The tech world is being taken over by precocious prodigies without degrees.
Elon Musk’s hand-picked staff on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) range in age from 19 to 24 and include a recent highschool graduate, in addition to a former SpaceX intern who received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel to drop out of college.
Musk and Thiel are outspoken cheerleaders of faculty dropouts in Silicon Valley — and an increasing number of firms, like IBM, Google, GM, and Apple, are following suit by scrapping degree requirements for tech gigs.
“Where you went to highschool, and for those who went to highschool, matters less, I feel increasingly so,” Silicon Valley veteran and former Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin told The Post.
“The brightest minds are starting to acknowledge that capability, competence, and effectiveness can transcend the university that you simply went to.”
Dropouts are in good company too: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all quit college to focus on their tech empires.
It’s about time legacy firms follow the lead of trailblazers like Thiel, who has long favored young entrepreneurs gutsy enough to pave their very own way.
The PayPal co-founder began handing techy dropouts $100,000 checks to fund their endeavors in 2010. DOGE worker Luke Farritor was awarded a grant this 12 months, together with Augustus Doricko.
“There’s definitely respect in Silicon Valley for people who drop out,” Doricko, 24, told The Post.
“You discover a community.”
Doricko left UC Berkeley in his senior 12 months to start out Rainmaker, a tech company that modifies the weather to make it rain more. He just raised $6.3 million in funding.
“I feel that any aspirational young person in college pretty quickly realizes how ridiculous the university system is, simply because how un-intense it’s, how much you’re coddled, how slow the pace of education is,” he said. “But when it wasn’t for Peter Thiel, I don’t know if I’d have been confident enough to drop out myself.”
Now that he’s hiring his own employees, he believes “having a level is a moderate to bad proximate indicator of capability,” and an increasing number of hiring managers are agreeing.
IT firm Accenture is amongst a slew of firms who’ve recently loosened degree requirements. Last February, they hired Seth Gallegos as a network engineer, despite his lack of a diploma.
“I feel 95% of any tech job may be done with out a degree,” the 21-year-old Denver native told The Post.
Gallegos took a 15 week “bootcamp” in cyber security, which allowed him to get certification at a fraction of the associated fee of a pc science degree.
“I’m the youngest person within the office, but I’m at the identical level and on the identical profession path as others who’ve passed through those 4 years of faculty,” he said.
He has several friends thriving in tech with out a degree, including Alejandro Ceniceros, who also did a bootcamp upon his advice. Ceniceros, 20, works as a cloud technician for a hospital chain — a job that traditionally would require a school degree to even apply.
“I didn’t wish to get right into a huge amount of debt over education, since you’re not even guaranteed a job with a level anymore on this market,” he said. “I also knew employers are beginning to prioritize real-life skills and never just diplomas.”
Ceniceros believes tech is uniquely meritocratic since it’s easy to self-teach, like he did by binging cybersecurity podcasts: “Anybody can purchase a pc and understand how the parts function, or learn through open-source resources, studying [and] articles.”
Francis Larkin, an enterprise applications engineer in Pittsburgh, agrees. He spent a decade attempting to get into tech with out a degree but was only in a position to break the glass ceiling in 2022, when firms began relaxing education standards within the wake of the pandemic.
“I applied to all the key employers, and none of them would hire me [without a diploma],” Larkin, now 35, said. “The primary pick was all the time kids coming out of faculty with an IT degree and like a 3 month summer internship, whereas I needed to gut it out for years.”
“But now it looks as if firms are hiring the perfect person for the job, and education might just be one thing they consider.”
Hyrkin says artificial intelligence says AI can actually help non-grads like Larkin.
“Previously, you’d use a university degree or company pedigree because the bar, but now you need to use AI tools to weed through everybody’s application,” he said. “AI tools are going to offer more efficiency to access people’s true skill set.”
Some firms are even proactively reaching out to non-grads through apprenticeships. The Amazon Web Services apprenticeship program pays students for 4 weeks of coaching and sometimes hires them after.
Kavary Hill, a 25-year-old working in HVAC in Virginia, had all the time dreamed of going into tech but never thought it possible with out a college degree, until his mother told him in regards to the apprenticeship program.
“I used to be all the time interested by IT… but this was the primary opportunity to truly get my foot within the door,” Hill told The Post.
He and his mother, Sherrie, decided to undergo the training together in November — and each launched careers as data center operations technicians at Amazon Web Services with out a college diploma.
Other firms need to onboard even younger — like IBM, which partnered with specialized Brooklyn highschool P-Tech on an apprenticeship program.
Shekinah Griffith was offered a 6- figure salary by IBM straight out of P-Tech as a 19-year-old.
“I’ve learned more here than I could have possibly ever learned in school,” Griffith, now 24, told The Post.
She foresees more young people trying to get an identical jump start of their careers: “Not a variety of students are interested by going to school anymore nowadays, so embedding technology early on… is absolutely vital.”
Besides, an absence of a faculty degree isn’t all the time a ding on a résumé. It might probably even be a sign of a precocious, self-sufficient, non-conformist trailblazer.
As Elon Musk recently put it: “We don’t care where you went to highschool… Just show us your code.”
The tech world is being taken over by precocious prodigies without degrees.
Elon Musk’s hand-picked staff on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) range in age from 19 to 24 and include a recent highschool graduate, in addition to a former SpaceX intern who received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel to drop out of college.
Musk and Thiel are outspoken cheerleaders of faculty dropouts in Silicon Valley — and an increasing number of firms, like IBM, Google, GM, and Apple, are following suit by scrapping degree requirements for tech gigs.
“Where you went to highschool, and for those who went to highschool, matters less, I feel increasingly so,” Silicon Valley veteran and former Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin told The Post.
“The brightest minds are starting to acknowledge that capability, competence, and effectiveness can transcend the university that you simply went to.”
Dropouts are in good company too: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all quit college to focus on their tech empires.
It’s about time legacy firms follow the lead of trailblazers like Thiel, who has long favored young entrepreneurs gutsy enough to pave their very own way.
The PayPal co-founder began handing techy dropouts $100,000 checks to fund their endeavors in 2010. DOGE worker Luke Farritor was awarded a grant this 12 months, together with Augustus Doricko.
“There’s definitely respect in Silicon Valley for people who drop out,” Doricko, 24, told The Post.
“You discover a community.”
Doricko left UC Berkeley in his senior 12 months to start out Rainmaker, a tech company that modifies the weather to make it rain more. He just raised $6.3 million in funding.
“I feel that any aspirational young person in college pretty quickly realizes how ridiculous the university system is, simply because how un-intense it’s, how much you’re coddled, how slow the pace of education is,” he said. “But when it wasn’t for Peter Thiel, I don’t know if I’d have been confident enough to drop out myself.”
Now that he’s hiring his own employees, he believes “having a level is a moderate to bad proximate indicator of capability,” and an increasing number of hiring managers are agreeing.
IT firm Accenture is amongst a slew of firms who’ve recently loosened degree requirements. Last February, they hired Seth Gallegos as a network engineer, despite his lack of a diploma.
“I feel 95% of any tech job may be done with out a degree,” the 21-year-old Denver native told The Post.
Gallegos took a 15 week “bootcamp” in cyber security, which allowed him to get certification at a fraction of the associated fee of a pc science degree.
“I’m the youngest person within the office, but I’m at the identical level and on the identical profession path as others who’ve passed through those 4 years of faculty,” he said.
He has several friends thriving in tech with out a degree, including Alejandro Ceniceros, who also did a bootcamp upon his advice. Ceniceros, 20, works as a cloud technician for a hospital chain — a job that traditionally would require a school degree to even apply.
“I didn’t wish to get right into a huge amount of debt over education, since you’re not even guaranteed a job with a level anymore on this market,” he said. “I also knew employers are beginning to prioritize real-life skills and never just diplomas.”
Ceniceros believes tech is uniquely meritocratic since it’s easy to self-teach, like he did by binging cybersecurity podcasts: “Anybody can purchase a pc and understand how the parts function, or learn through open-source resources, studying [and] articles.”
Francis Larkin, an enterprise applications engineer in Pittsburgh, agrees. He spent a decade attempting to get into tech with out a degree but was only in a position to break the glass ceiling in 2022, when firms began relaxing education standards within the wake of the pandemic.
“I applied to all the key employers, and none of them would hire me [without a diploma],” Larkin, now 35, said. “The primary pick was all the time kids coming out of faculty with an IT degree and like a 3 month summer internship, whereas I needed to gut it out for years.”
“But now it looks as if firms are hiring the perfect person for the job, and education might just be one thing they consider.”
Hyrkin says artificial intelligence says AI can actually help non-grads like Larkin.
“Previously, you’d use a university degree or company pedigree because the bar, but now you need to use AI tools to weed through everybody’s application,” he said. “AI tools are going to offer more efficiency to access people’s true skill set.”
Some firms are even proactively reaching out to non-grads through apprenticeships. The Amazon Web Services apprenticeship program pays students for 4 weeks of coaching and sometimes hires them after.
Kavary Hill, a 25-year-old working in HVAC in Virginia, had all the time dreamed of going into tech but never thought it possible with out a college degree, until his mother told him in regards to the apprenticeship program.
“I used to be all the time interested by IT… but this was the primary opportunity to truly get my foot within the door,” Hill told The Post.
He and his mother, Sherrie, decided to undergo the training together in November — and each launched careers as data center operations technicians at Amazon Web Services with out a college diploma.
Other firms need to onboard even younger — like IBM, which partnered with specialized Brooklyn highschool P-Tech on an apprenticeship program.
Shekinah Griffith was offered a 6- figure salary by IBM straight out of P-Tech as a 19-year-old.
“I’ve learned more here than I could have possibly ever learned in school,” Griffith, now 24, told The Post.
She foresees more young people trying to get an identical jump start of their careers: “Not a variety of students are interested by going to school anymore nowadays, so embedding technology early on… is absolutely vital.”
Besides, an absence of a faculty degree isn’t all the time a ding on a résumé. It might probably even be a sign of a precocious, self-sufficient, non-conformist trailblazer.
As Elon Musk recently put it: “We don’t care where you went to highschool… Just show us your code.”
