The deep irony of praising autodidacticism in lieu of getting a degree is that one has to be a world class autodidact to succeed in a Ph.D program and that a university is stuffed to the brim with resources to support that autodidacticism: libraries, lab facilities, experts, etc. for both graduate and undergraduate studies. And not in just in one field, but dozens and dozens of fields.
A real autodidact would be in seventh heaven at a university. These kids are just trying to put a good face on being "too cool for school".
The problem is that while they have most of the good learning resources locked away, they are frequently aligned towards other goals, and they are structured in ways that make that clear.
I didn't go to college because I was rebuffed by the sharp edges. And honestly it is difficult to not resent at times my peers that both did and failed to use the resources available to them.
I wish it was just accepted that ability comes in different forms from different sources, and should be cultivated wherever it is at, without social gatekeeping, status games, etc. The banality and simultaneously seriousness of these rituals repulses me.
Because the principle you suggest applies in reverse as well. If an autodidact knows more than someone with those resources available - then they are so much better equipped to learn the material that they should be an automatic hire and you should ignore anyone else unless they are significantly more capable/learned.
University, and especially grad school, is really an amazing environment. Because of these tools and resources and because everyone involved has learning as its prime drive.
We should normalize sabaticals were you go back to university for a summer or what not.
Companies just don't want to give people long stretches of time off of course.
However, I suspect that another important dynamic is that it's essentially impossible at a small firm because there aren't a lot of people to cover the workload. Fast forward and you now have 5,000 people some reasonable portion having been there for 5+ years. OK, how do you initiate a sabbatical program that doesn't lead to a ton of people taking time off or screwing the long-term employees?
Being at university helps but accessing those resources doesn’t necessarily require attending, which is out of reach for many people for many different reasons. When I was in high school I emailed a few professors at my local university (Caltech/MIT/Ivy league tier) and they allowed me to audit graduate level classes, participate in labs and group projects, and sponsored visiting faculty status so I could officially borrow books and lab equipment. Maybe this doesn’t scale if everyone starts pestering professors at research universities, but everyone I’ve met in academia has been extremely receptive to helping autodidacts access university resources without attending. At the coal face of a university, everyone is still dedicated to education afterall.
Most of those top universities have very aggressive scholarship programs for low income students. A surprising number of students at those universities pay little or nothing to attend. It’s actually more rare to pay full price than to pay nothing at all at many universities!
Well, then it's time to reinvent academic publishing. (Personally, I've found off-the-cuff personal blogs can be far more insightful than oh so many stuffy academic articles I've read. If there's one thing about programming culture I've gleaned: those of us who connect the rubber to the road actually know something about knowledge-production.)
P.s. I think you can say "ass" on the internet. Hell, in 2024, you can practically kiss ass on the internet.
In a typical phd program you have a lot more freedom (as long as you publish), a lot more flexibility than in a typical 9-5 job, and a lot less politics on average. Pressure is about the same.
And the possibility of doing a post-doc somewhere else for another dogsht salary (maybe complementing it with some teaching), then to maybe be able to continue in academia.
just go around YT and see the average opinion on a PhD and postdocs. Or google PhD and "mental health issues".
Not sure who are you arguing with. I compared learning on your own with learning in grad school. To prepare for real world jobs. Grad school is better imo.
Being too cool for school is cool though. I'm personally very glad that information is no longer monopolized by institutions and that any self starter can learn anything they like without permission or expense. I'm too cool for school and I love it. Debt free for one thing, adn free to pursue whatever catches my interest at any time.
On the other hand, with the toughening of the job market, companies are selecting by degrees and pedigrees more than ever. The last company I worked for is currently doing this exactly, only looking at applications from people graduating from select universities.
So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.
Of course at the individual level, there are always exceptional individuals. But by definition, they are few and far between. It's not like going to school precludes you from learning other things and being flexible, creative, with burning passion for learning, etc. I would still encourage my kids to finish school and aim to get into a good university, I think.
I never managed to finish my degree mainly due to dyslexia, and started working as a self-taught programmer, but I can only second this opinion. My CV doesn't get past most first screenings and even then people sort of treat you like a second class citizen.
Maybe I should start lying about my lack of a degree like a real con man.
Perhaps. But let's assume those of us who've "made it" are generally acting in good faith (because a world-system built on sand will never last) and not simply slaves to their hind brain.
What's probably true is that between the current market (at least in tech), automated application systems (and, yes, LLMs) of various kinds, etc. companies are just being flooded by applications. They can (and do) various things--lean very hard into referrals, randomly throw half the applications into the trash, etc. But at least one not totally irrational filter is a 10 second credentials check--which is at least objective assuming the person isn't lying. Why not take advantage of a lot of admissions office effort?
At the same time, I can remember the day when certain credentials were non-negotiable and this is probably still true to a certain degree in fields like Big Law and management consulting.
As someone in the job market right now, with 15+ years experience but no degree... This is an unfortunately very visible trend. It's Especially boggling to see a job posting wanting 10+ years of experience but still demanding you provide your GPA.
It’s been 20 years since I’ve ever been asked for proof of my degree, and also 20 years since it has ever come up during an interview.
I think university only counts when you’re freshly graduated because you don’t have a lot to work with given the pool of candidates… but once you instead require X years of experience then education does not matter - but if it ever did, nope it out of the interview because they sound like amateurs.
I was asked not just for my GPA but the specific grades for all of my university courses >10 years prior even though I had worked in FANG for many years. The recruiter apologized for it and said the directive came from HR.
HR is not your friend. "Human resources" -- guffaw! Of course, the Human behind the desk is more than their role.
Conversely, I've met brilliant people living on the street because [trauma]--who can't get a leg up because they're stuck in a proverbial catch-22 where bureacratic desk-jockeys can't help (even if they want to) because those of us working in state/corporate jobs love kicking the can.
I hope future generations figure out how to get shit done.
There is a delay in the perceived value of the job as well as a delay in acquisition of a degree/pedigree so the calculus must take into account the expected job value at the end of the degree.
In my view, given that the tech job value is in decline, and will continue this decline for the foreseeable future, the net present value of the job is much lower that the perceived value. Prospective students should take this into account, especially the middling ones.
When I decided to go to university in 2001 it was after the dot-com crash and classes were very small. We were told that all programming jobs in the future will be done by Indians and there was not future for us in this feild. I took the bet that they were wrong and did quite well out of. But I was also a rather gifted student with a natural affinity to programming so I figured it was something I wanted to do even if it turned out that I was wrong.
My prediction now is that this downturn in tech prospects is not a temporary setback as seen in previous downturns and is more structural and permanent. The pie is not growing fast enough to turn efficiencies into consumer surplus and instead efficiencies are driving down wages at a time where government policies are exasperating income inequality in an effort to chase GDP. I don't know how someone starting today would escape the intentional demand destruction / crushing of the middle class. Maybe there is some margin left in the high pedigree -> good job strategy but I am not confident in it.
Since I think the expected payoff of high pedigree degrees are worth less than what other people think a more economically defensive strategy of not taking on large amounts of debt and self teaching as much as possible would be the way to go even if historically that has not been true.
Somehow, late stage capitalism seems to bring us to this winner-take-all environment. We are being separated into rich and poor and forced farther and farther apart.
In large part for the reasons you stated, I'm sending one kid to a $100k per year private university instead of the $7k per year state school.
I was helping my kid try to apply for summer jobs. It involved a lot of 2FA apps and QR codes, which needed to be installed on a phone with the latest security updates, plenty of space, and a fast internet connection. The same was true onboarding the student onto the university.
Why do we tolerate this world where the bar is so high and getting higher all the time?
> Why do we tolerate this world where the bar is so high and getting higher all the time?
There isn’t a single “bar”. The company the parent commenter was talking about was a single company at a single point in the job market using a single heuristic.
These anecdotes are anecdotes, not representative of the entire industry.
The pointy end of the job market has always been selective. There have been companies that select from specific universities for decades, if not longer. It’s not a new phenomenon, nor is it a universal practice.
The pointy end of the job market has always been exclusive.
It’s interesting because I’ve seen the direct opposite. Also, it’s been at least 15 years since I’ve ever been asked for my references… but mine have never been called regardless
As a child who went through this, I could not put a child of my own through that system; I couldn’t do the pointless teacher-pleasing busy-work and it took a piece of my soul and childhood away. On the other hand, I totally understand the necessity of it. Squaring the circle on those two contradictory feelings was quite simple for me - simply don’t have children. I thought I was a bit unusual for that, buy it seems that this is more common than I thought; fertility is falling throughout the developed world and I think super intensive parenting expectations have to be at least a part of that.
While I wouldn't describe it as late-stage capitalism, the situation OP is describing definitely isn't sustainable, we're all becoming more like Korea or China, high stratified and overstressed societies that may well be dead ends given their declining birthrates.
I recall the controversy about Amy Chua's Tiger Mom a decade ago, the funny thing is that Amy Chua today believes that her methods would be insufficient for the competition today. When we have parents fighting for top kindergartens and extracurriculars for 5 year-olds, you know this is getting out of hand. And the worst part is, for all the rise of "overachievers" going into these jobs, services and products in society just seem to be getting worse and worse.
> And the worst part is, for all the rise of "overachievers" going into these jobs, services and products in society just seem to be getting worse and worse.
Sounds natural, as the profit-driven corporate machinery is getting more qualified and more obedient workforce than ever before!
I totally agree with the your frustration over the technological barriers... you should not need a cell phone to survive/thrive in this world. We're designing a world where the concept of "affordance" is replaced by "dependence".
On the other hand,
investing the $93k/year difference in the state/public institutions where your child might have gone seems like a better pathway to a win-win scenario.
(But, does this really make any sense when our learning institutions move at a bureacratic snails pace, and are bogged down by egos and other inefficiencies? Meh.)
Perhaps we should consider running learning-institutions like lean startups where, instead of success being measured by capital wealth, well-being and innovation are the KPIs.
> So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.
In retrospect, some of the worst advice I got from the internet and even the real world was that college was overrated.
I did well in college, went above and beyond in my studies, and learned a lot. But I did not go to the most prestigious university I could have attended. It was far more of a missed opportunity than I would have guessed.
At the time, the narrative was that colleges are antiquated institutions. They were going away for top careers, and people were fools to invest so much time and money into what was dismissed as rote memorization. Influential and powerful tech figures ranted about college being bad, people obsessed over entrepreneurs who had dropped out of college, and everyone could tell you about Peter Thiel paying people to drop out of college.
Years later, I realized that all of those famous and influential people ranting about college actually did everything in their power to send their kids to prestigious universities. They knew the value of those degrees. Those internet commenters beating the “college bad” drum were more angry about their own degrees being at a disadvantage than they were about speaking any truths.
I’m doing fine with my own degree, but there were so many times where it would have been so much easier to walk into situations with a degree from an Ivy League university. I sat at a table one time where the head of the department I joined flat out told us that he’d need to hire someone with an Ivy League degree or experience at one of the Big management firms to lead us, otherwise the other part of the company wouldn’t take us seriously. These situations do exist, although they’re not everywhere. As long as the situation exists, it’s statistically more helpful to have that prestigious degree.
Pro tip, people hate ivy droppers. The only people who will respond well are other people who went to the same ivy as you.
The value of an Ivy Education is that you become friends with people who have rich parents, and those people bring you into the stuff they start because they have the capital to do whatever they want.
> The only people who will respond well are other people who went to the same ivy as you.
Not my experience at all. I’ve been at multiple companies where the top management came from different Ivies (or similarly prestigious universities).
They all promoted and hired people from other prestigious universities.
I have never actually seen this proverbial situation where an entire company clique is all from one, single university except at very, very small startups.
At big companies, it’s less about the exact uni and more about where it falls in the rankings. Anything top-10 is basically interchangeable.
Being at an Ivy doesn't buy you much 10+ years into your career as an ordinary applicant in most industries, a lot of people hardly make it that far down a resume before tossing it. Getting your first job out of college (or getting recruited while in college) and knowing people from an Ivy who are 10+ years into their career and being able to skip the applicant pile is very different.
I'm pretty skeptical of the networking with rich people theory. Of course, it happens. But I'm not sure it's a rationale, by itself, to go to Harvard if you can. While I've done business with various people I know in school I can't point to any clear examples where some opportunity came along because of school connections. Professional connections, yes, in pretty much every case. But very little to do with school.
I got invited to a startup that had a good exit through school connections. I left a good bit before the exit because my school chum became a megalomaniac that was impossible to work with, but I can at least give you n=1.
Oh. Totally happens--probably especially at small companies/startups. I'm just saying it probably isn't a great bet if that's your main reason for going to the school.
Everybody is self-taught. If you went to university (for example), the professor was there to set the curriculum and force you to study (things that otherwise you didn't know were important or didn't want to pick on your own). Teachers helping with a student's question is a very small fraction of learning. We learnt x because we practiced x ourselves.
And the ultimate university degree, the PhD, is all about learning how to learn. It's unlikely that you will continue to work on the project you did your dissertation on where you spent 3 to 6 years becoming an expert on in grad school. The point wasn't getting the knowledge, it was developing the skills to get up to speed on a new topic quickly.
> The point wasn't getting the knowledge, it was developing the skills to get up to speed on a new topic quickly.
Well, then how do we qualify "this", and help future expert-generalists immediately find a niche and start pursuing meaningful work? (Not that "work" is the end-all, because we hopefully work-to-live and not the other way around.)
Yes. While movies often talk about people "with two PhDs" (and yes, there are a few people who do that for some strange reason), a PhD prepares you to change fields dramatically without any additional formal training. Much of molecular biology in the 1950s was created by physicists who decided to become biologists and who learned genetics and biochemistry and then created a new branch of biology. While not as dramatically, I myself have changed research topics several times since getting my PhD 25 years ago.
>the professor was there to set the curriculum and force you to study (things that otherwise you didn't know were important or didn't want to pick on your own
That's what it means to NOT be self-taught.
That you got an organized overview of a subject in a systematic manner.
What was the expectation otherwise? That somehow another person instilled all your knowledge directly into your brain?
> What was the expectation otherwise? That somehow another person instilled all your knowledge directly into your brain?
Perhaps close instruction and observation and correction? More like an apprenticeship, or the way your parents may have taught you how to ride a bike or use utensils etc etc, which differs markedly from a professor speaking to a large group and leaving the struggle and attempt to master a subject to the independent study of the pupil.
>Perhaps close instruction and observation and correction?
You have lectures (with questions and discussion), labs, assignments and corrections, and so on. Obviously the lectures and such are not one on one, but given to the class you're in. It would be expensive and require dozens of different professors just for one person to cover all study subjects with a degree.
Also a lot of it concerns learning about stuff you were pointed to by reading the relevant material, so it's can't be done similarly to the one to one teaching a tacticle thing, like how to handle glass blowing to get into the guild, or how to ride a bike.
Still, regardless of what it contains, the difference between self-studying or not is that in the latter you are given a systematic, organized, curriculum to follow.
And it's the quite common idiosyncratic mix-and-match, and jumping from subject to subject, and often lacking foundational knowledge in base areas, that academics look down on those who "self-studied".
Or course if someone studied by themselves in an equally systematic and organized way as a university curriculum, coverting the same bases and expanding in a similar way, they'd not really be "self-studied" in the spirit of the term, just nominally.
But traditionally that was hard or impossible - and in any case, very rare (the other kind of haphazard self-studied person was far more common). Now with the internet and easy access to information, it's somewhat easier, what you need is heavy discipline.
The difference is that some folks require having a instructor/coach/mentor motivating and guiding their study more than other folks. Of course it is a continuum and can vary based on the topic.
I have been trying to be an aUtoDidAct for the last 5 years and I seriously failed. My technical skills are stagnating. My social skills deteriorated. My network is abysmal. The value of working in team with others, and being able to talk to experts is really invaluable when it comes to learning. Some stuff can't be found in books nor on internet, and you can't learn it by yourself unless you spend 10 years on the topic.
So, for me at least, I think being an autodidact is not the best option when it comes to learning.
I think some people are really creative and curious, and benefit from having more freedom, but most people need guidance. We shouldn't push the message than anyone can learn anything by himself, even though I wish it were true.
Back in my home country you are either rich enough to pay tuition or you study hard
(as in: you are rich enough so your parents can support your attempts at enter the top public universities) and then there are the shitty cheap uni that people do just to get their degrees. I would call those a borderline scam if people wouldn't getting exactly what they want: a cheap low effort bachelor degree.
I've opted out of everything. Sure getting work was harder but everyone I worked with loved my work so I always had a path ahead. Normally I can only get work if someone over there interacted with my previous work so they know I'm legit.
Still can't deny that my life would be easier if I just got the cheap McUniversity degree.
Allow me to reformulate the title, it's the era of the of the destruction of school systems, as a result people try to learn alone since they found no other option...
The daughter of a friend have started a II-level master in economics and the faculty demand her a PERSONAL laptop to take IN-PERSON exams, when I raised a couple of eyebrows hearing (and reading) that, she say "but they say they have a proctoring system" oh, sure... If we are degraded at such point it's normal try to learn alone. The issue is that learning alone is harder, you can easily take more wrong routes and have to correct them after a while, you can learn things who appear to be good but they are not and so on, long story short it's doable but less effective than a properly guided process by others who have already studied something and so they can create a better path and better distill knowledge and philosophy.
I wrote about this in 2008. I’ve made my way in this industry for 41 years without institutional education.
Institutional education is not real education. As someone put it here: you have to be a world-class autodidact to get a Ph.D. Yet, the school takes credit.
Anyway, what I did and how it did it can be found in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, published hy Scribner.
That's an interesting angle to see it from, it's not "look at what I was able to accomplish" anymore so much as "look at this expensive jewelry I was able to afford."
A real autodidact would be in seventh heaven at a university. These kids are just trying to put a good face on being "too cool for school".