At 17 I thought I wanted to be a sport journalist or shoot rockets into space. Turns out I had zero interest in the path to ESPN and am terrible at chemistry. Sure looking back I can totally see that computers made all the sense in the world but I didn't recognize that then. If I had bypassed college and just started working to get to one of those paths I saw for myself who knows where I'd be. This is not to say that college is the only place where you get this freedom to explore, but colleges, especially good ones certainly encourage you to explore other options.

I think ideally your last year of high school would be nothing but career exploration, but failing that I recommend most teenagers go to college even if they think they know what they want to do.

Despite how much success/failure/I learn I endure, college name matters... a lot. I snuck into Nuro's open house last year and found they exclusively invited Harvard/Stanford/MIT students (I can say this because I was a minor at the time of signing their NDAs)

College name matters, especially when you're starting out (which can impact where you evenetually end up... whether its working for a startup or working at a cool VC firm) In fact most of the time, the people who've said: "don't go to college" are the same people who go to Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford and probably don't realize how much of a network/presitgie gives them to get them where they are now.

As a recruiter I never looked too serious for credentials, knowing myself going through the college only for that piece of paper at the end, working full time and knowing a lot more from the job than what the other students learned. From my former class in college I think I am the only one practicing IT, the others too other directions, including one that was a quite successful music band leader.

I am not a job. I am not a career.

I learned two important things at university that I doubt I could have picked up otherwise.

1. I learned how broad knowledge is. I learned about things I did not even know I did not know about. Some of these things I learned in classrooms. Most I learned outside of classrooms, either through interaction with my peers or by accident while researching something unrelated in the library. Sometimes by hacking on the school computers. In high school I learned that being smart is bad. In university I learned there are people who value thinking.

2. I learned how to organize my time to complete tasks I had no personal interest in, how to force myself to work despite my dislike of team mates or organizers, and to finish by deadlines. I only wish I had learned these things before my 6th and 7th years in university, but alas.

You don't need to go to university. We will always need garbage collectors and street sweepers, and remember, anyone can write bad software. Vendors continue to try to make it easier to do so.

If all you want to learn is programming and to a lesser extent computer science then I guess you don't really need to. However if you want to learn science, medicine, law, mathematics or any other real subject then of course you should. Plus if you want to have fun meeting new friends, getting wasted, and meeting sexual/romantic partners.

But I'm biased towards going to uni, since I live in Denmark where I get paid monthly for going to university.

Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification.

This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance to writing JavaScript for a living.

In the end, I did choose to go to university. I will be working part-time to pay about 90% of it (including housing) which means I'll have practically no debt. The main reason for me to go, was that I don't want to de a developer for the rest of my life. I think that having a degree will make a eventual career switch a lot easier.

Nowadays in a hiring position, I don't care too much about the degree, but I do look more for commitment to something. The interview is an indicator of socialization as well and the deciding factor of wanting to work with someone.

Middle class Taiwanese family of white collar parents. Went to undergrad, dabbled in a few side projects and dropped out to work at a game company, a startup as an employee, and my own startup, in that order.

Learnings: found out I knew very little, and the branding/network/advice I could get from school would save me from reinventing the wheel over and over as a unvetted/newbie entrepreneur. This is hugely important and people don't assign enough value to it. For things where you need someone to hire you: you need to convince them somehow, and getting that piece of paper helps cover their butt and makes their life easier. I went back to school to have a bit of optionality.

Graduated and was planning on doing grad school. Spent first quarter basically playing D&D and League and barely scraped by academically, spent a few weekends hanging out with fellow Burners at a theme camp and collaborated on a few projects. I dropped out (for good this time) and pursued them -- all of them failed in the next 2 years, but what was useful was that I learned who were the good cofounder/advisors and how this kinda opaque process worked. Hit both a good startup as an advisor/early employee, then cofounded a cashflow business that I then bought out and proceeded to run for a decade.

Learnings: Knowledge and network are filled with plenty of opportunity costs -- and there's ways to make it both as a generalist and a specialist... ideally you can optimize for the intersect of what you want and what the world wants, and that ends up being the hard part. My own path was largely unplanned and opportunistic -- by hanging around an area of opportunity long enough and being ready I was able to access enough things to mildly succeed (didn't hit the stock jackpot, but I have a reasonable business).

Back to the question: the article answers it in the first few paragraphs - it depends on the person but is usually the "harder way". I only took the path because I had the priviledge/luxury to chase what I wanted, despite the vague expected value.

The way I see it, altough I learned a lot in uni, it's basically a "VIP" token to get yourself a job. And that's sad. Lots of companies will hire physics and math grads _just because_. They think they have "problem solving skills" - let me tell you - there are a tonne of STEM grads that do not have these skills (putting it politely) but get hired anyway.

This is an urgent view.

The post-hoc justifications of people who either didn't go, or people who did go but want to believe their other accomplishments are more defining - are not valuable to someone who has the means and opportunity to make the investment. The more arbitrary and meaningless having a degree seems, the more important it is to actually get one, because without one, you are subject to the even more arbitrary and meaningless barriers that it will otherwise unlock. You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate. A "degree," is in effect the degree of trajectory for the compounding rate of the value of your experience to others, where you don't see the effects until much later.

Look at the rate of occurrence of non-degreed people above a certain level of financial success, property ownership, executive management, assets, and opportunity, and then compare them to the very long tail of the hundreds-of-millions other non-degreed people you are in a labour market with. The distribution of that curve looks a lot like lottery winners. Given outcomes are exponentially distributed, should you make an investment, or just play the lottery? Get a degree, or always work for people who have one when you don't.

People who think education is mainly about skills and training don't understand what education is. Suffice it to say that a degree is a strategic investment. If you don't know what that means, I recommend investing in your education.

1) You don't actually want to do the work to finish a degree, 2) your only options are to get an extremely mediocre degree, or 3) you will have to go into savage debt to get a degree.

Then there are the exceptional folks who could do well anywhere (who, presumably, would also be the high-flyers if they went to a university).

For everyone else, getting a decent degree should almost be a no-brainer. It will be useful. HR will like it, pretty much forever. The "lost years" of work experience will rapidly converge to insignificance (a point that seems lost on the folks who think that it's only university degrees become less significant as you get older).

You can do a range of subjects - some of them, shock horror, not narrowly vocational (a lot of the discussion here seems to imply that the sum total of what we should learn after high school somehow begins and ends with "programming and computer science"). Further, you can do these subjects at a much higher level and with greater intensity than the whole "hey, I read a couple books on Philosophy or did the first level of Duolingo in Spanish" or some such.

It should be a pleasant time where you get to try some new activities, meet a lot of people - maybe including a life partner, but maybe just good friends and some "early-adult romantic" relationships (which IMO are likely to greatly increase your chance of learning what you really want and how to get along in the real grown-up world).

The whole tertiary sector is pretty messed up right now (even pre COVID), so buyer beware. Don't do a crappy degree.

Programming is one of the few fields, that isn’t packing boxes of frozen fish, where a career without a degree is possible here, and even on that field time is running out for people without degrees because so many young people have been getting them for the past decade.

But that is my country, here you’d be absolutely crazy (or perhaps challenged in some way) to not finish an education.

I did a 2 year technical diploma program and went to work as an electronics technician. I was good, got promoted fast, started fixing a lot of mistakes the degreed engineers were making. I got pretty far without a degree but eventually hit a ceiling because credentialism was strong at the company. So I went back to college, a good private college, paid for by my employer. It was hard, because I was working longer and longer hours since I was good and they counted on me, while taking classes part time. The classes I took taught very little and did nothing for me except that finally getting my degree I could break through the credentials ceiling.

So...if you are going to work for a company that values credentials then you need the degree and I think it is better to go straight from high school to college instead of doing it the hard way like I did.

I'm not sure this is a real thing unless you're, say, Richard Branson. I also can't really imagine many circumstances in which you're doing something non-traditional and you can't just pretend you don't have a degree by neglecting to mention it... and if you've already reached a level of "significance" in a non-traditional thing where someone might actually check, well, you've probably already done better than most.

There is also downsides, like the fact it is a job at the end of the day, and that comes with politics as well as technical challenges.

I'd again make the decision (over University) in a heartbeat.

Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.

I got a lot of socializing at both companies, got to hang out with guys my own age and guys older than me, got to have some fun (maybe not as much as my peers in university), got to grow up, etc.

I think university back in the day used to mean a lot more, and I would have enjoyed it, but now it's so watered down cause everyone goes, and political / cultural movements have made the university programs require much more effort and much less thought

Just my 2 cents

Edit: also, to add to this, at the same time I also learned a lot of stuff completely outside of the domain of software through books on my own. philosophy books, history books, sociology books, etc. etc. I really liked that I was able to carefully select the authors and books and topics to the ones that grabbed my eye.

edit 2: oh ya! i also got a lot of fun socializing at the bootcamp too.

University was so much more than learning how to program a computer so that I could get a job, I knew how to that that before I started. Almost none of what I learned at university I've ended up using in my career. But it was good to scratch that intellectual itch, I enjoyed learning what I learned, which is why I chose software development as a career, even if it isn't knowledge I use in everyday life. It was also an opportunity for me to move to a new city and become an independent adult and grow as a person, while meeting and socialising with people I would've never met had I stayed in my home town or even moved to a different city to attend a coding bootcamp.

Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.

Nobody ever asks me what college I attended. Nobody cares.

Usually this is a good sign you do not want to be an employee there.

This is why so many Americans view university as an elitist institution :) I agree about high school. High school is why I decided the education system was not for me (right or wrong, it was just a horrible experience).

I learned #1 while cold calling businesses to sell phone systems. You have to talk to people, make friends, and genuinely understand why companies operate the way they do. You can learn how large the world is without sitting in a classroom.

I learned #2... well in every job I've had.

What I feel I missed by not finishing university was the time to deeply understand a single subject. But then again, I was taking classes all over the spectrum. Maybe I was never meant for a deep understanding of a single subject.

OTOH, as far as recommending non-traditional paths, I wouldn't for my kids. I am extremely self driven. I never realized that most people are not this way.

I myself didn't graduate, because the allure of starting a company was too strong. Here I am 20 years later advising people with degrees. If you are dedicated enough and creative enough (in the hacker kind of way) you can become skilled in just about anything you want.

However without a degree there are doors that are closed to you. For example the UC system will not even consider you for an MBA if you don't have an undergraduate degree. Don't even bother applying. Other private institutions will consider you but you need to be absolutely exceptional to get in.

I use that just as one example. People with a degree (especially a good degree) can stroll into an opportunity that I have to work 10X harder to to get. That said, once I'm in I tend to outperform my peers simply because I'm used to a world set on "hard mode" at all times.

Another thing I'm lacking are the deep friendships and connections that people who have a degree seem to have. That, to me, is the biggest loss from skipping a degree. Despite significant effort I don't seem to be able to make that part up.

The tech industry generally rewards those who can self-teach (tech is constantly changing), self-organize, and put in the effort.

A lot of people say university helps build a professional network.

Well anything you put put 4-8 years of concentrated effort into will help build a professional network. And if you go the route of internships and jr. level roles, you'll be paid while you do it.

A couple of points:

- going to college has nothing to do with whether you can write good software. Even CS grads do a ton of learning on the job, and lots of great developers started as hobbyists or came in from unrelated fields.

- Going to University doesn't guarantee you a good job. When I waited tables, I knew busboys with masters degrees.

- You can get hired (even for senior / principal level roles) without a degree. The degree doesn't mean you are good at what you do, and so it's often not a factor in hiring.

The exception is junior positions which are easier to get with a degree, but this discrepancy vanishes after you break into the industry.

The US spends ~3.5% of GDP on non-tertiary education and ~2.5% on tertiary education. If what you are saying is representative of the general population, it means there is a massive unjustified waste of resources.

You are, of course, doubly fortunate.

> the freedom to pursue intellectual curiosity is a thing which universities offer almost unconditional unlike jobs

The hypothetical awakening of a person's intelligence is a battle against much more dominant social conditioning. And then students self-select for narrowness of perspective in a programme. As you note, the job market and consumerism are fatal stages of later conformity.

There is always the chance that some discussion or chance meeting will awaken a mind. But it seems far too accidental, assuming a society with libraries and recognised need for genuine public discourse.

In many economies, university isn't unconditional. It has become so expensive in some cases that graduates carry heavy debt for decades.

Does a person need to go to university? I would say that a person is better off reading at the library and seeking serious discussion rather than seeking credential-rewards in the edu-bubble. The shoddy mess should be rebuilt to make it a better deal. On-line learning is the only way I can see this happening.

This site is very US-centric, which adds a huge monetary component to this decision. That makes this an entirely different question compared to a country where higher education is free.

I also think that software development is a field that is quite friendly and attractive to people switching from a different career or field. So you have the related, but still distinct discussion about whether you should have a CS degree specifically to work as a software developer.

I don't know anybody who learned math or physics outside of a college classroom. Maybe there are some out there, but I haven't met them.

But it goes further. What strikes me is not only an anti-university sentiment, but also a strong anti high school sentiment. I've been surprised by the number of comments from people who are obviously smart and diligent enough to be programmers, but for whom high school was a disaster. And it occurs to me that this does reveal that education is not serving everybody equally well.

So, even though I value my university education, I'm still interested in hearing how others have experienced it. However for students, my advice is that you have to find the thing that makes college worthwhile for you. If you go in with a cynical attitude, that it's just "signaling" or "networking," then you are likely to be blinding yourself to the other kinds of opportunities that it presents.

I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc.

I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.

Also at my former company there was a principal computer scientist who was quite proud that he didn't have a university degree; I didn't work with him much but he was obviously fairly accomplished, career-wise. So that worked fine for him.

Most people are not like that, though; even though in theory you can study everything by yourself nowadays, I find that in practice people who didn't go to university often tend to have a fairly narrow & shallow field of expertise ("narrow" = don't have experience with many different things/ often focus on one language and a few sets of related technologies; "shallow" = they often don't understand too many layers of abstraction, and get completely lost if they need to go too deep). This is perfectly fine at the start of your career, but as years go by (like, 20years in, when you're still only mid-career) I can't imagine this working too well; unless maybe you switch to management?

Obviously if you just want quick vocational-type training, you don't need university level education. But then you should not be the one having problems with procrastination or self-discipline either. Most students in universities are there because they would not study or learn difficult or uninteresting subjects if left on their own. You also need to learn to communicate verbally and in writing with your peers. Knowing stuff but not being to able to communicate and work with others leads directly to low level jobs.

In this sense the biggest value of a degree in hiring is just the crude proxy it is for IQ and conscientiousness. That being said, I've never interviewed anyone without a degree, but then I've never seen a candidate without a degree either. I have hired people whose degree is completely unrelated to the role, because they demonstrated the ability and interest to learn something outside of what they studied at uni.

So perhaps part of the opposition to university is due to the (possibly incorrect) feeling that it encourages people to think of it as "this is the period I do my learning", whereas some alternative to university might better promote people to develop a habit of lifelong learning. I.e. maybe people have been jaded by the experience of interviewing/hiring people with degrees from good universities who just spend all their spare time consuming media.

Which is not to suggest attending university is a bad idea, given its value as a signal, just that it doesn't seem ideal for developing the habit of lifelong learning.

I have two bachelors' degrees, one in Mathematics, and one in Japanese. Those two programs were night-and-day in terms of rigor.

The mandatory "general education" classes were an absolute waste of time, and accounted for over a third of the cost of my college education.

It would have been more productive to spend that money on Pokemon cards.

The reality is, for a lot of people, university is massive waste of time and money. It largely was for me. We would be better off following the German model, with tracks outside University for professional workers and artisans.

Moreover, there are some excellent self-taught programmers out there, who work in the industry, and learn the mathematics and the physics and all the rest because they are passionate about the subject.

I'll take that kind of drive any day of the week.

We were required to take a breadth of courses first year that helped create a well rounded foundation to my studies in software which I value greatly.

I can tell many people in the field have never looked past the technicals to think about how computer science connects to the world at large and it's a shame because there is a lot to learn and much wisdom to be gained by taking a holistic view.

Some of my favorite courses were sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology (I did switch majors) not to mention classics and astronomy.. They gave me a very rich insight into the philosophy of thought outside of software and I've always applied my learnings to corporacy and professionalism.

Not all universities are like this and graduates while technically proficient graduate wholly unprepared for the realities of social programming because let's face it software is a social medium in the truest sense of the word and university work with its emphasis on solo work i.e. individual performance and occasional groups (which are invariably one person pulling all the others' weight or someone bossing everyone until they give in) as well as emphasizing marks as the primary metric serves very little utility in preparing people for the real world and even co-op programs serve only to reinforce the stereotypes rather than disrupt them.

High school dropout here, no uni degree, I can write more than just JS thanks. I know C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, ruby, Typescript, Go. I know DDD, SOLID, TDD, and AOP. I have forgot more about Linux than most people will learn in a lifetime and I did all of it without attending one uni course. I come from a poverty background, grew up in a trailer park, got fucked up on all sorts of drugs and didn't do well in school. Some time in my early 20's I had a revelation that I was nobody and I was going to die poor and alone if I didn't get my act together. Sadly with my piss poor grades there was no way I was going to get a scholarship to pay my way through college, my family just made enough that I couldn't get finaid easily either. So I decided to wing it. I looked in the newspaper for high paying jobs, decided I wanted to be Systems Administrator, and looked up the skills required to be one. Did I get a sysadmin job? Hell no, I worked my way up from Help Desk to PC Tech, to Network Tech, to Systems Tech, to Systems Admin, to DevOps, and then to Sr. Software Developer, I'm now a Principal Engineer.

Here's the deal, I know bright people who made it through college and I know stupid people who made it through college, but I also know bright people who have worked their way up from the bottom, like myself. I've been working my way up since 2003. My personal opinion is that Uni is not only not for everyone, but that perhaps some industries, including software engineering, may work better on the guild system than in a class room.

I can with certainty say I did not have everything I needed to go off and have the best possible career. Not all of us were born into that type of situation.

I would not have become an economist without going to college and taking an economics class to fulfill a requirement. It was so right for me that I even got a PhD. Needless to say, that would not have happened if I had stuck around to take over my dad's excavating business or the family farm. [Edit: I was a licensed sewer and water installer before I graduated high school, so I was in a better place than a lot of high school grads.]

During undergrad, I was worried about the ~40k in loans I took out to pay for it. However, I was able to pay them off fairly soon after finishing up, and would never have been able to attend without the federal loans that did not require a co-signer.

It's hard to put into words, but university was a unique experience for me that was instrumental in helping me grow to become the person I am today. Finishing high school and then going to a coding bootcamp for a few months before joining the workforce just wouldn't have provided that space for me to "discover myself", for lack of a better term.

That's not to say that everybody should go to university, although I definitely benefited from it and don't regret it at all, I was definitely railroaded into tertiary education by my parents and teachers. And that's not to say that university is the only place where I would've experienced the kind of personal growth that I did. I have plenty of friends who went into trades and completed apprenticeships (actually more than went to university), and most of them don't regret doing that either.

I enjoyed college but, I very quickly understood that its only purpose wasn't to enhance my education as I sat through multiple classes that were nearly identical to previous all because I had to check a box. And generally I felt classes moved to slow and would have been much happier studying on my own, but courses often forced my attendance. Though I am a bit unique in my ability on that admittedly.

You apparently didn't learn to have a better look at those things at the university, it might surprise you some time.

The reasons to attend college are more than moneymaking. Social networking, maturation, shared experience, opportunities to expand your knowledge beyond online tutorials, college offers many interesting experiences that going straight to work will not.

> You don't know them because you don't get to them until 10y+ after you graduate.

I think it's actually much quicker. A degree matters most for your first few jobs after you graduate, and your first few jobs matter a lot for your career.