I have a real problem with the way a large number of people on HN dismiss college because there are better & less expensive ways to learn the things you need to know and get the credentials you need. Of course there are. The diagnosis is correct, but the prescription is wrong.
There is no better & less expensive way for someone between the ages of 18 and 21 to surround themselves with people the same age, who are as smart as they are, and learn how to be a positive social creature.
Maybe it's because I have a liberal arts degree instead of an engineering degree, but college taught me how to be a person, in the broadest sense. I'm perfectly happy to admit I went to college because that was "the thing to do," and I'm glad I can relate to so many people by virtue of having done it.
My best friends are still the 5 people living on my freshman floor who played counterstrike on 2ms ping university servers at 4am with our doors open, shouting at each other down the hall.
College is FUN. F-U-N. It is a highly structured 4-year period where you have exactly 2 responsibilities: graduate and don't die.
Sure, there might be less expensive ways to socialize, but none that so forcefully eject you from the shell you built around yourself in high school - something I suspect many who hope to eventually be in startups have built. You can say "oh, go to tech meetups", but you can still stand in the corner there, an intimidated 18-year old, just as easily as anywhere else.
If you can take Guy Kawasaki's advice: live off your parents as long as humanly possible. And if you have to pay for college yourself, consider it an investment in what many people consider the best 4 years of their lives.
This is good advice and all, but the problem is many people can't afford to go to college with just two responsibilities like you have listed. Going to college and working to help pay for it SUCKS. Some of the most miserable bits of my life were weeks on end of no sleep because I had a job and midterms/finals.
So, if you have a well off family or you are willing to go $60k in debt and make it the most fun experience of your life, then that is one thing. But for a large portion of practical people who realize the implications of $60k in unsubsidized school loans, college is a rough four years.
You make a fair point; everyone has to do their own cost/benefit analysis. I just wanted to challenge the chronic devaluation of some of college's intangible benefits. Some life experiences are worth more than money, and I've heard more than a few older folks refer to the best things in their lives as: 1. Kids, 2. Marriage, 3. College.
I agree. I am not discounting what I learned from college, which was how to suffer through and reach a goal. Can't discount that experience too much :)
I'm probably an edge case, since I've dropped out of college twice because it just wasn't doing it for me. I plan on finishing because I want the piece of paper, but honestly there's no social aspect that you can't get elsewhere in some other capability. Then again I've never had a 'shell' to be ejected from, so I basically graduated from school with the plan of making something out of my life and have fun while doing it. In college I felt I was missing a whole lot of 'real life' and the fun was much to uninspiring for my taste. It felt like highschool, but with less retarded classmates to be honest.
Going to college is a good thing, but it certainly is not a prerequisite to achieve an amount of knowledge that gets you ready for the 'real wold', nor does it provide a cultural & social benefit to everyone. In any case, people here dismiss college because the ratio of cost to benefit is seriously close to rock bottom, and will probably have very little impact on your career after the starting years.
Hey, I took an engineering degree and it was able to teach me how to be a person as well (despite it not being a liberal arts degree). =) My experience is somewhat similar to your experience. I went to college because I did not know what else to do and it was "the thing to do". And it changed my life. Lifelong friends, outlook and maturity.
Swapping experiences aside, I'm glad that someone is taking up the college side of the argument. I like to think of college as a purgatory for people who don't know what they want to do in life to hang out in. And hopefully, while they are there, they learn more about themselves to the point that they know what they want to do outside of college. To me college is one of the best places for people who are unsure of their life direction to learn about themselves (costs and other factors aside) because of the variety of new experiences and people that they encounter there. Once they learn what they want to do in life, it is trivial to analyze whether continuing with the college degree is worthwhile.
The part about the rocket scientist just irked me. Why are you trying to impress upon someone else your beliefs on the importance of money? Some of the brightest people I know are also the most distant from material goods; as long as they have a fully belly and a roof over their heads, they are completely satisfied working on what they want, regardless of monetary compensation.
Of course, HN is full of people chasing after money, but personally, I have a great respect for people who perform great work for the sake of great work, and I would NEVER chastise them for not hungering for wealth.
I think his point was that being super smart doesn't mean you are a great entrepreneur. Nor is being super smart a requirement for being an entrepreneur.
I agree that money is not the only means to the end (I'll assume most rational people are trying to maximize their happiness which may or may not involve more money), but his post was about what makes entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs need to put making money #1.
Wether the rocket scientist likes it or not, money is a necessary evil. It sounds very noble to go on and on about how you're not interested in the 'money', but when you're sabotaging aspects of your life that require money it's not nobility that takes the front seat, it's stupidity.
It's not about getting rich and famous. It's about being able to provide for your family. It's about being able to maintain a lifestyle you're comfortable with through the good times and through the shit ones. It's about being able to pay for medical treatment for you and your loved ones when it's needed. It's not about innovating for the sake of making money, it's about making money as a byproduct of innovating.
As you, I have great respect for people that perform great work for the sake of great work (regardless of the money), but I'm deeply insulted by someone not taking a slice of the pie they baked themselves when their stomach is churning for food.
In this example, the rocket scientist may be a brilliant man, but he's also naive and stupid. He wants a family, but is put off because of the extra financial pressure it might place on his shoulders. This is like going backwards when the world is giving you a gift to move forward. This is also being irresponsible. You don't want the million dollars and the fancy cars? Fine, keep 500k for your family, get married, have children and put them in decent schools, pay for your mothers comfort on her last years, and give the other 500k to a charity instead of letting it pad someone else's pockets which are already filled with great amounts of cash.
If you have enough money to live the life you want, by all means do great work for the sake of great work and give it away for no retribution. But if you do need the money to fulfill your goals, it's an insult to all the poor people in the world to not make some money out of achievements that allow you to do so.
> I have a great respect for people who perform great work for the sake of great work, and I would NEVER chastise them for not hungering for wealth
Absolutely agree. I think what irked the OP was that the rocket scientist was putting off getting married or becoming a dad because he didn't want the financial responsibility. Obviously we don't know if this was a priority of his but if it was he wasn't doing himself any favours by just giving away his valuable skills.
"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned."
Learning only things you think you'll need (e.g. coding) limits your thinking considerably. I always find it amazing how knowledge from absolutely unrelated fields helps me to solve specific problems.
I totally agree. You should invest as much time as you can in improving the quantity and quality of your knowledge on any field and topic that you find interesting. You always see huge bookshelves with thousands of books in the home's of the rich and smart. Make sure you've got some Moby Dick and some Financial Modeling in your bookshelf, and not just X, Y, and Z programming language for dummies.
That being said, education is a continuous habit of the curious and intellectual, and not a byproduct of formal education. Four years in college teaches you very little in the grand scheme of things, and is in lots of cases not a prerequisite to keep improving your knowledge and skills.
I was curious about that bit. It sounds good, but is it actually true? The thing that makes me skeptical is that I really enjoy reading biographies, and I can think of plenty of very successful people who were emotional wrecks (e.g. "tortured geniuses") while they were doing whatever led to their success.
Rule of thumb: if it has hard Math in it (engineering, physics...) or labs/facilities you cannot afford (chemistry...) or it requires a degree to work (medicine...) or you want to be a professor go to college, otherwise (literature, languages, philosophy, history...) you can do it on your own, it will be mostly on books.
Computer science is an edge case since it has some math/logic in it, that's why every two months there's a heated thread in HN/reddit/etc that started by someone asking or answering "do I need to go to college to be a software developer?" or similar.
> otherwise (literature, languages, philosophy, history...)
> you can do it on your own, it will be mostly on books.
Not really. Even in those cases (or possibly more so), you need the perspective of someone experienced and well-read to show you how to look at the literature. Such people are usually professors at universities.
Actually that holds true for most subjects at good universities.
Practicing computer science, which I'd rather call software engineering, is not a case. It's many. So I don't think you can generalize what one needs to proper practice it.
In college you are forced to learn all the boring stuff about code readability, data structures and algorithms, code life cycles,etc...
Most of those I know who have taught themselves code (engineers, physicists, statisticians and mathematicians) in a non-academic environment spurge spaghetti, and I hate them to death.
Are the minuses because you disagree? Please discuss.
For me, dealing with codebases generated by the untrained is a daily problem. I do what I can to try and help - I sound like a broken record rattling on about naming variables what they are and whatnot.
I actually agree in part with what you say regarding having the discipline of going to class and a teacher versus self-learning.
You are probably being downvoted because of the second sentence talking bad about self-learned programmers when it's a popular opinion that there are many self-learned programmers.
I personally only downvote when someone is being rude/out of line or says something that is flat-out false, never for opinions. I find HN to be harsh frequently (no specially more so than other inet places but still) and I'm actually a bad day away of taking the route others have taken and just leave.
I may have been too harsh. The problems i see are actually from experts in non computer science fields. They don't even know that software engineering exists, and are used to being right.
At least non statisticians are respectful of stats. Doesn't apply to programming.
Many people who advocate or encourage skipping college in favor of experience/entrepreneurship overlook one thing: how difficult it is to succeed. Most real-world businesses end up failing and online entrepreneurship can be just as cut-throat (if not more), having a college-level degree gives you at least something to fall back on. College is also a great networking tool to build the relations that can one day help your startup.
"3. Selling bottled water for more than you paid on a hot day accomplishes this, and you could make decent coin doing it…"
I took the most exception at this comment for some reason. I guess because it seems like a serious suggestion instead of an example of what I understand as arbitrage. Maybe because it seems the most hand-wavey of all the suggestions.
Yeah, you can sell bottled water on the beach for more than you paid but, I think it's dubious to say that you can make decent coin in the long, or even mid-term. When I think "decent coin" I think of an income that can support my lifestyle and family.
It's not even arbitrage, since embedded in the price increase is the value of your hard physical labour in carrying heavy bottles around. Sure, you can make money doing sales and heavy lifting for markup, but it's not a strategy - its a self-employed service job.
A guesstimate of how many bottles you can reasonably expect to sell in an hour suggests that most of us on HN wouldn't consider it to be "decent coin" either. Although if the objective is to show the guy pestering you to buy things on that Thai beach is showing more entrepreneurial ability than some rocket scientists, Sebastian's choice of examples does that.
I reckon I'd hate to sell water bottles in the beach to make a living, but don't knock it till you've tried it. You might be surprised at how much money you can make doing the simplest of things. I bet that if you made the money Joe Ades made while selling potato peelers, you would easily support your lifestyle and family.
I was taught business that way; If anything, in an even lower-paying way. I grew pumpkins, with my Father's help, and then took them door to door in a wheelbarrow, selling them. Seventy five cents for the big ones and fifty cents for the little ones. I made maybe $25-$30 a year that way. I was maybe 10-12 at the time.
The thing of it is, most HN readers, and especially Sebastian, would call me a loser even today; he would say I'm still overly focused on the "provide value" side of the coin; the business I spent the last five years on is worth maybe a cheap south-bay condo[1] right now, and I believe has the lowest margins in the industry. It pays my rent, sure, but if Sebastian looks down on patio11, he's going to look down on me, and really, anyone else who takes that view of business.
[1] note, I actually like doing this, I wouldn't sell at that price; but as far as I can tell, that's market value, give or take.
I'd never call you a loser for building stuff in the world. Never. I think that's fantastic and wish you the best in your endeavors. Additionally, if you were to drop me a line and asked something I could lend a hand with, I'd do what I could.
I think weakness and mediocrity sucks, and it's worth fighting to transcend the weak/mediocre elements of ourselves that we all have. But I'd never look down on someone for building, I'd never call someone moving forwards a loser, never. Best wishes in your endeavors.
Pretty vague: thesis is you only need to add value, and skim some of that value for yourself. Gosh, wish I'd thought of that.
How about: develop the skills to let you do either of those? Any guidance there? No, just some handwaving about college either being useful or maybe not.
There is no better & less expensive way for someone between the ages of 18 and 21 to surround themselves with people the same age, who are as smart as they are, and learn how to be a positive social creature.
Maybe it's because I have a liberal arts degree instead of an engineering degree, but college taught me how to be a person, in the broadest sense. I'm perfectly happy to admit I went to college because that was "the thing to do," and I'm glad I can relate to so many people by virtue of having done it.
My best friends are still the 5 people living on my freshman floor who played counterstrike on 2ms ping university servers at 4am with our doors open, shouting at each other down the hall.
College is FUN. F-U-N. It is a highly structured 4-year period where you have exactly 2 responsibilities: graduate and don't die.
Sure, there might be less expensive ways to socialize, but none that so forcefully eject you from the shell you built around yourself in high school - something I suspect many who hope to eventually be in startups have built. You can say "oh, go to tech meetups", but you can still stand in the corner there, an intimidated 18-year old, just as easily as anywhere else.
If you can take Guy Kawasaki's advice: live off your parents as long as humanly possible. And if you have to pay for college yourself, consider it an investment in what many people consider the best 4 years of their lives.