The University to Tech Pipeline
I've been considering what the value of a university degree means for tech companies. After all, wouldn't self-taught learners be better suited to keeping up with an ever-changing tech stack? Doesn't it show a certain drive and motivation?
My friend and I met when I was helping mentor him on his high school senior project - an iOS app called Colorado Localaw. It requested data from the State of Colorado's legislative API so that people could stay informed about the democratic process. So when I heard that he got into Stanford, I was thrilled! I felt like I had been a small part of his journey and I was grateful to help him out.
When I got the opportunity to go to WWDC 2023, I knew I could take a detour to spend a day visiting Stanford. It was amazing to visit both campuses and get a tour of the grounds. Both Apple and Stanford were beautifully manicured, quiet, and clean with large allotments of land, orchards, and modern architecture. It felt like a utopian vision of the future. The environments were, it seemed to me, deliberately similar.
My thought as a self-taught learner, who started working in software straight out of high school, was that a university degree was useless. It's expensive, time consuming, and outdated - especially in tech where best practices change so fast, a four-year degree can leave you four years behind the curve. Some people justify university with the adage that it's about "learning how to learn", but I've always believed that self-taught learners have the edge in that respect.
But being at Stanford showed me a different side of the picture, which was that Stanford is designed to help students focus. Students don't need to worry about transportation because they live on campus. They don't need to worry about housing because they live in dorms. And they don't need to worry about food because they have cafeterias. In fact, they mostly only need to worry about how to get to class and studying and taking exams. The rest is just distraction from the clear assigned goals.
It's quite easy to draw parallels between that sort of lifestyle and working at a tech company where staying focused on your job is the top priority. Tech companies are all partly about the perks that can help remove the distractions of normal life. Cafeterias on campus so you don't need to pack a lunch. Gyms with personal trainers within walking distance. And salaries to take care of the worries that most people have - like rent or car payments.
Seeing both Apple and Stanford at the same time opened up this alternate point of view; it makes sense that big tech wants to hire from universities. They don't need somebody who knows the tech stack or somebody who has relevant skills. They want somebody who they can guarantee will fit into the culture and be effective within the realm of focused study. One can learn a new programming language and new design patterns, but there's something else they're looking for.
It's the environment that shapes the individual, and tech companies are looking for individuals that have adjusted to a certain way of life. They want employees that are at home amongst the orchards, the cafeterias, and the modern architecture. Employees that work hard to achieve a goal - as arbitrary as a final exam - with a level of focus that might otherwise look like myopia to worldly concerns. Employees that take high salaries for granted because the solution to their problems wasn't ever money - but study.
In the end, the true value of a university degree might not be about the actual education, but the forces that shape someone's expectations of the world.
