I’ve been recruiting for US startups since 2008, probably recruited over 100 folks from engineers to C-level.
I have never considered a candidate’s college or if they even attended one. The only thing I evaluated is what they accomplished in the last 1-2 years. That meant hiring some brilliant engineers straight out of high school.
Most of these candidates were early stage hires for dozens of companies that went on to become billion dollar public companies or get acquired for 8-10 figures.
As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission.
Almost your entire career value is dependent on how well you can self-learn and self-motivate. The one important piece that school might teach or give you exposure to is how to collaborate effectively with others.
I can attest to universities not being useful for helping you get in to a career, besides resume writing. I attended one career fair sponsored by a university I attended. There were about 60 different booths, and two of them were tech companies. The first offered 40k/yr. They had already reached out to me prior to the career fair and I declined to move cities for a 40k/yr position, there were plenty of state jobs paying that. The second was Amazon. I asked if they had any SWE roles. They said there were only warehouse jobs.
> As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission.
This right here.
The strongest argument against the status quo is that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
In aggregate college graduates could achieve equal or greater levels of learning, relative to their chosen profession, and cost, with education regimes other than the typical four year state college experience.
My ideal college would be 2 years of straight up technical computer science/math, followed by straight going into the industry. If you want to learn theory in depth, that is what grad school should be for.
That's exactly what I'm studying right now at holberton school in tunisia, it's project based and we dive into the fundamentals pretty well for a year and then choose a specialization in the other year, it's pretty good so far.
I have never considered a candidate’s college or if they even attended one. The only thing I evaluated is what they accomplished in the last 1-2 years. That meant hiring some brilliant engineers straight out of high school.
Most of these candidates were early stage hires for dozens of companies that went on to become billion dollar public companies or get acquired for 8-10 figures.
As far as a springboard for a career, I haven’t seen colleges come close to worth the price of admission.
Almost your entire career value is dependent on how well you can self-learn and self-motivate. The one important piece that school might teach or give you exposure to is how to collaborate effectively with others.