All Rockstars Went to Juilliard
Right? Wrong. Anyone who follows music knows that, especially in non-classical genres. Sure, going to Julliard will make you a better musician, which in turn will make you a better rock star, but not everyone does and not everyone needs to. After all, Hendrix never got out of high school.
What does this have to do with programming?
There seems to be this elitist assumption that the best of the best developers all happen to have a ton of money lying around. Joel says it here and this company decided to publicize the idea.
If you’ve read more of Joel on Software (I happen to love that archive, and you should consider buying his book) you’ll probably have read his criterion for a good candidate. One of things he likes is some kind of selective membership, like an Ivy League school. Google prefers candidates that went to Ivy Leagues as well This seems to be a fairly well-known fact everwhere, if you went to Harvard or Yale or Stanford, you’re a more attractive candidate. That makes sense, they’re more selective, their students are more likely to be better developers.
42floors up there loved Dan Shipper so much for his entrepreneurial success that they decided to write a blog post courting him. They said that’s the way all developers should be found, because the real rock star developers are always out there creating their own products and working hard to achieve their goals.
Furthermore, a common theme among these discussions is also that rock star developers don’t go looking for jobs. I don’t know why this is, but apparently rock star developers are too focused on being rock stars to care about looking for internships or applying to things. They’ll just be discovered or recommended by a professor.
All of this seems to completely ignore the fact that all of the above take copious amounts of money.
An Ivy League education is almost certainly a 6 figure sum of some kind, depending on where you go. They have need based scholarships, but if you’re in the middle class those aren’t really applicable to you, and your parents can’t afford to send you to that expensive a school. There’s no way in hell you’re going to work your way through an Ivy League education.
You could take out loans, but then again student loan debt is over one trillion dollars, and can’t be absolved by bankruptcy, so have fun paying back that 6 figure loan over the next twenty years. That seems like a poor decision to me.
Surely being an entrepreneur certainly doesn’t cost any money though? Certainly not the 6 figure sum of an Ivy League. Maybe only a few thousand to get yourself up and running, right?
Great, and then consider that most startups fail. We never hear about those because they don’t make the news and the cool headlines, but most startups fail. That’s an investment of time and money that you can make if you happen to just have it lying around and just want to try for fun. If you’re worried about how you’re paying for next semester’s tuition you simply can’t take that risk.
Same basic principle applies to finding a job. If you have money lying around it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a job your first year or two at college. Just focus on being a rock star until someone finds you and scoops you up. If you need the money you’re out there looking for a job, regardless of talent.
As you can probably guess, I don’t go to an Ivy League school, and I can’t afford to not have a job. Even with my scholarships and my parents supporting me, I could never afford to go to an Ivy League school, despite being academically qualified for one. I don’t have the luxury of starting my own business. I’d love to, don’t get me wrong, this website is dotted with ideas of cool things I’d love to sell to people. I think of new ones every day driving to work. As you can see by the broken links, at the time of writing all of those projects have been put on hold. I’m going to complete them, but right now the paycheck I get every two weeks is more important than pursuing my own lofty goals.
I think I can compete with the best of them, and I want to prove it. I think that technology companies need to expand their searches beyond just the best of the best schools. Specifically, I think you need to come to the University of Georgia, and talk to me. Keep in mind that not all rockstars went to Juilliard.
I tend to agree with most of this, but I thought it should be pointed out that a few of the Ivy League schools are tuition free now. Princeton was the first and at least a couple others have followed suit. It seems to be the direction things are headed. It also was never necessarily the case the an Ivy cost more to attend than other schools. I came from a lower middle-class background and ended up at Columbia because they gave me a significantly better financial aid package than the other less “prestigious” schools that I was accepted at. Not just a little better, significantly better. I also did work 20-30 hours a week during my last year and a half at Columbia (while getting an engineering degree) and quite a few of my non-rich classmates did likewise, so “There’s no way in hell you’re going to work your way through an Ivy League education” hasn’t been my experience either.
Then you had a different experience than I did. Of the Ivy Leagues I was accepted to, after hearing from their financial aid office I found it too expensive, even if I was working 20 hours a week.
Interesting thought. I studied music at Cambridge (England), but now work as a developer for a brilliant YC company in SF. I still think the world is smaller than the divides we place in it.
Well ranted.
I feel the same way 100%. It is a load of bullshit and our industry is terribly elitist that way.
First commenter makes a good point, you *can* get into an ivy, get the scholarship and make it happen. But that’s anecdotal evidence, it misses the larger statistical evidence that student debt is institutionalized indentured servitude and most people who “make it big” in the startup game had plenty of financial and network support from their wealthy friends and family.
How to fix it? Well, I don’t think you can really. That’s the shitty side of capitalism. The means of production in this case is 12hrs a day to just screw around with your computer when kids like you and I had to have full time jobs at 17+.
Best,
Jacob
sorry for the nitpick but “Same basic principal applies…” should be principle, not principal
Thank you. I’m a bad editor.
Anders, Princeton is not tuition free.
From http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/cost/
Fees & Expenses
The estimated cost of attendance for 2012-13 is $54,780 and includes:
Tuition: $38,650
Room charge: $6,950
Board rate: $5,680
Estimated miscellaneous expenses: $3,500
Michael, Princeton and other Ivy League schools aren’t free, but they are generally need-blind for traditional students:
“Need-blind” means that Princeton accepts students regardless of their ability to pay the cost of attendance and meets their full demonstrated need with a “no loan” aid package. There is no disadvantage of any kind in the admission process for financial aid applicants. – http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/financial_aid_faqs/
You’re right, I misremembered the details. I guess “loan-free” would be a better way of putting it than “tuition-free”. My understanding is that if you graduate from Princeton, you do so with basically zero student loan debt. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me compared to pretty much any other school.
I think my general point stands though, which is that it is not necessarily more expensive to go to an Ivy than elsewhere.
Princeton may not be free, but Harvard is free for students coming from households that make less than $65k/yr (students are expected to work/study to contribute). Between 65k-150k they are charged between 0-10% of their parents annual income. Above 150k/yr, there are still opportunities for aid, though we’re getting into territory where they can actually afford it at that point. Details here: http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/index.html
I’m a college dropout. I have a day job that pays me more than any other developer in the market doing what I love to do. I make enough to cover old tuition loan (before I realized it was a waste) and afford a decent living. Parents can’t help in any way shape or form (it’s the other way around actually). I get buzzed for job interviews all the time (which I constantly reject). I’m planning on running my own startup in the very near future (already working on finalizing some functional prototypes in different fields [mobile app, RFID research etc...]) and quite frankly I don’t give a shit about working at Google or any of the fortune500 companies or popular startups.
Rock star developers do what they feel is right and fun, in short they do what they love doing best, what they believe in! They don’t sit around reading about what this has done, whine about what they don’t have and admire what others have pulled of.
Morale: ROCK STAR DEVELOPERS SPEND THEIR PRECIOUS TIME DOING.
anders pearson, Michael R,
Princeton may not be tuition-free, but they don’t include loans in financial aid. They provide grants sufficient to cover what a student needs.
https://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/whats_great/
It’s “Juilliard”.
So how do I contact these not yet employed/cash strapped non Ivy devs? We are dying for good devs. We pay 6 figure salaries to guys with just a few years experience in PHP for god’s sake, let alone quality guys able to build scalable backend that doesn’t break with every 4x traffic spike. Which job websites do you guys look at? Where are you listed? How can we find you?
My contact page is listed up at the top
.
But seriously, Dice.com, LinkedIn, Hacker News, blog posts like this.
Georgia Tech, just an hour and a half away from you, has a CS program that gets plenty of attention from recruiters et al. Thoughts? For everyone else- it’s also a state school.
I should’ve gone there, but c’est la vie.
The piece of this puzzle that you’re missing is that programmers make a *lot* of money. If you’re still in college, this is easy to miss, because jobs in academia (and especially jobs for college students) pay far below industry rates.
I recently met someone fresh out of college who had been offered a starting salary (!!), with his non-Ivy 4-year degree, of $90K a year. That’s so far above the cost of living (or the average salary) it’s not even funny.
If you want to think about the Ivy League degree from a purely business perspective, suppose you end up with $100K in debt after 4 years. Then you get a job paying, oh, $75K. Even after taxes and living expenses (unless you feel the need to live in luxury you can’t really afford), you should be able to pay off your entire debt in about 3 years. It may or may not help you, but it’s not impossible to do, especially for a programmer.
Or let’s think about starting a company. Suppose you went to no-name university and you don’t get $75K out of the gate. So you work there for 5 years. Great, now you’ve got 5 years of experience, plus a decent little pile of savings now. Take a year off to start your company. If you can’t even get ramen-profitable in 12 months, you probably aren’t ready for it, anyway. Best of all, even if you fail, there are a ton of companies who would now absolutely *love* to hire you, with your year of “ran an entire company myself” experience — even though you failed at it!
This is another thing that college students often don’t realize, by the way. Failing in school is generally bad for your future prospects, but failing in business is *fantastic* for your prospects: it means you have experience (and guts), and you’re not too rich to hire! I was the first programmer at a tiny startup that died a quick death and never made any significant money. I could walk from that disaster to any software company in the city and get CEOs to practically beg me to work for them.
Starting a software company is the cheapest thing you could possibly do. Working as a programmer is one of the top-paying jobs in the world. If this was hard, then I don’t know how anyone else in any other industry could have ever got started with anything. Starting a bookstore or restaurant or bicycle repair shop takes many orders-of-magnitude more capital, and the people starting these typically don’t have $100+/hr consulting jobs waiting for them if they need to whip up some cash.
It is a thought provoking!!!!!!!!!