to be a CEO someday. Went to college, made a local "hot or not" clone, stole some guy's idea for a social networking, got noticed by the right people early on and the rest is history.
So yeah, if you want to be a CEO running a successful US high-tech firm, don't follow Zuckerberg.
But if you have a startup that you're trying to launch, Zuckerberg might not be a bad role model.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
1. He was young.
2. Being honest in a private conversation.
3. This conversation has become a meme that's regularly used to assassinate his entire character. Largely I imagine, because out of some hard work and a lot of luck, he became successful.
4. It's really just one moment in his life and he probably said it in a geeky-sarcastic manner to get a reaction. I don't necessarily interpret it to mean that he's admitting (at that point at least) to not be trustworthy with others data, just that he was amazed to discover that people become blithering idiots when it comes to exchanging their personal information for "shiny". I don't think the rest of us truly made that connection until several years later, so I imagine it would have been quite a revelation to him just how much people trust words on a computer screen.
Sure, he started Facebook and they're hardly corporate role models when it comes to privacy, but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data, so go burn their CEOs in effigy.
Nobody has ever been forced to use Facebook. It is the people unwilling to take responsibility for their own choices and actions who are causing the problems. Zuckenberg and Gates both made a choice and took the risks that ultimately made them successful beyond measure. When you first start a business in hopes of achieving success you should totally invest yourself in that enterprise to achieve that success. As with MS, Facebook, Apple, or Google when do you decide to stop trying to achieve success just because you start making money? Do you reach a cut off point and then just start working for free? When society starts punishing success than you will see some real problems.
The main problem with this article is it is conflating two rather distinct things. It is trying to confuse founding your own successful company with running someone else's behemoth.
Gates and Jobs and Zuckerberg weren't just handed the keys to IBM or AT&T. They built their own empires.
It's an entirely different thing. Minding someone else's store once it has become a monstrosity is a different skills set.
When you are your own boss and you write your own tunes, it might not matter if you can't play anyone else's.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Nah, we're not posting this from a cave because the cave didn't impress women, so we built houses with electricity in them and running water.
Absolutely everything on earth came about because of pussy. If there were no pussy, we would be sitting in caves gnawing on raw meat.
To be fair, we'd have probably invented beer without pussy. But we may have invented it sooner so as to engage the really fat cave girls.
It's great to be comfortable or a rebel and all, but the way humans (and computers) interact seamlessly is through standards. Clothing may seem trivial to you, but dressing for business is a statement that you are there *for* business.
Fuck your standards.
Clothing IS trivial. Only meatheads obsess over what people wear.
You can still be there for business if you wear a hoodie, but it becomes open to interpretation, just as Zuck's choice of apparel was.
Only a dumbass would have such an interpretation. All the smart people in the room were focused on what was actually important: the gigantic Facebook IPO.
That lack of clarity can ruffle feathers and be enough to make a difficult negotiation impossible.
Why would you want to negotiate with a moron? There are lots of billionaires in the world. Why would you want a moron as your investor?
Sometimes, that sort of clash is a statement, and as such, may be a good idea, but it comes with a risk.
Only for cowards. Leaders aren't "risking" a goddamn thing, because they are the ones who set the example.
One way or the other, anyone who expects their bits to arrive in an expected manner, but rails against people who arrive dressed in an expected manner isn't considering the value of convention to efficient and clear communication.
And what the fuck are you trying to "communicate" exactly, through your fancy suit? That you paid a lot of money for it? That you have a tailor? That you are willing to cow down and blend in the crowd and be just like all the other lemmings, when you aren't and don't want to be?