In my early twenties I had a cohort of friends and coworkers, all Silicon Valley engineers, all quite good at their jobs, all college dropouts. We developed a shared conviction that only losers got computer science degrees. This sounds like a joke, or a self-defense mechanism, but it was neither. We were serious.

We held CS grads in contempt, as a class. We privately mocked them. When interviewing candidates, we considered it a knock against someone if they graduated — not an insuperable one by any means, but certainly a yellow flag, something to be probed in the interview process, to ensure they had good judgment and were capable of learning independently and getting shit done, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We didn’t look down on ALL college graduates (that would be unreasonable). If you went to school to study something like civil engineering, or philosophy, or Russian literature, good for you! But computers? Everything in my experience led me to conclude that sitting in a classroom studying computers was a waste of time and money.

I had evidence! I worked my way through school — as the university sysadmin, at a local startup — and I had always learned soooo much more from my work than my classes. The languages and technologies they taught us were consistently years out of date. Classes were slow and plodding. Our professors lectured on and on about “IN-dustry” in a way that made it abundantly clear that they had no recent, relevant experience.

College dropouts: the original bootstrappers

The difference became especially stark after I spent a year working in Silicon Valley. I then returned to school, fully intending to finish and graduate, but I could not focus; I was bored out of my skull.

How could anyone sit through that amount of garbage? Wouldn’t anyone with an ounce of self-respect and intrinsic motivation have gotten up off their butts and learned what they needed to know much faster on their own? For fuck’s sake! just google it!

My friends and I rolled our eyes at each other and sighed over these so-called software engineers with degrees, who apparently needed their learning doled out in small bites and spoon-fed to them, like a child. Who wanted to work with someone with such a high tolerance for toil and bullshit?

Meanwhile we, the superior creatures, had simply figured out whatever the fuck we needed to learn by reading the source code, reading books and manuals, trying things out. We pulled OUR careers up by our own bootstraps, goddammit. Why couldn’t they? What was WRONG with them??

We knew so many deeply mediocre software engineers who had gotten their bachelor’s degree in computer science, and so many exceptional engineers with arts degrees or no degrees, that it started to feel like a rule or something.

Were they cherrypicked examples? Of course they were. That’s how these things work.

People are really, really good at justifying their status

Ever since then, I’ve met wave after wave of people in this industry who are convinced they know how to sift “good” talent from “bad” via easily detected heuristics. They’re mostly bullshit.

Which is not to say that heuristics are never useful, or that any of us can afford to expend infinite amounts of time sifting through prospects on the off chance that we miss a couple quality candidates. They can be useful, and we cannot.

However, I have retained an abiding skepticism of heuristics that serve to reinforce existing power structures, or ones that just so happen to overlap with the background of the holder of said heuristics.

Those of us who work in tech are fabulously fortunate; in terms of satisfying, remunerative career outcomes, we are easily in the top .0001% of all humans who have ever lived. Maybe this is why so many of us seem to have some deep-seated compulsion to prove that we belong here, no really, people like me deserve to be here.

This calls for some humility

If nothing else, I think it calls for some humility. I don’t feel like I “deserve” to be here. I don’t think any of us do. I think I worked really fucking hard and I got really fucking lucky. Both can be true. Some of the smartest kids I grew up with are now pumping gas or dead. Almost none of the people I grew up with ever reached escape velocity and made it out of our small town.

When I stop to think about it, it scares me how lucky I got. How lucky I am to have grown up when I did, to have entered tech when I did, when the barriers to entry were so low and you really could just learn on the job, if you were willing to work your ass off. I left home when I was 15 to go to college, and put myself through largely on minimum wage jobs. Even five years later, I couldn’t have done that.

There was a window of time in the 2000s when tech was an escalator to the middle class for a whole generation of weirdos, dropouts and liberal arts misfits. That window has been closed for a while now. I understand why the window closed, and why it was inevitable (software isn’t a toy anymore), but it’s still.. bittersweet.

I guess I’m just really grateful to be here.

~charity

Experiment update

As I wrote last week, I’m trying to reset my relationship with writing, by publishing one short blog post per week: under 1000 words, minimal editing. And there marks week 2, 942 words.

See you next week.

Week 1 — “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment”