Over the last twenty years, I have been the least impressed with the value of formal education in the field of computer science for most practitioners who do most of the work.
As someone who struggled to do well in exams and avoided classes with exams, I never understood what they measured. I know that I never applied to Google because they had this ridiculous requirement to see my GPA. I graduated with honors and summa cum-laude. It wasn’t my grades; it was the principal.
Maybe it was being bullied. As a weird, obnoxious Greek, my experience at Brown was toxic. I didn’t fit in. And all I wanted was to put as much physical distance with that part of my life as I could. And maybe the experience taught me that maybe this degree wasn’t as valuable as I thought. And maybe I thought, if everyone at top-colleges were like some of the specific people I had to deal with, then I would prefer to never work with them again. And the easiest thing to do was never to go work where they worked.
Over the years, I had no issues with hiring or promoting people on my team with no CS degree. At Zynga, we did real paper facebook of every senior leader with no CS degree, which was illuminating. I do remember that the guy who was the architect for cafe-world had no degree in CS.
Schools teach you the wrong skills, abstract concepts that are of meandering value, and most importantly, the wrong interpersonal values. Production software is a team sport. School is an individual sport. Production software is about maintaining software over time, not hitting a deadline. Production software is about customers and business requirements, not some contrived technical problem that some poor Professor invented to grade your attention span in a class. Production software is about the wisdom of how broken something can be.
In fact, I will observe my high-school history class, and the value it placed in critically understanding the nature of information and sources has proven to be far more valuable than any CS class I ever took. I would trade any CS class for that one.
But I *never* dismissed a top college’s most important value to a student. In fact, while simultaneously shitting on the value of a CS degree, I would tell folks, “a CS degree at a top-school has extraordinary value for your first set of jobs that set you up for your next set.”
If you want to get hired, out-of-school, graduating from a top school is orders of magnitude more valuable than anything else. And then, because the next set of jobs is a function of your relationships that you build while you work, the next set of jobs. I met an Israeli sales guy, and he told me the same thing. He was infuriated that he never got a job at a top-tech company because he felt he didn’t have the right degrees from the right school
I graduated from Brown University with a degree in CS, where I barely understood algorithmic analysis (I still don’t get how to do induction). I didn’t know what a database was. I didn’t know what a compiler was.
But I got a job at SGI in the kernel group because Forest Baskett’s daughter was a student at Brown. Forest Baskett was the then CTO of SGI, and he interviewed students at Brown as part of a recruiting project.
That had more to do with anything.
At SGI and later NetApp, I got a part-time Master’s degree at great personal expense and filled in gaps in my understanding of the field. But I did that to get a military deferral. I was wealthy enough to do that.
Having said all of that, I think learning and a life-long love of learning are crucial to your personal happiness and success. And a college education, if you can afford it, can help in that way, maybe. And I do believe learning to analyze how people talk and think and learn critically is valuable. And if you need to learn some boutique knowledge and a college setting works for you, by all means, take a class.
But the real reason a top-college degree is valuable? Because recruiters go there. That’s all.
Leave a Reply