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As long as a branch of science offers an abundance of problems, so long it is alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction or the cessation of independent development.
David Hilbert, 1900
As a self-educated professional working with the best in the field, I think I’m supposed to tell you that you don’t need college to be successful. My journey has been an unconventional one for sure. Growing up in a dysfunctional home with a schizoaffective and abusive father, surviving high school alone was barely manageable. The notion of college was unconscionable to a depressed teenager from a poor home with no parental guidance or support. Computers have been a part of my life since I was eight, where typing programs from the back of magazines into a Radio Shack TRS-80 took me places far away from my terrifying childhood. The highest level of education I’ve accomplished to date is a GED, after failing out of high school. What turned my trajectory around, second only to my faith, was falling in love with learning. I’ve learned a lot over the course of an ongoing 30-year career, and slowly worked my way up from building PCs and doing sysadmin work into software engineering, forensics, and security. With that has come the opportunity to make a lot of impact along the way that’s touched people’s lives, and a lot of self-education. This is a life I couldn’t have possibly imagined for myself. A great career with one of the best companies in the world, books written, a good living, and the opportunities to make long lasting impact. So why would you need college to do the same, especially when billionaires like Peter Thiel are willing to pay you six figures to drop out?
Thiel’s plan for you is a short-sighted one, and doesn’t take into account the difficulty you’re likely to face as a result of taking his offer. What’s missing from Thiel’s story – and all of his romanticized notions- is all the hard from taking this path. Not just the financial hard that it takes, but the hard of navigating an unforgiving world without a degree – regardless of your intelligence. The hard in trying to make meaningful contributions to the scientific community and touch government sectors without a formal education. The difficulty of the mind in grasping for solutions to complex problems but lacking the theoretical foundation to connect with your higher-level knowledge, and the sense of feeling stupid for decades because of it. The hard in having to constantly prove you’re a better choice than the other candidate with a pedigree, no matter what level of experience you have in your field. Sure, you’re not me – I get that, but perhaps consider some of my experience spanning a tech career before you decide to quit school.
If you’re thinking about whether to finish college, then you’re likely not old enough to have lived through the dot bomb of 2001. Or perhaps you’re a recently laid off professional going through your first recession, wondering what to expect. Skills-based hiring isn’t as glamorous as you may think it is. When the economy is good, everyone’s hiring and throwing money around. You’ve got opportunities to jump into new positions that you know you’re not entirely qualified for and gain experience. During the late 90s, the stock market pumped tech full of cash to idiotic levels. Jim Cramer was telling investors that technology was the place to be, and they would be missing out otherwise. By 2001, the tech industry had collapsed when investors realized it wasn’t living up to the hype. Capital dried up fast, and unemployment rates shot sky high. While it lasted eight long months for Wall Street, it took years for many talented engineers to fully recover. Startups infused with hundreds of millions in cash (billions by today’s standards) were failing day after day during the recession, so much that it became fodder for a website named Fucked Company. These were the same quality startups Thiel would want you to start: great ideas, dedicated people, and lots of heart and vision to do things. Their capital evaporated, and most of them failed along with several well-established companies.
When the startup I was working for failed, it didn’t matter that I was good at what I did. Simply getting in the door for an interview meant that I would be in a stack of paperwork on a desk with potentially dozens of candidates in the Atlanta area with better credentials than I had. One hiring manager (a total asshole) dangled a meager scripting job in front of me, then shortly after bluntly decided he’d rather have someone with “a pedigree”. As more companies failed, the noise only got louder. I went from making a six-figure salary to spending six months unemployed. Even when I’d get a new job, the new company would suddenly suffer mass layoffs. I briefly had to get on food stamps just to pay for baby formula, and nearly lost everything. It was humbling and humiliating. Does this sound glamorous? This is the reality Thiel isn’t warning you about, but you really should understand these are the risks. When there’s an economic downturn, the world turns cold. Your friends and contacts dry up. All the doors you think were open to you end up closing fast. When your startup fails, you may find yourself with a family and a mortgage, and no college degree. That $100,000 he grants to you will have long dried up and you’ll end up with a narrow, niche set of skills beyond your high school education that are now associated with a failed industry sector.
Fortunately, my story doesn’t end here. I took the time that I was unemployed to learn some new trade skills: namely C. This saved my bacon, and I dove deep into modern coding. Fast forward about seven years, and I made some of the most satisfying impact of my life in pioneering and teaching new methods in computer forensics. There were several incredibly wonderful things about this. Most importantly, it gave me a direct connection to helping people through my work. To know that your effort can directly impact the lives of victims is indescribable, and I was passionate about pursuing the truth that could set them free. To also play a role in protecting our country from foreign actors who are always trying to attack us was also deeply moving work. But also, to be able to teach and reproduce this research to the law enforcement community and see men and women ranging from everyday meatheads to skilled forensic examiners become enamored with learning something so cutting edge was inspiring. Many of them never thought they could do what they ended up learning. My classes inspired some of my students, who became close friends, to go back to school themselves and earn degrees in digital forensics. A decade in this field provided a lot of satisfaction. My work today in security is similarly satisfying, knowing that I play a role in protecting billions from becoming victims to many types of crimes. Yet without proper credentials, my pioneering work in forensics came with notable hurdles. Simply being accepted as an expert at trial proved challenging. In spite of stepping on every seal in government, actually working in government became untenable. I had been recommended for a high-level position at FTC, but it became a non-starter due to my lack of formal education. It is only because of the seminal nature of my research and the support of great people in the field that my impact in forensic science could have been made by someone with only a high school GED. For those people, I am forever grateful.
Have you ever felt like you had the solution to a complex problem on the tip of your brain, but it was just out of reach? As a practitioner in the field, you largely learn from the top down. When you’re functioning in an engineering role, your focus is the moving pieces – intimate knowledge of the operating system, various architectures, and the pool of existing research in the community. This is all crucial knowledge to have, but without an underlying foundation of mathematical and scientific knowledge to connect it to, you can only take this so far. There is a clarity and an acumen that comes through mathematics that exists nowhere else, and a way of solving complex problems through reasoning and a repertoire of theoretical knowledge. Abstractions in computing are wonderful things but afford us the opportunity for gaps in our knowledge. College works in the opposite direction: it aims to build your intellect from the ground up: mathematics, theory, methodology: from the very mathematical foundations of computation and the theory that takes us from the smallest of NAND gates to half adders, adders, and coders, and to all of the subtle and often taken for granted foundations that have built the computer systems of today. You simply won’t get enough exposure to this knowledge at work, because of its top-down nature. It’s taken myself decades to build the fundamentals and the theoretical base I’ve learned without college, and that process is still (always!) ongoing. You can get there on your own, sure, but the question is whether you want to start at a disadvantage.
What that looks like is a much longer process spanning years, where I’ve devoted myself to personal studies in my spare time. Through books, I’ve engaged with great academics such as Shiva, Cormen, Schneier, Paar, Norvig, Strang, Knuth, Kernighan, Silberschatz, and Sipser along with contemporary authors in the field such as Halvorsen, Case, Levin, and Sloss. Like playing along to a record, I’ve spent years conversing with some of the greats in this field through their writings and continue to learn from them. It takes passion, resilience and drive to follow such an endeavor through into the late hours of the night, because you won’t have time to do it while you’re at work. But it will become necessary the deeper you want to go. I still study for hours at night every week.
If it hasn’t become clear yet, what I’m saying is that one requires a college education to be at a certain level – regardless of whether you get it at a college, or through your own studies. There are numerous challenges when attempting to self-educate. For one, it’s far too easy to gloss over test questions when there’s no accountability or skip the exam at the end of the book completely. It’s also too easy to say “the hell with the damn proofs” and never learn then. Re-reading chapters and re-taking tests after you’ve bombed requires discipline. Without accountability, you may not actually be learning the material as you should. You’re likely to gloss over bits that you don’t understand, too, because there’s nobody there to help you understand it outside of some YouTube. If you took a course on YouTube without doing the textbook work, you probably only gained a superficial understanding of the subject matter and would likely struggle if you were actually required to perform those tasks. Even with a textbook, it’s too easy to work backwards from the answer at the back of the book, and you must be careful to also make sure you can work forward. Unless you force yourself to sit and work through problems and create hundreds of tiny pencils, you’re just not going to learn the material like you would in school. And if you do manage to learn a subject, a good school will have some of their own pedagogy that you just won’t find in textbooks anywhere. The journey is never ending – as it should be – but without the focus, accountability, and challenge of college, you are at a clear learning disadvantage. It takes an incredible amount of effort and discipline to teach yourself and unless you’re gifted, your journey begins much farther back than it would if you had acquired this foundation at a school.
These learning gaps easily led to a lot of depression and feelings of imposter syndrome for much of my early adulthood. Even during times of great accomplishment, I’d spent more of my career feeling stupid and useless than I have intelligent, impactful, and capable. Obviously, I’ve had to deal with my own depression issues, but I’ve also learned that I am in very good company with others who have felt stupid or undeserving of the work they’re doing, and the mountain of textbooks in my office is the prescription that’s greatly improved my sense of self-worth in this area.
I wanted to share this little bit of my journey, because there’s a lot of misguided advice out there. It’s easy for a billionaire who’s been to Stanford to be cavalier about college, but Thiel has never walked in my shoes – and won’t be walking in yours. Thiel’s program feels more like a self-serving endeavor to drum up new sweat equity in startups that incubate well, rather than a genuine attempt to better the world. Before putting all your stock in Thiel’s program, consider there are other billionaires out there like Sam Altman, who tried to make it on his own without college and failed spectacularly. Altman ended up going back to school to earn his degree later before becoming successful. He’s now running one of the most trailblazing, impactful startups in the world. To understand the complex neural networks and accompanying algorithms his company is building, Altman surely must have academic level expertise in advanced linear algebra, calculus, and complexity theory to say the least. While his blog doesn’t attempt to sway you in either direction on college, he offers this advice: build stuff and be around smart people. This is how I learned. It would have been much easier for me if the role models of my time had simply said: go to college. So I’ll say it: Go to college, then build stuff and be around smart people.
Notice I didn’t say his company is disruptive, but rather impactful. Disruptive technology may very well live up to its name but is much less so impactful. Countless tech companies have made their founders billions, but there are few that – if we’re honest – we can say have honestly changed the world for the better. Consider Thiel’s own company (PayPal), whose only real claim to fame is saving eBay. It wasn’t particularly transformative, even in the late 90s. Technology was already gravitating in the direction of online payments. While PayPal makes plenty of revenue, the company’s technology feels like more of an old carpet that someone forgot to roll up and throw in the dumpster. There are countless better technologies for online payments today. PayPal was disruptive, but at the end of the day nobody’s going to remember it making their life any better. Disruptive technology usually only has temporal effect, and while it’s true some may occasionally nudge the physics of the world slightly off-course, when that disruption wears off some years later, the company becomes entirely irrelevant to anyone but the founder. There’s no shortage of executives who like to talk about their success yet haven’t really contributed to society. Ten or twenty years later, many of their companies are old and dated and will eventually become irrelevant.
Something far worse than accomplishing nothing meaningful is believing that you have. It would be impossible to convince rich men in tech today that they’ve done anything short of make the world a living utopia, while their contributions have all been relatively temporary, and often nightmarish. The reality is that once they’re gone, nobody’s going to care about these men, and they’ll be long forgotten just like other rich men from the past whose sole accomplishment distilled down to financial gain. Any good that those fortunes might bring is more likely sitting in tax-sheltered foundations, whose controlling shares seem to be more the focus than the charities that could use the money. I’m not against money, but it can often be a distraction to making deep and meaningful impact. Money isn’t the root of all evil, but rather the lust for it. There’s a whole lot of good you can do with billions of dollars, naturally, but hardly anyone with that kind of cash ever does much needed good with it. Some promise to donate to charity upon their death; a sort of “get out of hell free” card or a bizarre prescription for wealth guilt. There are a lot of dead rich people who still haven’t delivered on those empty promises; it usually ends up going into foundations that pass on to family, rather than the charities who largely receive the table scraps from dividends. I’ll bet you that in twenty years, more people will remember MacKenzie Scott than Jeff Bezos.
Many dropouts pursue startups in hopes of attaining professional achievement and success. Often, this kind of success typically provides only temporal reward. While success is important and money gets things done, these alone do not satisfy scientific minds, nor do they usually make the world any better. The temporary success you may find doing a startup right out of high school will not satisfy you in the long term. The older you get, the more you’ll realize that money doesn’t satisfy like meaningful impact can. I have no doubt that you can probably achieve what you’re imagining right now, but if impact is what you desire, it starts with a solid education to enable you to do the things that you currently can’t imagine.
I’m making a lot of impact in my field, and I’m in a great place to continue to do that. But at 48 years old, I regret never having the opportunity to attain a transformative formal education. Thirty years later, I still believe that I could be even more impactful, solve more complex problems, contribute more to the scientific community, and become more unstoppable were I to advance my background in mathematics, computational theory, and in other subjects. That’s why I’ve taken an opportunity to start earning a Master of Computer Science, which will hopefully lead to a PhD one day. Fortunately, I’ll be able to do this while continuing in my job responsibilities, thanks to coffee.
If I, almost 50 years old and already doing what I love, having already spent a lifetime learning, believe that a solid foundation in academia will benefit me and enable me to make even better contributions to computer science, then I would hope that you might take this to heart in considering that perhaps Peter Thiel’s $100,000 isn’t such a great deal, when compared with what you’d be giving up.
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