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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."
Because he's a cunt.
first ps0t
It's not a myth if it happened on multiple occasions...
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.
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.
Could this post be any more pointless? So in other words, stay in school kids, stop all your creativity and innovation because you have no chance in the world to actually change the world around you. Just get a degree, get some office job, settle down, retire, and die. Don't actually use your brain to expand your life. Go figure. Also, if it was a myth, why do you have clear proof of it happening twice in your post? You say it's a myth, yet you cite examples of it clearly not being a myth. What? Seriously, man.
Which came first, jobs or college degrees? I'm pretty sure humanity would be fine without the existence of colleges. It is will power that needs to be instilled in people, not random bullshit facts about Socrates, Plato, and macroeconomic principles. I'm sorry, but taking a class in 'Social History' does not do anything for my life whatsoever.
The "drop out billionaire" myth is just as likely as the "overnight sensation" myth.
Here's a basic and reliable formula for success - educate yourself, save your money, and don't be stupid. Oh, and position yourself at where money goes to.
Ellison
Gates
Jobs
Zuckerberg
That's most of the tech money that isn't IBM or HP.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You can get as many degrees as you want but it doesn't guarantee that you will even get a job.
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/06/not-where-they-hoped-theyd-be/100320/
...just pretend. I'm pretty sure eBay and Yahoo won't even notice.
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.
Without you, we would have never known that being evil and without a conciousness from the deepest depths of your heart is a bad idea in the long run.*
You saved the day!
___
* Now that I see it... Wasn’t there this articles, about how so many managers are probably psychopaths and sociopaths without anyone noticing because they don't think it's unusual?
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.
It seems like there are a lot of jobs--and career paths--that offer a very low chance of fabulous wealth: dropping out of college for a tech startup, writing a novel, becoming a fashion designer, going to Hollywood, starting a trendy restaurant, dealing crack, doing anything artistic (ballet/sculptur/rock band), day trading, pro sports, being an "inventor", etc. For most people, it's a recipe for going broke or just subsisting. For a few, it leads to greatness.
:-().
And while humanity needs risk-takers, and it needs people to strive for greatness, I feel we over-glamorize the few (ALL of whom benefited from generous portions of luck in addition to the hard work and personnel genius they may have contributed) instead of emphasizing the steady, dependable careers that offer a good chance of honest work for honest pay (maybe not in this economy though
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
you dont have to make billions to be successful...
What if correlation is not causation, and the number of tech execs with degrees simply reflects the total population of people with the skills to be tech execs, ie, could many of those degreed tech execs have made it without the degrees they spent so much time and money getting?
It's funny, the things that degrees are required for these days. I would hire someone out of high school to be a entry level technician in my lab, and train them myself, if our hiring policies allowed me to do that. In that way, I could get people without a bunch of debt who would be happy with the salary they get here, and thus would stick around long enough to advance.
well CS does not really help for upper VP / Execs where a MBA is gold.
But on the other side CS is not IT and you need people with real tech skills that college does a poor job of teaching.
The scenario mentioned above isn't as much a myth as it is an oversimplification. None of the people who accomplished this were average college students who simply had a good idea. They all had some sort of foundation for success started before they ever entered college.
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.
complete with annoying survey tacked on the article.
the site and article are aimed at essentially people holding masters in "business" - that's phb's, nobody fucking else would bother to read a site with hover-spam and popups.
(here's the print link, all in one page http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&pagename=/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&site=printpage&nsdr=n )
basically, if you want a job running a big company _for someone else_ then you need a degree most of the time. but hell, they chose to include even a guy who's running a company because he inherited the position. sure zuck might not get an interview for ceo position at another company - but most companies would set him up for an interview to buy the fucking company - but if he didn't own facebook he would be just a regular schmo.
interesting list would be one of tech companies ran to the ground by ceo's with perfectly good credentials on paper, even McBride had degrees you know - on the very thing he fucked up!
besides, what the fuck defines "an aspiring tech executive"? I can understand what defines an aspiring engineer, but not technology executive - is it like aspiring to be a venture capitalist, only playing with someone elses money already given to him to play with, with projects already given to him?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
First off business men absolutely should copy Mark's complete disregard for the law, friends, and common decency when chasing profits.
"RUNNING successful U.S. high-tech firms"
And that is the important part. Running, did these "tech giants" create these companies or were they simply the safe choice that was made when picking someone to run them?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But not because he dropped out of college, but for doing things like buying Instagram for $1B without consulting his board.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There are outliers any any population. These are the folks who are at the right place and the right time. Some are astute and take advantage of the situation while others fall into it.
This happens with everything from insects to people to companies and it has since time began. So, the Jobs, Zuckerburgs and Gates of the world can be shown to be successful without a college education but there was also a few others:
John D. Rockefeller
Andrew Carnegie
Samuel ZeMurray
George Westinghouse
Thomas Edison
Most of these people were from the school of hard knocks and were ruthless individuals when it came to their enterprises. I think history bears that out that the ruthless individuals who are willing to sacrifice anything to get what they want usually succeed. Either that or the villagers get their pitch forks and torches and kill the SOB.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The real reason he's a bad role model is because he started Facebook.
Seriously, that is NOT what we need more of.
If we want to be pedantic, "outlier" is probably the better word.
And here I thought it was just because Zuckerberg was a socially-inept slob. I know a few of those with business degrees.
well we have to much college for all and less is need in the class room and less filler classes.
Maybe a AA / AS should be the base line to shoot for with more a trades focus in place. a BA / BS is way to much for most jobs and stuff like IT need a trades type learning system.
Stealing IP and lawyering up to defend it is a pretty reliable plan.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Summary mentions the myth of the ivy league drop out...
Dare I ask? What about the myth of the grad student who has a stellar career in the midst of the biggest college/university fee hike --and possibly the shittiest economy-- in history?
Anyone care to tell them that their lifetime salary bump for having their degree will not necessarily pay for the debt they took on early in life, since the career prospects for many of them will be flipping burgers or waiting at restaurants anyway? (Don't laugh, most of you have been served at least once by a lawyer or PhD. It occasionally pays better.
troll article?
The CEO is generally an employee of the company. Do you really expect a board (most of whom also have degrees and are often CEOs of other companies) to hire someone without a degree to lead their company? Of course not.
So yes, CEOs will generally have degrees. The only time there is an exception is when the person founded the company, and built it themselves. And apparently in tech, there are only 3 of those left at the moment (gates, zuckerberg, ellison).
College drop outs account for 20% of the 657 self-made billionaires in the world:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/02/billionaire-clusters-harvard-skull-and-bones-goldman-business-billionaires-wealth.html
Of course, college dropouts (or those who never started) account for a much larger portion than 20% of the population.. so if anything, college dropouts are LESS likely to make it that far.
Accumulate loans. Accumulate debt. Graduate into a crappy economy created by the same people you will be paying off for the next 20 years.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
well passing over people who can do the job but do not have a piece of paper can be seen as discrimination even more so in a job where some with learning disabilities can learn on the job but is not cut out for college.
I sense a trend...
OK, BofA is stretching "high tech" a little...
Richard Branson - Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, plus all of http://www.virgin.com/company
David Geffen - Dreamworks
Ted Murphy - izea.com
Tom Anderson - myspace.com
David Karp - Tumblr.com
Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com
Rob Kalin - etsy.com
Theodore Waitt - gateway.com
Shawn Fanning - napster.com
Steve Wozniak - apple.com
Kevin Rose - digg.com
Dustin Moskovitz - Cofounder, Facebook
Jerry Yang - yahoo.com
Amadeo Peter Giannini - Bank of America, perhaps you've heard of it
Craig McCaw - McCaw Cellular
Ashley Qualls - whateverlife.com
Pete Cashmore - mashable.com
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless.com
Ben Kaufman - kluster.com
Red McComb - Clear Channel
Bram Cohen - BitTorrent
Gurbaksh Chahal - Blue Lithium, Click Again
He is a greedy sociopathic bastard.
You should have cut it off at "Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad".
Brevity, Friend.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
be jewish, have connected parents, go to some ivy league bullshit old boys college, steal other peoples ideas
facebook was not zuckerbergs idea, he did not become successful because he struck while the iron was "hot"
its all about image.
you fools all continue to fail to understand the simplest shit.
its exactly why america has completely fallen apart...
He's a lottery winner. There was nothing special about facebook. He happened to be at the right place at the right time to have his otherwise unremarkable network become popular, and he didn't turn it to complete shit as fast as myspace did.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Remember the woman who played the young John Connor's step/foster mother in T2? Yeah, I don't know her name either, and that's my point. She's one of those actors/actresses whose face you remember, but whose name you don't. But as a result of having small parts in so many movies, she's pulling in somewhere at the low seven figures from royalties. She's not Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter or any other famous professional from the acting world, but she embodies a more likely form of success to anyone who would choose acting as a career. But alas, the center of the bell curve is never all that interesting...and nobody wants to be at the lower side of what falls off the slope. So everyone focuses on the exceptional and strange (in a good way) examples.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The key here is not who is the present CEO of tech companies but who was the (potentially mythical) founder. The title CEO implies that the company is public or at least has a bunch of shareholders; these CEOs are often MBAs. Often the founders have sold, retired, or the MBA types have pushed the founder out by this point. So the stat that I want to see is what percentage of successful tech companies are(or were) run by someone with a degree?
Plus think of all the companies that were bought out by a big company and technically no longer exist; who started those? I don't necessarily say that the article was wrong just that by narrowing it down to the title CEO that you have probably cut off the "Mythical" story that we have come to love. CEO would be the post script to that story. Lots of those "Mythical" people would probably have held the title: President, or Co-founder.
What is not mentioned here is that the methods by which those great tech startups got big.
" behind every great fortune is a great crime"
Apple
Microsoft
Facebook
Oracle
are all great heists
And thus it's good to study those crimes if you wish to become rich. The MBA is really good training for finding your mark to exploit and understanding risks..but anyone can steal.
Dropped out: Gates and Allen. Jobs and Wozniak. Ellison. Zuckerberg.
On the other hand, if you don't want to drop out, you could go to Stanford, as Hewlett & Packard (HP), Bosack and Lerner (Cisco), and Brin and Page (Google) did.
This is like half of all little kids saying they want to be astronauts. Talk about winning the lottery! This is just academia's old saw to market itself and it's nothing but snake oil.
This article is a joke. Zuckerburg was a CS major. He was not perusing an MBA and thus was not looking to be a massive CEO.
By and large most fields require a deep education to be competitive. No form of higher computing is on that list. Drop out and get your alphabet soup in order (certs). Keep them up to date. Keep up with new tech.
Degrees in Computers are nearly worthless because tech evolves so quickly. If you feel you absolutely need a degree, then go after business. Business degrees are wise if you INTEND to be in leadership. Or you can pick another field so you can take your IT knowledge to that field and bridge the gap between.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/13/farewell-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompson-ousted-for-a-resume-lie.html
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
This is the nerd version of high school football players not worrying about grades because they're gonna get into the NFL.
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.
Woz: never the CEO of apple
Jobs: not the first (Michael Scott), nor second (Mike Markkula), nor third (John Sculley), nor fourth (Michael Spindler), nor fifth (Gil Amelio) CEO of apple. Not 'till he was fired from Apple did he become the CEO of NeXT...
Perhaps you could conclude from this that getting fired and starting your own company is the model for aspiring Tech Execs?
And a filthy little Jewboy.
I'm confused how it's a myth. Not common, sure, but it doesn't exactly meet the definition of a myth.
He's not even mentioned Jobs or other famous people that didn't finish university. But more importantly he didn't list all the people with a CS degree that have a shit low paid going no where job just waiting to be off-shored.
Stop the presses! This just in! Education increases the likelihood of succeeding in business!
Next up in our "who knew" exposition - Sticking sharp objects in one's eye increases the likelihood of blindness! Who knew?!?
Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com
uh huhuh huh...
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Education has nothing to do with it. The fact that he didn't waste his time on slashdot gave him the advantage that allowed him to beat the competition.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I have two graduate degrees and I'm still a failure.
It's really easy to drop out of college when you go to Harvard (like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg). Harvard lets you go back to your studies in any time of your life. There's no real reason not to give your new startup a shot when you can go back to college later if things get messed up.
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.
If the majority get educated then it's not surprising that the majority of CEOs are educated. That doesn't mean one has anything to do with the other. I got a degree and I will state it's totally and utterly worthless. There is nothing of value I learned in college and I'm in the field that I got educated for. What I learned in college had nothing at all to do with the courses I took or the degree I got. Everything of value I did on my own completely unrelated to school. I always though education was worthless... then I realised wait- it is.
Yea- I'm the CEO of a start-up that is doing great things. And not only are we doing great things. It's a successful free software company. Not "Open source". We only write and sell free software products and services. We have operations in a few countries now and are doing fantastic. Our biggest problem is keeping up with demand. I'm projecting millions of dollars in the next couple years. Not bad for a company that was funded off a $9 an hour job for 6 months and living in my parents basement (ok, I didn't actual live in my parents basement, I had a room, but just trying to stay stereotypical). And yes- I have my own place now and a handful of employees.
Mark Zuckerberg (sugar mountain) is really Mark Greenberg, Rockefeller grand-son.
And so do the 800.000.000 users.
The reason why Zuck and his fellow college drop-out CEOs are so compelling examples for many, has something to do with rejection of the mandatory college model we have been fed since some decades ago. The belief that in order to prosper, you have to have a paper showing off your grades is simply wrong. It rests on the societal delusion that education alone gives you the edge on the jobs market, where in fact talent, motivation, interpersonal skills, personal interests and/or self-imposed experimentation and work are much more fruitful.
Some people do have other talents that don't require them to finish a college degree or more in order to be marketable. And that should be OK.
The problem I see is that society can make such model a de facto imposed rule impacting everybody's lives, if everyone comes to expect for you to have a diploma, and it may end up disqualifying you from opportunities just because you fail that basic test.
Really talented people tend to overcome that, but the young and impressionable feel compelled to pursue a degree just to avoid that potential rejection, and because "it's the thing to do".
bad future
We keep forgetting that a lot of these 'college dropouts' who went on to become successful CEO's came from wealthy families and had their business venture not worked out, they'd have gone back to college and then laid around enjoying their trust funds for the rest of their lives.
We're also looking at this situation rather orthogonaly. Often these successful companies became successful because of a great idea or product that resonated with people. Many of them incorporated more senior managers there to help guide the 'ceo' who invented the idea or product...the VC people usually see to that. So the fact that the 'ceo' dropped out of college and doesn't have a degree is pretty much 110% irrelevant.
Foil that with the fact that many college degree laden ceo's are lousy ceo's. I can think of 4-5 right off the top of my head that couldn't find their ass with both hands and a swivel waist. The netflix ceo comes to mind. I hear he's quite good at making deals for content, but he's a blaring moron. Without looking, I'm sure he has at least one or two degrees.
I took a different route. When I looked at computer science programs in the late 70's when I graduated high school, they were mostly 5 years behind what the industry was already doing and the few schools with highly contemporary programs (dartmouth, mit, etc) were expensive and hard to get into. Since the maturing computer business needed people, my relative immaturity and lack of a degree were easily overlooked by many. Twenty years later I'd started and sold several businesses and was sitting on the board of a half dozen companies my company had invested in.
There were 3-4 companies I'd have liked to work for that nixed me because I didn't have a degree. That wasn't really a problem. I made a few billion dollars for people who weren't so short sighted.
The real story here is the percentage of people who go to college and get a degree and never use that degree in their job, or who walk around for ten years with college debt for a degree that didn't really help them that much...not the children of wealthy families who decide to punk out on Harvard and try to sell software...
yep they have all those degrees and they are still dumb fucks!
Sounds like someone is trying to justify spending a lot of money for a piece of paper
or someone is trying to enforce in us why we should go to school and be in debt for our entire lives
for a worthless piece of paper.
Yea I have a degree; I can be trained as easily as a seal bouncing a ball on its nose.
Don't drop out of college kids, get into massive amounts of debt being forced to pay for classes you have zero interest in and pay through the nose for books that become worthless in a year.
Because then you'll really be able to start a business after your $30,000-$200,000 in the hole.
If you get an MS in CE, EE, or CS and you worked hard as a Research Assistant and did well at your internship, you will find a good job even in this economy. Lots of people whine that they have no job prospects after thier degree, but they have not tried hard enough and were not willing to sacrifice enough to make it happen. Furthermore, if you have to pay a cent for your masters degree, you really had no business being a masters student in the first place. With the exception of Law, any school that wants you should pay your way in the form of an research assistant-ship. I work at a middle of the road university and most of our masters students are fully funded. They also have had a near 100% placement rate over the last few years. The "do you want fries with that" lawyers and phds are generally people that did not do what they were suppose to do while in school.
Everyone who won the lottery bought a ticket!
That doesn't mean that buying lottery tickets are a good idea - especially when they cost $50K and take 5 years on average.
The reality is that the vast majority of degree holders in the US will never be a highly paid CEO and those that are mostly likely started their own business.
The majority of new degree holders are now unemployed or severely underemployed.
Half of them have to move back in with their parents.
If you had $50K and 5 years to do over again, wouldn't it be better to start a business?
Yes many people who are heading these companies have graduated, and obviously have more content knowledge than those who do not, but only more than those who drop out and stop learning. I believe that if people instead drop out and continue learning they will be just as successful, if not more so, than those who stay in college.
How to be rich and successful in corporate America: be a selfish, backstabbing cunt with no conscience!
Err, Warren Buffett? Sergey Brin? Jeff Bezos? Bill Hewlett? David Packard? Steve Wozniak?
I know some of you goddamned ./ dorks like to cliche the fuck out of things with cheap generalizations for shits and giggles, but c'mon. Even by /. lowbrow geek-wannabe standards, this is pretty pathetic.
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.
And by doing exactly what every one else is doing, you become the "vast majority". Golf clap.
And the unique are the ones that don't give a fuck about the 9-5 shifts, or the need to go to school or work. It's a waste of time for some, and those people that have it in them, and truly know what they are doing succeed in being more human and free than most. Most humans are meant for the 9-5 job however, only 2% are intelligent enough to escape the barrier of the norm.
Not disagreeing with you.
But on a small point regarding "loan with money from your depositors".
Money isn't lent out from deposits. It's created out of thin air. It's created as a bookkeeping entry against the promise of repayment, possibly secured. A new account is created with, say, $100K.
However, no depositor's account is debited $100K, or even $100K/[number_of_depositors]. Neither is any of the bank's own accounts debited.
Funny when you think about it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
We see lots of stories with headlines like "Nation's Millionaire College Dropouts."
Odd that we never see "Nation's Minimum-Wage College Dropouts."
I suppose they only have so much newsprint...
You finish college, get over to grad school, spend 8 years writing your master thesis and meanwhile write the Linux kernel. Yes you hold on to your fortress of solitude but you end up getting blasted by the big boys who grew smart, dropped out and earn big bucks!!!
Coming from an experience from a current grad student, dropping out, starting up and venturing should be the way to go, not getting stuck writing your thesis and hoping that you can repay the loan afterwards!!!!
The question was "tech exec", not "any exec", or I would have been including a lot more people in the list. Plastics is tech.
The name alone should be enough to keep people from making him a role model of anything... Unless you need a role model for underhanded scumbaggery.
So, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple all conjured by college drop-outs. Only big one I can think of is Google, that has guys with degrees as founders.
3 vs 1