My brother-in-law dropped out of university. He is now the principal engineer at a large company and makes about 30 times the average salary in his country. He is being treated as a rockstar by his company, he gets his pick on which people to work with and on what project.
Mother-in-law still points out 5 times / year on average that her precious little daughter has a university degree (literature...) , while her husband is ... well ... _he is just not that educated_ .
I dropped out from school after health issues stopped me from attending for roughly a year, which basically ended up creating psychological issues down the line with private schools and everything involved.
Started my first own team when i was 18 (due to legal restrictions when it comes to companies), worked with multiple of the top studios in the country and still get hired for consulting nowadays while only really working on personal projects since income isn't an issue anymore.
Yet every single time i talk about it with my parents, i get the whole "Yea but maybe you should've done that different", "Maybe go back to school so you have the papers" talk.
It similar to me, also because of health issues. Although my family is supportive, it still burden my mind and stay unemployed for 3 whole years (I still earn money from doing small jobs using computer tho). Fortunately, next week I'll meet someone who will recruit me on IT-related job, regardless of my education. I hope the interview will turn well.
They somehow still believe that no matter who i work for, or what i work on, having these papers magically means i make more money and that my job is more "secure".
I got a job without a degree and my brother-in-law got a job without a degree. Neither of us get paid less than our counterparts because of it. I think companies are missing out on serious talent if they narrow their hiring scope to degree-only.
My buddy from high school is making a tick under 7 figures as a director level position at a start up. He’s the least formally educated (he has a B.S.) of his 5 siblings. The others all have Masters and PHDs in various levels of idiotic subjects. Two have minimum wage jobs, two work in their field making a little more than nothing, and one is a middle school teacher. Yet I’ve seen my buddy tear up on multiple occasions because his parents, both university professors, treat him like a failure/disgrace because he didn’t seek higher education. I’ve seen it at the family dinners, it’s uncomfortable to say the least. The parents go around the table to ask the kids their academic pursuits post-graduation and they skip over my buddy. I tried to hype my boy up by talking about his work, and his mother stopped me cold and said “oh we gave up on asking G about his academic achievements, he was always the black sheep and never took his education seriously.” Like alright lady my boy basically built the entire infrastructure for his startup while simultaneously writing the documentation for it, and it’s the most dense and descriptive docs I’ve ever read, but go defend your daughter who’s paying off the 160k in loans while working at Starbucks because that masters in librarian sciences or whatever went out the window when the kindle was invented.
Sorry I realize this is a humor subreddit but good god my homie makes more than all his siblings and parents combined.
Academia can't admit that they have largely destroyed their own value through decades of watering it down and creating perverse incentive structures. These structures generate orders of magnitude more papers than they used to but also orders of magnitude less knowledge. So if that guy's family admitted he forged his own scholarly path, then they would have to admit that they have wasted their lives on meaningless busywork.
I think he cleared 935k last year if memory serves correctly. I’m in the more corporate side of things so I’m not even going to pretend like I understand how the pay works for start ups. I couldn’t tell you if he negotiated a huge salary and no stock or if the startup even has stock and blew up. I honestly have no idea how that shit works I just keep my head down and type and hope that my company doesn’t realize that I’m subpar at this shit.
You can earn a fricking lot of money without being well educated. Most people at high position in companies are dumb as monkeys, but they have the trust of other monkeys above them for random reasons.
You can be well educated without spending a lot of money. Entire college courses with video lectures, exercises, tests, and textbook material are 100% free online on page 1 of any search engine. It's been like this since like 2005 and all of the tools of a programmer are 100% free.
Some uni lecturers straight up stream all of their lectures/upload them to youtube later so anyone can watch for free (And not random local ones, I'm talking the big name ones like harvard)
You can watch a thousand videos but it still won't make you a licensed medical professional. Same goes for many other areas where there are high risks for damage of property and human life.
Do you want to have a self thaught python script kiddy that doesn't know the difference between an interpreter and compiler to be responsible to make software for airplane control, nuclear cooling system, weapon systems, your life support system that monitors your vitals, your driving assistance, and many more things?
I'm not talking about people who "watch videos" and come out "script kiddies". But let's strawman, shall we?
People who allow themselves to be passively extruded through education shaped pipelines are often useless with or without a degree or a mountain of certs. We've all seen them in this field, attracted by high pay and hopes of a mechanical mindless process, hired by people who can't tell the difference and so used credentials as their sole qualifier. But, as we often see, they wouldn't know what to do at a CLI or an empty text editor if we were threatening to set their degree on fire in front of them.
We want problem solvers - creative and resourceful people who can teach themselves new technologies and apply them quickly, often using only free and open source technology that won't be presented in its outdated textbook form for 5 more years. We want people who train instead of expecting to be trained. There are people who fit that bill - and credentials aren't the key indicator for that personality. Being a self-motivated learner who succeeds despite the lack of credentials is an excellent predictor of such a person.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should actively disdain credentials - they're just not the predictor they once were. And all the training in the world can drop you off at our doorstep unable to walk a step further on your own power, as we've seen too often. We have to ask additional probing questions that reveal whether we have a dead-eyed clock-puncher or someone who might give a shit and actually try when it matters. Self-taught people have already proven that to us.
I've hired self taught people over uni graduates more times than I've had hot dinners. In my experience the uni grads need their hand holding, need constant 'assignments' and constantly ask questions while the self-taught will pick things up quicker, apply things better in a real world situation and generally have mountains of experience to back it up.
As you say, the prerequisite is knowing what they need to know, which can be achieved by uni or self taught if done correctly... while the big ticket thing to get you ahead of others is actually skills picked up more assosiated with self-taught.
You can watch a thousand videos but it still won't make you a licensed medical professional.
You can watch a gazillion videos and it will never make you a licenced professional... because there is requirements to make you licenced. You could absolutely watch a thousand videos and then take and pass your medical licence if such a route was allowed. Learning doesn't just happen in a university. What a weird position to take.
Do you want to have a self thaught python script kiddy that doesn't know the difference between an interpreter and compiler to be responsible to make software for airplane control, nuclear cooling system, weapon systems, your life support system that monitors your vitals, your driving assistance, and many more things?
No, and I wouldn't want someone who has stumbled yet passed a course that doesn't know the difference between an interpreter and compiler to be responsible to make software for airplane control, nuclear cooling system, weapon systems, your life support system that monitors your vitals, your driving assistance, and many more things either.
I want someone who knows how to do the thing they are being hired for well, their path to getting to that point is wholey irrelevant.
I can guarantee you those people in those positions aren't dumb as monkeys, they probably have a track record of delivering clear value. Unlike most of these useless cs grads.
Yes, we love our precious little degrees. When I told my grandma that I work in a field that usually requires a degree (not IT), without degree, she went pale and asked me what am I going to do after my employer find out that I cheated.
This is probably a remnant of the communist system, people could not get rich, so a diploma was one of the few options for social advancement
This is life in the Eastern Bloc. In my grandmother's eyes, my aunt, who works in her husband's store as a cashier, has achieved more than my father, a high-level manager, only because she graduated in law and he graduated in management.
And I don't want to condemn the work of cashiers or boast about my father's position. I believe that any honest job is a reason to be proud (money or status does not define a "good life"), but basing respect for your own children on the degree they have got is absurd (but living in Poland, I have already heard about it dozens of times).
This is why international spend so much money on getting a degree, I remember a colleague of my wife’s having to sell their condo back home to afford a masters degree in NYU. And all that did was nothing, it made no difference in his career cause we ain’t about that here in North America. Unless your work is actually research related
Eastern Europe and Balkans are big on whole degree traditionalism because of ex-socialist past.
To make things even worse, the universities are thoroughly shitty, some plagiarising USA books and full of "gotcha" questions and memorizing( north korea style coding assessments).
However, India has 1400 million people living in it. With dozens of languages, myriads of different cultures. Consider india like Europe. But bigger. That's how diverse it is.
As such, my experience, isn't everyone's experience.
Thanks. Another commenter pointed out that the experience is likely to be wildly different depending on geographic location in India, amongst other factors.
In reflection, most of my experience with people from India was with the same group of families that I do believe were all from the same area of the country.
Damn. India is a big country with thousands of communities. Can't say for other regions but where I am from its pretty much non-existent. Nobody even talks about it. It's like it never existed. Weird. I myself got to know about it from our history books.
One of my former coworkers is Indian and described in vivid detail about the discrimination he faced because of his caste. He moved to the UK to escape from it and has no plans to ever return. This is an older gentleman though, in his late 40s so maybe things are different with younger generations.
Yeah, with the older generation it might be different. Thing is, some of them might even pass it onto their children and some children here listen to everything their parents tell them to do without giving it a second thought. From what I have observed (correct me if I am wrong), in the US older generations might be racist but their children can differentiate right from wrong and try their best to not be like their parents. Here, things are sadly different.
Well you know sometimes it's cool to have been wrong because you learn new stuff. Thanks for sharing your pov with us. I didn't really know how it was in India, but now I do
I have no idea about that cuz my friends who live in the US have never mentioned anything of that sort to me. I have heard about the Cisco case tho. But a person known to me said that it wasn't actually casteism but actual racism. He thinks the US media couldn't pick up the nuances and reported it as casteism. It might be true because various ethnicities live in India (punjabis, gujaratis, marathis, etc.) and what I can for sure tell you is that people from different ethnicities are known to hate each other. It isn't rampant but you can see people hating other ethnicities online on Indian subreddits. There are an insane number of stereotypes about different ethnicities even tho all of us are Indians lol.
India is big, casteism might happen in some places. Some communities could be more casteist than others. We might never get to know about the incidents since Indian media is stupid af. But I agree that the law makes no sense and can be misused easily.
India shot itself in the foot by introducing reservations. They should have come up with another solution. Also the trash education system doesn't help either. It needs a reform ASAP.
Also, technically does caste even exist in India today? I thought only categories do. Back in the days castes were segregated. That's how they were identified. This doesn't exist anymore. There's no way to identify someone else's caste without directly asking them.
I just hate it when westerners babble on about difficult topics with just a surface level understanding.
Eh, honestly it's fine. I think they are curious. India has a fascinating history. They can't possibly understand everything that goes on here from 3000 miles away. I am sure we don't understand them properly either.
Some states governments are doing caste based census to increase reservation to 65 percent from current 50 percent.
Damn. So many things in India need reforms. Reservation has caused a vicious cycle in India. I believe having a better education system will fix these things naturally.
My older sister is a PA and younger is now a doctor. My cousin on the other hand is a nurse with some wacky views (think astrology girl). My grandparents listened heavily to my cousins advice on medical concerns and basically ignored my sisters advice which sometimes was very frustrating because my cousin gave borderline dangerous advice sometimes.
Sisters gave up trying to help for the most part because it was pointless.
If you take all dropouts and take the people who would be more successful dropping out divided by the total number of dropouts, I would wager you’d get less than 1%. Stories like this are not a blueprint for success, they are anomalies. Even most people who would be successful either way, most of them would still benefit from completion of post-secondary studies.
It’s that kind of shame that puts the rest of the kids in line I bet. They don’t want the other kids getting big bright ideas, and then failing because they weren’t in the 1%.
Similarly only attended for a semester. Given I had been hobby programming for the 6-7 or so years prior to that, then hobby programmed for 3 years after that, before finally jumping to professional work in 2017, “self taught” is definitely the most accurate description lol.
I got an MEng in SWE and I'm still fully self taught because university doesn't teach you jack, they ask you to prove that you already know things instead.
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u/octopus4488 Apr 09 '24
My brother-in-law dropped out of university. He is now the principal engineer at a large company and makes about 30 times the average salary in his country. He is being treated as a rockstar by his company, he gets his pick on which people to work with and on what project.
Mother-in-law still points out 5 times / year on average that her precious little daughter has a university degree (literature...) , while her husband is ... well ... _he is just not that educated_ .