Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Congrats on running against the herd. If you keep running against it you'll be wildly successful. I went to college for a semester after I already had a job programming, dropped out after that semester. The only decent thing about college was that I met a fair number of people willing to pay me to learn what they paid to learn. (eg. do their homework)

Due to good luck with the real estate bubble and getting paid to program instead of paying to learn it I posit that the personal cost of my degree would be around $400,000.

  $200,000 in lost wages
  $150,000 in lost in tax free capital gains
  $40,000 - $50,000 for the degree

I don't need someone else to give me a piece of paper that says I'm 'educated' I'd rather take the dollar fifty in late fees at the library. I can read myself, I don't need to pay a professor $200,000 a year to read me a book.

How did you find your first job?

My first ever job was assembling lawn mowers at a local shop at 14, before that I was selling software downloaded from select BBSes. From there I went into making pizzas and finally stacking boxes in a cold storage warehouse. Most of that stuff was from pounding the pavement looking for work.

My first technical job was doing dial-up tech support I found that job over IRC. Who knew typing +++ATH0 into mIRC could get you a job?

From there I worked tech support for the local cable company, and then wrote them some scheduling software in my spare time. After that they had me program instead of answer the phone.

I subscribe to the garbage man theory of value, do the jobs no one else wants to do but are essential to society. Avoid any job that seems glamouros it usually pays like crap.

> I subscribe to the garbage man theory of value, do the jobs no one else wants to do but are essential to society. Avoid any job that seems glamouros it usually pays like crap.

As a (former?) game developer, I can say this is spot-on.

Spot on if you write A* for a game company woopty do, if you write A* for a delivery company you just saved them millions.

I quit college. It was boring. I got my first programming job from a reader of my blog (www.curi.us), because he saw I was very smart. Low pay (low for programming, but better than waiting tables or whatever) but I learned a lot and, with that knowledge, got a great subsequent job.

If you're good at stuff, opportunities exist. If you're not, but you're motivated, you can learn more, faster, cheaper, outside of school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com