If you want to be a scientist and study computing, college is still a great option.
The OP's point was that increasingly, the low-hanging fruit is already picked and areas of high growth require a deep technical understanding of one or more fields.
The problem is even worse, because the low-hanging fruit isn't. The Paypals and Facebooks of today employ armies of Ph.D.s to work on their critical infrastructure. Google started as Ph.D. research.
On balance, tech startups that do not require a deep understanding of computer science to run are an anomaly. So where does Thiel's attitude come from?
I think the thing to keep in mind when listening to someone like Peter Thiel is that he's a businessman first, not an engineer first, and this colors what skills he sees as most important and necessary.
Thiel says "you don't need a degree to be successful". But almost all his warrants actually only defend the claim that "you don't need a college education or equivalent to build a successful business [because you can hire the college-educated experts you honest-to-god do need to build a business]".
Which is fine. But you're either under-estimating the difficulty of large swaths of Computer Science or over-estimating the intelligence and will of the average person if you think we can meet the demand for high-skill engineers with only people who spend large chunks of their childhoods learning about programming and computer science.
I believe Google would hire people on what they can do rather than focus on their paper qualifications. And I see this being a growing trend in the future.
The points by Thiel seem to be that uni can exist purely to be an exclusive option for a certain [richer] demographic of people, rather than an open playing field for anyone to study and improve academically. And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
> I believe Google would hire people on what they can do rather than focus on their paper qualifications. And I see this being a growing trend in the future.
Sure. Any my point was that I don't believe we can sustainable pump out the number of high-quality software engineers that a place like Google needs without something like a college system.
I think your interpretation of Thiel is uncharitable, and I hope it's not true. That would be awful.
> And also that uni is expensive and sold on merits of lifestyle, exclusivity etc. rather than pure academia.
The OP's point was that increasingly, the low-hanging fruit is already picked and areas of high growth require a deep technical understanding of one or more fields.
The problem is even worse, because the low-hanging fruit isn't. The Paypals and Facebooks of today employ armies of Ph.D.s to work on their critical infrastructure. Google started as Ph.D. research.
On balance, tech startups that do not require a deep understanding of computer science to run are an anomaly. So where does Thiel's attitude come from?
I think the thing to keep in mind when listening to someone like Peter Thiel is that he's a businessman first, not an engineer first, and this colors what skills he sees as most important and necessary.
Thiel says "you don't need a degree to be successful". But almost all his warrants actually only defend the claim that "you don't need a college education or equivalent to build a successful business [because you can hire the college-educated experts you honest-to-god do need to build a business]".
Which is fine. But you're either under-estimating the difficulty of large swaths of Computer Science or over-estimating the intelligence and will of the average person if you think we can meet the demand for high-skill engineers with only people who spend large chunks of their childhoods learning about programming and computer science.