Do Geeks Need to Go to College?
Bill Gates didn’t graduate. And many Web workers today feel they don’t need a technology
degree to succeed.
BY Lisa Schmeiser
Salon.com
APRIL 12, 1999
When Brad Scott of Clear Ink has to devise the information architecture for a new Web site, he
just asks himself where the site’s bathrooms will be.
Scott, a onetime interior design major turned information architect, is speaking only
metaphorically, of course. But he says learning about “critical adjacencies of space” — such as
putting restrooms near conference rooms so that meeting attendees can quickly duck in and out —
carries over to Web design, where the “critical adjacencies” are of information.
Scott’s migration from architecture into the technology industry isn’t atypical: Talk to a group of
tech workers, and you may find that the majority of them drifted into the industry from a
completely different discipline.
The Web industry is creating jobs at a clip, and many of those jobs are going to college graduates
without academic computing experience — and people who skipped college altogether. No one
has taken a formal count of these two groups, but they haven’t gone unnoticed. And their success
raises the question of whether a computer science education, or even any higher education, is a
prerequisite to competing in the high-tech job market.
The relevance of higher education to high-tech jobs is under scrutiny, thanks to the rising number
of success stories featuring someone who majored in a right-brained specialty, bypassed college
or dropped out — the most famous example being Harvard dropout Bill Gates. In December,
Forbes asked if investing in a college education was a smart way to spend time investing in a
career. Among the numbers the article cited: Close to 15 percent of the Forbes 400 either
dropped out of college or avoided it altogether, and those executives boast an average net worth
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of$4.8 billion. A few weeks later, U.S. News and World Report ran a related article: More boys
are opting out of college to pursue jobs in a booming economy.
There is ample incentive to trade higher education for high-salaried, high-tech jobs. Forbes
noted that a college degree costing $120,000 might actually be worth more as a mutual fund with
a 5 percent interest rate; if a teenager’s parents sink the $30,000 they would have spent on the
first year’s tuition into a mutual fund for their child, he’ll have $500,000 by the time he turns 50.
Many college graduates, especially those who spend their early postgraduate years paying off
student loans, will never see that much in the bank. The article also contends that colleges are
unable to keep up with the proliferation of programming languages and technologies driving
today’s job market, and thus do not outfit their students with the necessary job skills. Is it any
wonder would-be tech tyros rethink college?
The ubergeek news portal Slashdot posted a link to the Forbes article and found itself hosting a
300-plus-message argument on the merits of education in relation to high-tech jobs. The
respondents were evenly split: Some younger programmers argued that their practical experience
and high salaries offset the disadvantages of lacking a degree, while others argued that a formal
education leads to a higher caliber of technical work later in life.
But does that formal education even have to be in engineering, or will any old degree do? Scott
is joined by Web producer Satya Kuner and Jason Monberg, the CTO of Sparks, in believing that
their non-technical degrees have enhanced their work in the tech industry.
Kuner contends that her background as a dance major improved her job performance when she
was charged with doing technical support for Unix, C and Perl programming. As part of her job,
she had to walk users through solutions to thorny code errors, then log the events in a database
for other workers. She credits the improvements she made to the company’s database to the
communication skills she learned in college, saying, “Lots of geeks I know can’t provide clear
instructions, because they can’t fathom that someone
couldn’t know something.”
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Humanities-based skills can also improve the traditional code-writing process. According to
Kuner, artists bring a novel perspective to code composition, allowing them to extend the uses to
which a programming language is put. Monberg, who holds a degree in sociology, has noticed
that coding and engineering groups that include people trained outside the
discipline are more open to innovation. “It opens the door to a more engaging cross-pollinating
environment,” he says. “Individual contributors are not completely locked into thinking only
about their specific task.”
Nor are individuals locked into one set of job skills: Scott, Kuner and Monberg all acquired
specific technical skills on a compressed schedule in response to job demands, and they believe
that their college education helped flatten the learning curve — even if the connections between
Unix and dancing, interior design or sociology aren’t readily apparent.
College provided a mental model for learning subsequent skills, which complements the one
constant in high tech: the need to keep learning. Any high-tech worker, regardless of academic
background, must stay abreast of new skills to keep up in the field.
Perhaps, as those Slashdot posters argued, the learning can take place on site at a $60,000
programming job. But judging by the posts complaining, “if only Bill Gates took an OS class,”
there are also unarguable merits to a technical university education for engineers. Monberg
himself admits that there are times when a computer science education would have come in
handy: “When you get down to it, earning a CS degree provides one with some very basic
practical experience.”
At the heart of the higher-education debate lies the question: Do high-tech workers miss out on
some crucial educational event if they skip college? There’s no denying that high-tech offers
something few other disciplines do — the ability to enter and move up in an industry based on
applicable skills and experience, instead of requiring a degree to even enter the arena. But having
a degree doesn’t prevent high-tech workers from picking up experience elsewhere. The
learning skills one uses to pick up programming languages and systems operations are highly
individual, and can be acquired from disciplines as diverse as music or biology. They can also be
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picked up through a combination of time spent on a computer and a curiosity to learn more:
Kuner, Monberg and Scott all honed their technical chops through self-teaching.
What can’t be picked up through hard programming experience is the discipline-specific
experience that any college graduate possesses. To a biology major like me, object-oriented
programming didn’t make much sense when it was explained in terms of classes and
constructors. But when I could map the general ideas to familiar ground — the immune system’s
different types of cells and the chemical signals they send to each other are similar to classes of
code objects and the embedded functional signals they each have — I picked up the programming
concept, and expanded on it in ways my computer-engineering co-workers hadn’t pondered yet.
As more graduates combine their intellectual experience with practical technical skills, observers
may recast the higher-education question. Instead of wondering whether college
is relevant, we may ask what kind of degrees will allow high-tech workers and companies to stay
fresh and keep innovating.
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Discussion Questions
After thoroughly annotating the article, answer the following questions. Type your answers
and hand them in with the annotated article.
1. List and define three words new to your vocabulary.
a) Proliferation of programming languages – how programming languages have
increased.
b) To stay abreast – to be up to date.
c) Slashdot posters – refers to social news website that features news stories on
science, technology, and politics.
2. What is the Forbes 500?
It is an annual listing of the top 500 American companies produced by Forbes magazine. The list
was calculated by combining five factors: sales, profits, assets, market value, and employees.
3. What are the humanities?
Humanities include the study of all languages and literatures, the arts, history, and philosophy.
4. Why is the value of higher education in question for those in the computer technology world?
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Some people believe that it does not decide whether one will be competent in doing their job in
technology industry while others think that it provides one with firm foundation to grasp other
complicated skills. I found that the study suggests that higher education leads to Tech disparity
and investment of a lot of money that can be used better for long-term yields.
5. How did Kuner’s work in dance help her in the technology field?
Kuner claims that work in dance helped improve her job performance when she was in charge of
Unix, C and Perl programming. She improved the company’s database and established a
simplified way to login to company database.
6. Based on the information in this article, how would you advise the students at Washington, DC’s
Dunbar High School who just met Jeff Bezos? What should they keep in mind as they think about
jobs in technology?
First, I would advise them discover their strengths and weakness at early age so that they can
follow their dreams. They need to use their coaches well to discover themselves and if they are
interested in majoring in technology, it is good they acquire basic class knowledge so that they
can form a foundation of the skills they wish to achieve. Second, they need to know about Jeff
Bezos’ success story on how he come to be a prominent American entrepreneur, media
proprietor, investor, computer engineer, and commercial astronaut. They need to always
remember to work smart rather than hard to be like Jeff Bezos or be success in technology
industry although higher education is not everything but its one step towards success.
7. What skills from your field would help you excel in a STEM major? If you are majoring
in a technological field, what skills/courses from the humanities might benefit your performance?
The skills from my field that would help me excel in a STEM major include critical thinking,
analytical skills, problem solving, innovation, team player, effective communication, and
customer orientation. By studying humanities, I would hope to acquire specific skills to improve
my performance in the field of technology. For example, critical thinking and analysis, creative
thinking skills, communication skills and interpersonal and leadership skills.
