Forget College

A question came up on Reddit by a former military technician who planned to go from zero to full time programmer in less than a year by saving money and studying with something like Free Code Camp. That person got some grief. I say it’s a great idea. Here’s what I explained after the person contacted me through Reddit’s personal messaging facility.

First off, thank you for your service.

I looked at the conversation again and it didn’t seem overwhelmingly negative. One of the hardest things in life is to absorb feedback when it’s negative. I find there’s almost always something to get out of it. But it sure wasn’t fun to read from your perspective, either. It can also be a very fine line between living your dream and being realistic. I claim your plan is doable, and it straddles that fine line just the way it should.

The short answer is: Free Code Camp, plan still to be frustrated and to run a lot of experiments on your own, specialize specialize specialize, and have a very focused plan.

Longer answer. I got started when I was in my early 20s in the early 80s. I thought it was already too late. I am totally self taught, and there was obviously no Web to use at that point. Took me about 5 years to become a FT programmer while I worked at tech writing jobs. Given today’s resources, I could easily break that down to your time frame. (Within 15 years I had made enough to retire, though I am [not the retiring type](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3gbx78/til_that_the_founder_of_esnipe_a_website_that/)).

So your first job is to know exactly what your goal is. It is essential that you know this before you continue with your plan. When I was in your position I knew that without a degree I had to be better than everyone else, at something they didn’t want to do. At that time, it was programming assembly so I could become a game developer. I would eventually switch to compiler writing, but all the skills were transferrable.

Free Code Camp rightly forces you to learn a number of big disciplines, but it would help if you know early on that you want to be a UX designer, a back end DB programmer, a Javascript middleware specialist, whatever. Here’s the key. It actually doesn’t matter which one you choose as long as you don’t hate it. Because your plan is to get really really good at that specialty, so good you’re obviously better than the other candidates you’re competing with, you will automatically broaden your horizons as a programmer and end up learning the fundamentals no matter what you choose.

You’ll be scared by the idea of specializing, because it will necessarily cut off other possibilities. So that means you need to choose something that is highly likely to be around for the next 5-10 years, which happens to mean anything taught in the main Free Code Camp curriculum. But look at it from the point of view of a future employer, many of whom could well be risking their own money to hire you, if you interview at small shops. If you needed a Python-backed DB app written and you found yourself talking to candidates who said they knew a little Python and a little Redis and a little PHP and a little Meteor and a little MongoDB, vs. someone who had 3 live Python apps available on the web and could explain every design choice, which would you rather hire?

Remember how I said I got started because I wanted to program games? Never finished one, but because I learned assembly so well it was natural to root around for angel money to launch my own startup for a compiler (back in the day, when compilers could make money). Also I was technically hired by a game developer because I knew assembly, though they folded before the first day I started! (I’ve been through 3 boom/bust cycles in this business so far.)

How do you decide what to specialize in? Do a few toy apps (that actually go up on the web, as you’d do at Free Code Camp), look at job listings and see which ones are most interesting to you now, even though they’re aspirational. Look at the places you would truly like to work. Maybe it’s small local companies, maybe it’s Google, maybe it’s the library system, maybe it’s a federal bureaucracy, maybe it’s freelancing, I don’t know. Only you do.

You will no doubt find that Free Code Camp doesn’t have all the learning materials you need. No one source ever will. Don’t sweat it. Google the shit out of every problem you have, post to stackoverflow & reddit, whatever. Ignore the haters, except the ones who give you good info. Thank them. But the point is, don’t give up on Free Code Camp if they don’t tell you everything you need to know. Doing well in this business means everyone is self taught to one degree or another.

BTW, I’m pitching Free Code Camp not because I have experience with them or any financial interest, but because they course they describe is exactly how I would present the curriculum. It has theory, practice, and then actual real delivery of code to be consumed by live humans in a production environment. This is epic and will separate the men from the boys. I don’t know if their course is absolutely complete but it doesn’t matter. You can use their framework to learn everything you need. If you must, choose a different path to your education but make sure follows the same contours.

And while I said specialize specialize specialize, I lied a little. Get super good at one thing, and pretty damn good at a second. So: UX designer who is not afraid to do CRUD apps with PHP, or a Python programmer who can also use Javascript/jQuery to liven up that CRUD app, etc. Then learn how to sell yourself, which means to be able to spit out your specialty in one sentence: I made simple CRUD apps in Python fast. I make secure web apps that follow industry standards and are easy to maintain. I make intuitive UIs that disabled users can always navigate without ever getting lost. I do super fast in-memory database apps using pure Javascript and Node. That kind of thing.

I am always studying for my next job, even though I have been CEO of my own company for 16 years. In my case I am studying how to make high performance web apps using Go and MySQL on Google App Engine. Maybe not a good risk for you, but the point is, I have specialized on what I think is a usable skill set for 10 years from now.

You make me a little nervous because you expressed the need to be motivated. I grew up not rich in a neighborhood I am very glad not to live in. I sat down when I was young and rationally decided that a white collar job was the most efficient way to get the fuck out of that neighborhood without a college education. By 14 I was interviewing people who had done similar things, and found that programmers had the perfect way out. Good programmers were so rare employers would overlook their lack of a college education. That is absolutely true today. (I also wanted to be a rock star but didn’t practice enough. By the time I was 25 I jettisoned that idea permanently because I hadn’t worked hard enough at it.) If I were you I would take a bit of time to imagine my life if I don’t graduate Free Code Camp vs if I do. Think about it very carefully. If that’s not enough motivation I am wasting the hour and a half it took to right this, although I think I’ll turn it into a blog post.

So. Decide what you want to do by balancing what people are hiring for vs. what you like. Get damn good at it by learning it deeply and shipping bad code that people will criticize. You will get good jobs, I promise.

Here’s the future of college: Most degrees will be granted online, the best teachers will become rock stars, and eventually students become largely untethered. They will demand that universities let them mix and match courses from any school.

The prototypes for this can be found in the hit-driven economies of college sports and the movie business. Top football and basketball coaches now get multi million dollar salaries, because the universities make many times that in revenue from athletic programs. Great teachers are as rare as winning coaches. The only difference is that until now there has been no way to capitalize on teachers, because unlike TV contracts for basketball games, traditional classes don’t scale very well. The biggest lecture halls can hold no more than 1500 people or so, and, perversely, many students who are present have little or no interest in the subject no matter how brilliant the lecturer. Like non-sequel hit movies, finding great teachers is a process that cannot be replicated reliably. The only way to find them will be to hire en masse and exploit the very few who become hitmakers.

Freemium U

It appears that the best way for colleges to generate revenue online will be the freemium model. Anyone can view videos of the courses and perhaps participate on the message board at no charge. To get class credit and a teaching assistant to hand-grade the work that can’t be graded via software, you’ll need to pay. To get the teacher to grade your papers, you’ll have to pay much, much more. But as Pat Quilter of Quilter Labs says, “Who knows? Maybe students would actually take courses, life-long, to learn, instead of just to get a degree.” Zany thought.

If the universities are smart they will share this revenue with the teachers. Most American students won’t choose the pay-for-office-hours option, but it will be a high-priced add-on that will still generate significant revenue from wealthy Chinese and Russian parents who are accustomed to paying obscene amounts in bribes to officials at every level in the bureaucracy just to get baseline services. In Shanghai some kindergarten teachers are demanding $10,000 “gifts” for school admission. How much do you think those parents will pay for the top MBA faculty at Wharton to tutor their baby plutocrat-to-be?

The Hit-Driven University

It’s the rock star teachers that will prove to be the most interesting case, and by far the most lucrative for the university. All online classes will be reviewed and scored at closely followed ratings sites whose popularity will dwarf that of the fatally flawed but currently influential US News and World Report’s college ratings guide.

The hottest teachers will go viral within a year or two at Ivy League schools, and in three to five years at less prestigious institutions. Their classes will burgeon in popularity among paying students. The universities will be forced to hire armies of teaching assistants to grade work. Tenured but less popular faculty will make catty remarks about how long it takes to get budgets approved and how hard it is to get the department admin’s attention anymore.

Today’s parents know exactly what they want, starting with the best day care center with its 5 year wait and relocating to the neighborhood that gets the best SAT sources. They have checklists for every way to maximize returns on their pampered little babies’ life experiences. Top of the checklist is Ivy League schools, but consumers of education will see very quickly that good teachers can be found anywhere in the world.

Auctioning Dr. Zeyen

Parents will be forced to compete in an auction format to get individual attention from the teacher. Want that teacher to grade your papers personally? Kick in an extra $20,000. Get the teacher to be one of your dissertation advisors? A hundred grand. Don’t procrastinate. Put off deciding on your degree emphasis for a term and those prices might shoot up to $22,500 and $125,000. Dr. Mary Mark Zeyen, my piano and theory teacher in college, would have deserved every cent of it.

Editorials will harrumph that schools have lost their way and that the meritocracy is dead. Everyone will agree. Administrations will keep jacking up prices anyway. The most popular teachers will negotiate individual contracts. Tenure will mean nothing to them just as it has no meaning to basketball coaches. The only thing that will matter is revenue.

It is also possible that the freemium model will be applied more selectively for these teachers, and you’ll only get, say, the first two classes for free instead of the whole course. Why not? Quite possibly 10,000 other people will be only too willing to pay for read-only access to a statically recorded course by a rockstar teacher if it makes learning calculus bearable.

Professor Dark Star

For evergreen subjects like statistics, history, or literature some teachers will remain popular after they die or quit teaching the course. There will be diminished value because they won’t or can’t score papers or participate on the message boards. Highly rated teachers assistants will have long twilight careers as known disciples, the way Leonard Peikoff fed off the literary corpse of Ayn Rand for decades or piano teachers with “direct from Beethoven” provenance can charge extra for their pedigree.

Smart institutions will nail down intellectual property rights during contract negotiations. Smart teachers will hire agents and lawyers ahead of time. That won’t happen right away. A few rock star teachers will die suddenly after their courses have been completed, and schools will duel with families as to who owns IP rights to ancillary YouTube videos, email accounts, and teaching plans. Universities will do everything they can to keep the revenue stream from good dead professors healthy, a prospect only slightly less grisly than the former ship captain in 1974’s “Dark Star”, a science fiction comedy in which the spaceship’s former captain is technically dead but cryogenically preserved as an advice-giving brain with some kind of interface to the ship’s computer.

What about the majority of teachers who aren’t rock stars? Those everywhere but the extreme right of the ratings bell curve will be fungible. They won’t lose their jobs to the rock star teachers because GE requirements still need to be filled, just as the fencing coach doesn’t necessarily get canned just because the football program is in the NCAA.

Websites and TV shows will do fawning profiles of rock star teachers, especially newly minted ones. The best novelist of the English language in the 20th century was Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian. A talent of the same magnitude could emerge from Guangdong. Maybe she’ll be photogenic, and end up with a multiyear contract at Brown while getting some decent endorsement money from the Wall Street Journal book review section.

When A&M Wins the Stats Bowl

As it becomes clear that rock star teachers can pop up anywhere, prestigious universities will lose some of their mojo. Previously unheralded institutions will get bumps in their popularity. We all know that Texas A&M has an awesome agricultural department, but who’s to say they don’t have right at this very minute employ the best statistics teacher on the planet? What if by coincidence they also the best computer graphics teacher in the Western states because her husband will always be an Aggie and refuses to move to Palo Alto?

Suddenly those Chinese princelings and Russian plutocrats could make A&M the go-to place for top engineering students. A&M might just choose to hire a couple more rock stars paid for by the football program to prove to the world that they aren’t just a place where future farmers devise low-water farming techniques and disease-resistant crops. Maybe they’ll be home to the Statistics Bowl, an event with all of the charm of a spelling bee, the revenue of a fencing program–and ground zero for high-tech firms on the hunt for experts on big data.

End Game: The Food Court Degree

The end game will be an attempt from students to force universities to standardize degree requirements and transfer protocols, because the logical way to get the highest quality education will be to cherry pick rock star teachers regardless of the school you’re enrolled in.

You might get a killer art history prof at Yale, a machine learning prodigy from Stanford, and that up-and-coming American Lit chick out of Guangdong. Universities will obviously resist because they won’t want their monopoly power to be challenged, because they will have honest disagreements about standardization, and because above all else they will fear becoming commodities. Getting a degree will be like visiting a food court where you can get Ethiopian bread, Mongolian beef, and chicken nuggets if you brought the kids.

Eventually the market will win out. Just as AOL and CompuServe and Microsoft were forced by consumers to use Internet protocols in the 1990s, you will be able to assemble exactly the degree you want. Currently to get to the meat of your English Lit degree you’re often force fed a shedload of impenetrable courses because a tenured bureaucrat decided in 1989 that deconstructionism might become an enduring political movement.

Unlike today’s standardized degree in social ecology or feminist studies, however, you will have only yourself to blame if your masterfully designed Exobiological Critical Thinking degree leaves you a half million in debt and delivering pizzas to Standard CS grads at the local tech incubator.

There is No Manual is more than memoir. What is past is prologue, and what once characterized only disorganized or highly dynamic companies is the norm. You will probably be responsible for training yourself on your next job. If there’s any training material at all, it’s probably out of date at best, and missing critical sections at worst.

Work is Hell

This is a deplorable situation. It’s hell for the kind of employee who wants to do a good job but who isn’t familiar with the terrain, or who came from a highly directed school situation, or who comes from a milieu that, like most Asian countries, values conformity and rigid adherence to well-established standards. It’s deplorable, but guess what: this is your life. Deal with it.

I say this with love, because it is a recurring theme in my life. I would have advanced much farther in my technical careers if I had simply accepted that there just wasn’t a handy-dandy central repository of goodness into which I could occasionally dip the ladle of my ignorance. It was always my secret expectation that, given my proven willingness to work my tail off learning whatever needed to be learned, there should be some kind of easily accessible and complete set of references or tutorials around to help me excel in whatever job I happened to be doing at the time.

In isolation, this sounds reasonable. In the 21st century, it is simply not feasible. In the 1950s technology was changing rapidly but a war-trained generation had learned to map out all contingencies carefully and document every course of action required of the rank and file. Bureaucratic, sure, and turgid, most certainly, but distinctly comforting to me today. If you were assigned the task of operating a tank turret or programming an IBM mainframe you’d be shown a giant looseleaf binder somewhere, with hundreds or thousands of pages of typewritten instructions and crude illustrations. You could therefore become good at your job literally by reading the book.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Start a Wiki

Technology is infinitely more complex now. That book would be even more useful now. The problem is that things are changing so quickly that a cohesive orchestration of complex activities from overture to A section to B section to conclusion is now impractical to create. By the time draft 1 is finished for version 1.0, version 3.0 is already in development.  By the time draft 2 is approved by management, edited, and published, whole feature sets are changed beyond recognition, incompatible as documented, or deprecated in favor of a new technology.

All of this is a golden opportunity for you. It is now possible to create a wiki (community-written documentation, of which Wikipedia is obviously the most prominent example), shared Google document, or blog with zero technical knowledge. You can put up a wiki or blog yourself and use it to stitch together a patchwork quilt of tutorials, tips, reference guides to cover the most common aspects of your job. This will invariably find its way to grateful consumers, maybe even your own boss, who will then begin to regard you as an expert in the field whether you are or not. It will also make you more productive because you spend less time searching for, bookmarking, or being frustrated by obsolete websites.

Turn this difficult situation into a branding opportunity for Brand You. It’s a long-term career investment that could pay off richly.