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Agreed. But I'll just add one option that worked for me. I dropped out after the first semester. Then I found a job as a software engineer. In 4 years I'm a valuable senior java developer that everyone is trying to hire. Have I graduated? Yes, from the school of real-world software projects. I didn't have a startup business (well, I had one which failed, and I'm having one right now, on the side), but it was still a better option to drop out.

Btw, I signed up for a external program at the University of London so that I could still get a BSc without actually doing anything academic - so now I'm 24 with 4 years of real-life work experience and a BSc (not that I need it, but it's there)

So, perhaps it is better to summarize it that way: if you clearly see opportunities for yourself that are better than staying in university - drop out.

3 comments

Yeah, and you will also NEVER be a computer scientist. You will never be hired by a team building a compiler, or a team building a database engine. You condemned yourself to a programmer title for the rest of your life, doing mind numbing business logic for the rest of your life (unless you decide to go back to school that it).

Besides higher education is NOT about learning skills immediately useful for employment. It's about so much more. It's about mental gymnastics, about stretching your mind, it's about dedicating 5 years of your life to nothing but bettering yourself, reading and learning anything you can get your hands on, exchanging ideas with other great minds, and becoming better you.

This is a unique time, that can't be reproduced otherwise simply because you never will have the time (unless you are a millionaire and don't have to work) to do that any more, and when you become older you become less plastic and more set in your ways.

Dropping out of school is a tragedy really for any young mind. So is choosing easy school. If you are going to study anything, study hard things (Math vs English). They change you more.

While I fully agree with your point, the guarantee of developing software for a living and NOT building compilers or such sounds actually more attractive. Solving problems and designing systems is amazing but what you idealize sounds myopic and tedious to plenty of amazing and well-educated computer scientists. We don't need to get into the Scientist vs. Programmer debate but software can mean or be most anything. That too is a conversation left for the classroom.

There are plenty of amazing, rewarding, lucrative, and challenging projects out there besides the poles of Hard CS and bland Enterprise work.

I agree with both of you. As in politics, the two sides are talking past each other.

I think the dropouts look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, etc, and want to say "Look! You can be rich and successful and influential without requiring some silly piece of paper and a goofy hat!". Therefore, I don't need it!

The PhDs and Computer Science grad students are likely to look up to people like Turing, Church, Von Neumann, John McCarthy (as he's been in the news) etc.., and be satisfied pondering The Secrets Of The Universe and be stimulated by working on extremely pure intellectual challenges.

To the dropout entrepreneur/hacker, the prospect of working in an office proving the lower bound of a routing problem over ad-hoc networks is about as bland as you can get.

To the computer science professor, post-doc, whatever, the prospect of working as some web-app developer or "java engineer" and hustling for customers is completely vapid.

I tend to slightly side with the academic CS types, since many people can teach themselves to be successful hackers independently, few college dropouts are architecting the next generation of internet protocols, contributing much to computational complexity theory, producing the next RSA cryptosystem or homomorphic encryption, or contributing to the algorithms to make higher-resolution images from MRI scans. On the other hand, if you drop out of college, this isn't probably the kind of stuff that would interest your blood pumping anyway.

I don't see why I can't do compilers if I have to. I didn't take the "compilers" course in my remote study, because I wasn't interested. But when you reach a certain level of computing knowledge, you can learn anything quickly.

But anyway, I agree that "mental gymnastics", "stretching your mind" and "exchanging ideas" are very important things. And so I found ways to do these things. Yes, it's not the default case when you drop out, but as I said - if you have a clear vision how to proceed, including these important aspects, you should.

"I don't see why I can't do compilers if I have to. I didn't take the "compilers" course in my remote study, because I wasn't interested. But when you reach a certain level of computing knowledge, you can learn anything quickly"

Well, consider this. Here's an exercise, without googling for a solution (other than language documentation), do you think you could write your own grep? Write a reasonably performing distributed algorithm for routing over an ad-hoc network? Think you could write an automated theorem prover or model checker? How about just a frequency hopping protocol for congested wireless networks?

Some of these are not things that you can learn quickly with a "certain level of computing knowledge". Sometimes research projects like this take years and decades by huge teams and brilliant people, who often have to spend considerable amount of times formalizing and making consistent the underlying theoretical models, which can only then be effectively implemented.

I very much agree that defining those theories and algorithms is not for everyone. But they are already discovered, so if I need them, I'll (yes) google them and analyze if they are suitable. Of course, I'll need to know what I'm looking for, which is the "level of computing knowledge"

And if I have to do research projects - I agree I won't be able to start as a senior researcher. Perhaps a minor assistant, it is not impossible, if I ever need to. It's not like "I've missed my chance in life to ever do compilers".

Point taken. However, my point wasn't to play gotcha. Of course everyone googles for solutions, that's how things work. It's how they should work. The point was this: what if you need to innovate something new, that necessarily needs to draw from deep results in pure theory. Those without a formal background in CS, by and large, are not equipped to make these discoveries and breakthroughs. Among dropouts I think there is a certain cognitive bias of WIKIATI (What I Know Is All There Is) - they presume their success in their achievement, and in getting professional respect and a salary allows them to say "told you so!" to the weak-willed people who stay in school, without realizing they don't know what they don't know.

Or you could do both. I worked 15-20 hours a week while I was in school with a local software company learning all those things and doing the academic work. Most of my classes were in the morning and I'd work 3-4 hours in the afternoon/early-evening when all my roommates where playing video games. This lead to great summer jobs and I left college with a BSc and real-world experience. This lead to a higher offer out of school and looks great at the same time.

Recent drop out here. How did you find your first job?

I applied to 7 companies, got offers from 6 and chose 1 :) The thing is, I already had good programming experience and knowledge, so it wasn't that hard.