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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.
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!
[...] but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data[...]
That does not make it right.