College or Google?

I have several friends who have good solid well-paying tech jobs but no degree. Universally, two things are true about these friends: 1) They got their jobs in the mid-nineties, when things were different. 2) They are locked tight into their current jobs at their current companies, because even with fifteen or twenty years' experience, they have trouble getting other hiring managers to look twice at them -- since they don't have a college degree.

Thomas Friedman should not be considered an authority on getting a job in Silicon Valley. Google won't consider him unless he is unusually amazing. Pretty much everyone working there as a programmer has been programming since the age of 11... and also went to Stanford.

The top companies want college grads, and Google wants them from Stanford, then Harvard, then Yale. Google is notoriously snobby that way. Unless your nephew has already created an app that he can sell to Facebook for a billion dollars, I can think of NO reason for him NOT to go to College. He can transfer his existing credits and he can get into a CS program. He doesn't need to earn stellar grades in everything, he needs to pass his core classes and blow his CS classes out of the water. While he's in school, he can do internships, or have a part-time job, or whatever else makes sense. I work at a software company and we have an internship program, but until you get the degree, we're not even considering you. And we're a very niche player.

Yes, he's too young. Are there young, successful software developers that skipped college? Of course, but if he were going to do that, he'd probably already have the initiative and wouldn't be asking for advice or listening to it. Most of college, in my opinion, is not necessarily about classes, but about socialization. When someone has a college degree, you assume that they know how to get things done on a deadline, that they can be motivated to complete tasks even if they're unpleasant, they can work in a team, etc. And I think it has some merit as helping some people become more well-rounded. So it's not even just that I think this a bad idea from a career perspective, but also from a personal perspective. (BTW that article is fairly high on my bullshit meter. I applied to work for the big G recently and they not only wanted my college transcript, but my SAT score- a test I had taken 16 years before. I'm sure there are some open-minded hiring managers at Google, but the reality is that they love the big name schools, partially because they can afford to be picky. Ditto what the first two posters say about meritocracy)

The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are few and far between. He needs to have a plan to fall back on. It should be pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard for two years, and made $30 billion by starting a company with his college roommates that provided a service to college students. I can't imagine that he regrets going to college.

any of these people do not have college degrees (or unrelated ones) Also, to address this point specifically -- an unrelated degree is a vastly, vastly, vastly different proposition than NO degree. Unrelated degree: minor hitch, if anything. No degree? Big problem.

I work in IT as a computer programmer. I've been involved in the hiring process. College/university degrees are pretty much a necessity. It isn't just about "Learning how to learn". It is learning proper coding habits and standards. It is about learning proper coding structures, well, just learning to write clean code. Also, I just keep thinking about when I started my education in programming. It was a room of 40 people, most of whom felt they already were programmers, that they were "naturals", etc. But then when the coursework came a huge hit of reality greeted them. I was one of 6 people who actually finished the program and graduated (with honours I should add [collar pop]). My point is a company isn't going to trust someone's "I'm good at this" statements without proof that they've jumped some hurtles, and proven that they actually CAN do it. Your nephew may be the Bobby Fischer of programming, but we wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole without some sort of formal training that earned him a degree or diploma of some sort that related to programming. Maybe we'd be missing out, but it would simply be too much of a risk. Sorry, but if he wants to work at someplace like Google then he needs to do university/college, complete the program, get the incredible grades you say his is capable of. If it is important to him then he needs to do it.

I began writing a response to http://ask.metafilter.com/258277/College-or-Google#3752734 answer, but it turned into a snippy cynical rant. Instead, I will posit that it is an interesting thought exercise to consider ejfox's situation had he not had one of his works go viral or if he was interested in less-visible software design. The vast majority of software developers work on software that is never seen by anyone. Apps are a valuable (and profitable!) form of software development, but if the OP's nephew ever wants to leave that, I hope the OP's nephew has background outside of app development. Said development is what college is good for. I can say more, but my answer would no longer be polite and well-suited to Ask MeFi.

One of the sentences you wrote struck a chord with me: He's not a perfectionist so it doesn't bother him not to get all As even if he is capable of that. I've been in software product development for over 30 years. One of the most important characteristics of successful developers that write production code (as opposed to code for personal use or to give to friends) is that they are perfectionists. Coding is an incredibly fussy job. Making it work for the "happy path" (where all inputs are correct) is only 10% of the work. That's the fun part. The hard work comes when you make it handle error conditions, corner cases, etc... and when you test it to make sure that it really does handle all conditions correctly.