Congrat me, I got a job. Should I quit college now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3152801

by methane • 15 years ago

6 29 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

So, I got a Web Developer's job. It is pretty good job. I am just 19 years old and I've been programming since ~15 years old. So, they liked me and said that you can come work with us. Problem is, it's full-part job and I need to quit college to work here. And I don't like college that much, because it contains so much theory and it's hard for me. So, what do you think I should do? (my parents yell at me like crazy)...

I really need help, thank you very much.

cydonian_monk• 15 years ago

You get one chance in life for most things. As long as you exit gracefully, college will always be there to return to. This job may not be. Take it for the experience. If you hate or it doesn't work out, then go back and finish school.

But don't do it just because someone else tells you to (especially me). Do what you feel is right.

coryl• 15 years ago

How long have you been in college for?

What are you life goals, what do you want eventually do as a career? What don't you like about college (can you change programs/courses)?

You have lots of options, you should think about this a bit more, don't just take the job because its been offered to you.

methane6• 15 years ago

This is the first year of college. My life goal is to work for myself and I hope to achieve that by the age of 25.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

Be aware that traditional web development is going to continue to be more and more automated, cheaper, and commoditized.

I used to make good money as a PHP developer 10 years ago. These days I have been priced out of the PHP job market because I'm competing with every college dropout that's willing to do my job for a lot less.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

Finish college.

You NEED that theory stuff. If you don't get it now, it will stunt your growth and will limit how good you'll get at your craft (mainly because you'll keep making rookie mistakes for the rest of your life because you won't understand the theory behind what you're doing).

Quitting something just because it's hard is a very bad habit to get into. All it does is keep you on the bottom rung for the rest of your life. The good things are hard to get. That never changes no matter your age or station in life.

If you really want to do well in life, start researching companies now, while you're still in school. Find out what they're doing. Find out who they're looking for. Get contacts within those companies and talk to them. Build up a contact network. It's WHO you know that gets you in the door, and WHAT you know that keeps you going.

methane6• 15 years ago

How would I need that theory stuff if it contains hardware and other similar stuff and I am not planing to do anything with that kind of things in my career (I just want to be a software programmer, because I love it)? I am just feeling that I am studying lots of useless things...

Thank you very much for researching companies advice, it's a very good advice, I will start doing that.

whichdan• 15 years ago

Start researching the technology it takes to run a site like Facebook. There's a reason companies of their size are looking for Masters/PHDs.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

Most definitely, some of the stuff you're studying you'll never use. But a career in software engineering takes a LOT of twists and turns, ups and downs. Technologies and techniques come in and out of vogue. But one thing remains solid throughout: Algorithms. Without a solid understanding of algorithms, you'll never be able to write efficient software. And what's worse, you'll never even know why. You'll lack the tools to even be able to question why, until you study the algorithms written by the giants of computer science. They've done the hard work for you. All you need to do is learn the how and why.

But it doesn't stop there. You also need to have a solid understanding of at least one level below where you're working at (and preferably many levels). I'll relate a small example:

When I was working at a bank, all of our software was written in high level languages (mostly COBOL, Java, Python, and PERL). You'd figure that there's no need to understand CPU architecture, right? WRONG.

We started getting reports that our web app (for funds transfers) was crashing (not the regular Java crash, where the app keeps going; the hard crash where the entire web app goes down and has to be restarted).

Needless to say this was costing us a lot of money in lost business. All we had was a Java crash report with a stack trace that went into a JNI call. At this point, it's outside of Java, so the trail ran cold. Or did it?

One nice thing about Java crash reports is that they include a memory dump of the stack area, as well as a dump of the CPU registers. I know software and hardware top-to-bottom, from transistors to logic gates, to CPUs & machine language, through the BIOS, kernel, OS, libraries, all the way to the application level. It wasn't that difficult to trace back through the stack in the memory dump, disassemble the shared library that JNI was calling (a library for secure thumbprint recognition), and use the stack offsets to track execution right up to the memcpy() call that was being passed a NULL pointer (the thumbprint recognizer code returned NULL if the scan was incomplete, and the the library wasn't sanity checking the result before making a copy of the scan buffer). I was able to turn the library vendor's story around from "It's a problem on your side" to "We'll have a fix out for you in a couple of days".

I was the ONLY person in the company capable of doing this, simply because I paid attention in college. The knowledge I leveraged to fix the problem was seen as pure magic by other engineers because they didn't understand the theory and lacked even a way to ask the right questions, let alone answer them. Finding the answer is easy; It's finding the question that's hard.

So yeah, you can skip college and live a life of mediocrity. It pays pretty good, too. But you'll always be on the bottom rung. You'll be the guy who gets work in good times, and then gets laid off in bad times. When the market's hot (like it is now), companies tend to get driven to desperation, taking any programmer with a pulse. And then the bubble bursts, leaving all these now-jobless mediocre programmers asking "Why me?" when it's really their own fault.

If you're serious about programming, you'll take the time to learn. The best programmers never stop learning new things, and never stop reading new books. College is merely the beginning of learning & knowledge.

beatpanda• 15 years ago

No, you should not quit college. I worked a full time web development job while attending college from age 20 to 22 and I was much better off for the experience. I will finish my bachelor's next semester, and the combination of the experience and the degree are attracting far, far better jobs than the one I had at that age.

rorrr• 15 years ago

Do both. Most high paying jobs require a BS degree. HR often simply throws out resumes without bachelor degrees, even if you had 20 years of programming experience.

randomanonymous2• 15 years ago

Wait, you don't have time for what? I worked full time + (IE overtime, IE 40-50 hour weeks), and went to school fulltime and also picked up 4.0's. The whole I can't work because I have school, or I can't go to school because I have work ordeal is lame at the most extreme levels. Deal with it. If you quit college your a fool. If you can't do both and excel at both your lazy. Get it together.

randomanonymous2• 15 years ago

And the comment from Kstenerud about contact networks is probably the most important thing anyone will ever tell you. Without this, your worthless. Well, unless you are a true renegade in tech. But web designing... come on. You are competing with a zillion other people, aren't prototyping hardware, inventing anything (hardware/software/anything else), so it's more about networking, schooling, etc than anything else!

snikolov• 15 years ago

While I agree with the need to push yourself, and it might have worked for you, I disagree that this is a lame excuse in general.

Good work requires focus. Whether you can work and handle school at the same time also depends on your course load. If you are spending 70 hours a week on classes, an extra 40 hours a week (though not impossible) might not be worth a decrease in performance in both activities.

methane6• 15 years ago

Or I can't do both because I am just lazy fool?.. I am really not a genius or something.

edik• 15 years ago

Yes, listen to your parents. I was also not that good at college and couldn't wait till I get out, but you need to go through it. You will get another job, enjoy college. You can never get that time back and sometime you will miss it.

abbasmehdi• 15 years ago

It's much easier to go from college to a job, and much harder to go the other way. Drop out if you end up inventing a successful business that's a once in a lifetime thing and pulls you out (think Gates and Zuck, not Jobs), but not for just another job. There are plenty of those where that came from.

Daniel_Newby• 15 years ago

You are a 19 year old web developer who finds college hard? Then they are not hiring you because you are the second coming of Richard Stallman. You are being hired as just another warm body, easily replaced or downsized. When you get the axe, you will have no job and no enrollment. Whoops.

Tell them no way, you are committed to earning a degree. Higher education is valuable to you, so it's part time or no time. Do not be apologetic or sheepish. Do not blather on with explanations. Leave a silence for them to fill with compromise. If they truly like you, or if they are desperate for a warm body, they will likely compromise on part time or summer work.

caw• 15 years ago

I agree with this. If they want you and not a person who can code, they'll work with you on your school schedule. Either part time or remote work or flex hours. At the beginning of every semester, probably about 2 weeks in you sit down and talk about what your schedule will be like. The two weeks allows you to see what sort of course load you have and homework load. I did this and worked the last 3 years of college, 12-20 hours a week depending on courses, but I couldn't work outside of business hours.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

No, no, no, don't quit college. Your parents are completely right (sans yelling). Jobs come and go, but fundamental education is just that - the foundation for everything else that you are going to learn through other means. No foundation = mess in the head.

Besides, people who are self-taught are always treated with extra suspicion during the selection, interview and the trialing process compared to those with a proper degree. And quite rightfully at that. If you have Masters in Comp.Sci., it's given that you know reverse polish notation. But if you picked it all up by yourself, you could've missed this bit and it could complicate my life as your colleague or boss further down the road.

So, yeah, educate yourself properly first. The jobs will follow.

md1515• 15 years ago

I think you can do both if you make the sacrifice to do so. Take night classes.

willpower101• 15 years ago

Even if you don't get much out of it. The BS will work on two levels. The first is when you inevitably change jobs, you need that single credential as a baseline for getting your resume in the 'to be reviewed' stack.

The second, is that it gives you a higher safety net if/when you find yourself off track in the future. You won't have to worry as much about finding employment just to get by.

SHOwnsYou2• 15 years ago

Why can't you do both? Or do you only want to do one?

I worked full time in college from the time I was 20 until I was 23. Work was 8-5, classes from 5ish to 8ish, hung out with friends afterwards.

methane6• 15 years ago

I am not that clever and my classes are at day time...

SHOwnsYou2• 15 years ago

I can't tell you what to do. Honestly, it sounds like your mind is already made up.

But if I were in your shoes, I would want to do both. So I would schedule next semester classes to be in the evenings OR I would strike up a deal with the new employer to change my hours around slightly.

hansy• 15 years ago

What happens if you find out you hate your job?

methane6• 15 years ago

I've been working as a freelancer, so I know I love to do that.

Macshot• 15 years ago

As someone who quit college at 20 for a high paying job I understand your feeling. I'll say this though, the only reason I quit college was because of my financial situation. Here it is 6 years later and I am ahead of my peers in terms of salary but know I had to work just a bit harder then everyone around me to prove myself because I've worked for companies where I was the only person in the whole building without a degree. Now as I progress through my career at such an accelerated rate I recognized this is not the norm by any starch and I am vastly approaching that glass ceiling (granted I can hack the system to break right through that too). With all that said it is a much smoother route if you get your degree first and since your only 19 instead of joining some company start your own thing in your spare time in school. You will be far better served working for yourself while gaining more knowledge in college. If i could go back and do it all again that's exactly what I would have done as I am on the path to trying to get my start up off the ground. NoBadGift.com

hga• 15 years ago

Indeed. Finances ended my college career after my first year and never getting that degree hurt quite a bit. Note: avoid the D.C. metro area and others where people tend to value credentials over ability.

Congrat me, I got a job. Should I quit college now?

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