How One High School Grad Studied Computer Science Debt-Free and Nabbed a $90k Job

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043275/my-creative-life/how-one-high-school-grad-studied-computer-science-debt-free-and-nabbed-a-90

by Reddichu • 11 years ago

41 63 11 years ago

fastcompany.com

tapatio• 11 years ago

Children of retired military get a free college education so that's another way.

slam3s• 11 years ago

That's extremely impressive and goes along the line of experience over education.

calebhicks• 11 years ago

I love working in an industry where it's about what you can make or build on your own, not necessarily what your degree says.

As a past junior high teacher, I'm really excited about the new ideas around practical education.

mateo411• 11 years ago

If he still has an opportunity to go to MIT, he should do that. It's great that he was able to get into the industry, but not many people have the opportunity to get an education at MIT. He will get to learn a lot of topics(Physics, EE, theoretical CS) that he wouldn't get exposed to in industry. He will probably make some of his lifetime friends there too. This network will be great for his social and professional life.

... and if he doesn't like it, he can go back and get another software developer job.

chriogenix• 11 years ago

I'd say it depends on what the costs are. If he has to rack up a TON of student loan debt it may not make much sense. You can make friends and social connections outside of school if you create the environment to do that. Its a lot easier in school but to avoid the traps of student loan debt its probably better to continue making/creating software if thats the end goal.

jim_greco2• 11 years ago

You don't have to rack up student loan debt at MIT or any of the other elite colleges in America. If your family can't afford it then you'll get a ton of grants from their endowments (and work study to supplement). It's the next level down in colleges, especially at liberal arts schools, where students get stuck with the bills.

vonklaus• 11 years ago

I would wager that MIT has some of the best return on capital in the world. MIT is an amazing school, has an amazing reputation, and getting an engineering degree from MIT will likely be worth it. Like was already said, the network and life experience are really amazing. I could only imagine the kind of people one meets at MIT. Interesting and intelligent people with similar interests.

I went to a coding school (I also attended university) and I would say that when you are young, college is an amazing experience where you learn a lot about life.

I think someone will eventually crack the code by getting a school together for 2 years with >500 students and partner with a university so that students can get social activities in. This, in my opinion, would be the absolute best scenario.

A college experience, amazing education, and a long enough time horizon to learn and build interesting things.

rpcope1• 11 years ago

Agreed. One day app programming will get old, and if you want to do something different, and cool, especially if it involves mathematics or other difficult problems, that MIT degree is probably worth its weight in gold. Just getting to study with the best minds in many fields should be worth it...I guess I'm rather perplexed why anyone would turn down a chance to go study there as an undergraduate.

robotkilla7• 11 years ago

He should still go to college or budget his time in such a way that he is able to study the things he would learn in college.

This is coming from someone who has been in the industry for 12 years. I was homeschooled my entire life (until attending and dropping out of a community college). I thought that meant I was using correspondence courses but recently discovered from my mother that she just purchased text books and used those to educate me (save for 1 year during "grade school" and all of high school which was correspondence).

As I said, I've been in the industry for 12 years and to this day I feel like I'm judged harsher in interviews.

Also I'm not bragging about the homeschooling. I'm pretty ashamed of it.

qmalxp• 11 years ago

FWIW I regularly got destroyed by the homeschooled kids in math competitions in high school. That said, they were a weird bunch.

robotkilla7• 11 years ago

I was raised in an ultra religious hosehold that didn't allow me to associate with people from the "World".

What do you mean by weird? This seems perfectly cromulent to me.

endsarcasm

username3• 11 years ago

$90k with benefits?

diverightin63• 11 years ago

Make School takes 25% of your salary for two years. $45,000 is quite a price tag in my mind.

jim_greco2• 11 years ago

He had to pay 25% of 2 years * $90k for this. This is a terrible trade off. MIT is incredibly generous with grants and work study programs. My girlfriend's family ended up paying ~$10k a year to go to one of the best schools in the world. And when you graduate you're looking at a job well north of six figures.

Edit: It was actually ~6k for her. Class of '05.

robotkilla7• 11 years ago

do they give grants to people in their 30s who already know how to program?

urda• 11 years ago

I obtained my B.S. and M.Eng in Computer Engineering & Computer Science also debt-free, and landed a 100k+ job straight out of college.

I had to work my butt off with a few part-time gigs, had to do some smart saving, and cost managemen. I was able to do it without locking myself into anyone who wanted a cut of my pie.

It's not impossible, but you have to be willing to commit to it.

seanflyon• 11 years ago

"Debt-Free" is a real stretch.

In contrast, students at Make School pay tuition through their internship earnings and 25% of their earnings in the first two years on the job.

Coming out of a 6 month program owing $45k of future earnings sounds like debt to me.

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

This is an easily overlooked point, that's about how much debt I had when I dropped out of college to go into software development full time. That said I would have probably picked Make School over college if given the option....

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

As someone who dropped out of college to go into software development full time [0] I can relate quite a bit to this article. After graduating HS I went to college, that's just "what you did", I never considered another path until around my second year in college and even then didn't do anything until spring break my junior year when I worked a full 40hr week and loved it, my stress levels plummeted and I decided "Why wait?" I talked to my parents and my boss then went to the guidance office and dropped out.

I'm still young (24) so I'm not going to say "Everything worked out perfectly" because I can't know that yet but so far it has. After I had 2 companies under my belt I was able to go just about wherever I wanted (That is anywhere that my skill set lined up with what they were looking for) because I've found employers care a lot more about what you can do/what you have done than a piece of paper from a university. I'm not ready to write off college completely but in it's current state I don't see it lasting much longer. The college bubble will burst if they don't start making changes. The world has changed but colleges have not, they no longer prepare student for the real world (if they ever did in the first place) and they don't guarantee a job.

I love my job and what I do. I have no plans on finishing my college education, I might take community classes at some point but really I don't see the point. It doesn't affect me in my job searches and that money could be better used to pay off my college loans. I have older people tell me all the time that I should finish college but I think this is more because they grew up in a time when that worked not because they are actually right that I'll need it in the future. IMHO a degree only helps for your first-second job (if that) and after that no one cares.

I think another important point is a number of people I am friends with or have talked with seem to think the end of college marks the end of learning. That couldn't be further from the truth, I learn every day and spend a vast majority of my free time working to get better at what I know and/or pick up new languages/skills. I didn't drop out to stop learning, I dropped out to start learning things that mattered. If I ever went back to school I don't know if I would even go for my CS degree but instead take classes on subjects that are not as easy (for me) to learn online or that I might just like the classroom atmosphere for like writing or history maybe.

[0] http://joshstrange.com/why-i-canceled-my-college-subscriptio...

USNetizen4• 11 years ago

People confuse entry level programming with true computer science. I'm sorry, but there is no way a few months at some "hacker school" will replace a four year degree heavy in mathematics, theory and design.

Schools like these are producing mediocre coders, at best. Which is fine if you just want to write a few small apps. But you REALLY need that CS experience and education to effectively work on large scale engineered systems. There is no way around it.

On a side note, I also got a CS degree debt free. I served my country to get it. People want so much for nothing - there are no true shortcuts in life.

ericcholis• 11 years ago

On a side note, I also got a CS degree debt free. I served my country to get it. People want so much for nothing - there are no true shortcuts in life.

I'd argue that you paid a higher debt in some ways. Glad to see that it paid off though.

woah2• 11 years ago

Actually, CS degrees have little to do with programming skill. I work with hacker school graduates that write cleaner more maintainable code faster than others with CS degrees and 20 years of experience.

EDIT: Actually, the fact that you mention "large scale engineered systems" is interesting. Generally, I have found large, monolithic, tightly coupled systems to be very unmaintainable. "Building a small app" (or a bunch of them), along with in-house libraries tends to be the way to go if you want maintainability. "Building a large scale engineered system" might actually be a red flag when it comes to code reusability and quality.

USNetizen4• 11 years ago

That is your social proof. Try passing one of these hacker school grads off in an engineered environment at Google scale - they fall apart quickly.

You proved my point, though. Programming is only one small aspect of computer science. Engineering, mathematics and theory is the biggest part which you can't get at a 6 week school.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

I've met individuals with one year experience in doing something the wrong way, 20 times. I think the CS degree will prepare the right person to be a better programmer while letting the wrong person slide through. So it may be that the hacker school doesn't prepare the right person as well, but works far better at quickly culling the wrong person, meaning they would be the safer choice to hire from.

USNetizen4• 11 years ago

I think you haven't worked much in enterprise environments. You confuse "monolithic" with engineering. Nowhere does an engineered system have to be "tightly coupled" ... I think you could benefit from some of that CS education to see what I mean.

You're confusing "engineered," as in orderly, organized and planned according to specifications with "legacy" systems. A little more time in industry will show the difference.

crimsonalucard4• 11 years ago

I've met these hacker school/self taught types. One of them worked as a programmer for 20 years and didn't know what was recursion until about a year ago. He gets away with it because in programming there are many ways to solve a problem. Usually you only need to solve the problem rather then find the best way to do it.

A CS graduate will know about a 50 ways to solve a problem and will have the ability to find the most optimal way to do it. He'd probably take twice as long as the hacker school graduate who'd solve the problem using the one canned method he was taught in hacker school.

rnovak• 11 years ago

I cannot agree with this comment more than I do. Also, thank you for your service.

th0br0• 11 years ago

This comment reminded me of http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/sunday-review/please-dont-...

duaneb3• 11 years ago

This is crap. Yes, CS has important theory you won't learn about in "hacker school", but it's not like the (ridiculously expensive) education itself is necessary. Everything you need is on wikipedia and stackoverflow.

Kalium3• 11 years ago

In theory, you don't need college to learn much of anything. In practice, few people are going to correctly teach themselves discrete mathematics within a reasonable timeframe.

patio112• 11 years ago

FWIW, I'd self-assess at top 20% of my CS class (WashU), and I can say without reservation that as of graduation day it would have been rank insanity to have me coding on a production system. There are occasional times when the book learning comes in handy, but CS degrees are, in my experience, neither necessary nor sufficient to develop ability to ship working software.

USNetizen4• 11 years ago

Yes, to ship working software you need nothing - high schoolers do it. But to MAINTAIN and ENGINEER an efficient, secure software system (especially for enterprise environments), you need CS fundamentals. These CAN be learned on the job over several years of work, but no 6 week school can teach you them overnight.

robotkilla7• 11 years ago

CS experience and education

I will add that the experience and education can be gained outside of a classroom. I managed to teach myself everything I know and have been a valuable employee at various large companies in a major US city and I never attended school (see previous comments).

In the end though what I really did was get lucky that I was born a fast learner.

Dewie• 11 years ago

On a side note, I also got a CS degree debt free. I served my country to get it. People want so much for nothing - there are no true shortcuts in life.

And if there were, I'll bet people like you would feel pretty cheated.

afutd• 11 years ago

I served my country to get it.

Served the intersts of the military industrial complex maybe. Killing random people on the other side is not of any use to the rest of us.

xlm1717• 11 years ago

I want to start by thanking you for your service to our country. But knowing that, your elitism in the rest of your comment is even more confusing.

Not everyone is going to work on large scale engineered systems. Even companies with those systems are gonna need cheaper mediocre coders to code the app that uses the engineered system as a backbone. So what if a few months at hacker school won't replace a four year degree in CS. Take as much or as little schooling as you want, as long as employers are willing to pay for your skills.

sogen• 11 years ago

So sad to see that being debt-free causes a headline.

rhodysurf• 11 years ago

Except the 45k he owes back to the school is about the same amount my engineering degree cost me total.. That's not exactly debt-free

Bouncingsoul1• 11 years ago

How I studied CS Debt-Free: I live in Europe. End.

atmosx• 11 years ago

I know more about computers than most guys I know with a CS degree. Then again I know physicists (Google has a huge number of them) that know more about computers than I will ever learn.

I don't think that a CS degree is all that important. It's the self-drive that makes the difference IMHO. Then of course, having a background helps a lot, but in todays world there is little that you can't learn by yourself given the right amount of (free) time and effort.

How One High School Grad Studied Computer Science Debt-Free and Nabbed a $90k Job

Related Stories