Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad Role Model For Aspiring Tech Execs 326
coondoggie writes "Want to run a successful high-tech company? Don't drop out of college. The myth of the brilliant Ivy League student who starts a business in his dorm room, drops out of school, and goes on to run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades to come is essentially just that: a myth. Despite a few high-profile exceptions — such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — the vast majority of CEOs running successful U.S. high-tech firms have college degrees, and more than half have at least one graduate degree."
Confirmed (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a myth if it happened on multiple occasions...
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Re:Confirmed (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from some small element of skill it is no different from the lottery really.
Re:Confirmed (Score:4, Insightful)
Education is a microscopic part of it. Being in the right place at the right time, or having the right family is the real multiplier.
Obviously this academic douche bag doesn't understand his own analogy.
"I've met as many successful tech CEOs who have dropped out college as I've met folks who have won the lottery," says Professor Jerry Luftman, managing director of the Global Institute for IT Management, who holds doctorate in Information Systems from Stevens Institute of Technology. "There are always going to be exceptions to any rule. But if you are a betting person, you would increase your odds of becoming a tech executive if you have a college education and a senior executive if you have a management degree."
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I used to watch a show called Pinnacle on CNN in the early days where they'd profile some successful person each show. One common factor was that there was some person in their lives that could be seen as a keystone to the whole arch: a talented mentor when they were a kid, a person with the right connections after college, someone with some critical resource or knowledge at the right time.
The real answer is personality type. If you are the type of personality that loves to meet people and be hypersocial, y
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I wouldn't call it a lottery, but it is close. The chaotic nature of capitalism is what rules.
Che Guevara [wikipedia.org]:
The laws of capitalism, which are blind and are invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without he or she being aware of it. One sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon ahead. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller — whether or not it is true — about the possibilities of individual success. The amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible for the popular forces to expose this clearly.... It is a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others.
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Busted (Score:3)
Woz: never the CEO of apple
Jobs: not the first (Michael Scott), nor second (Mike Markkula), nor third (John Sculley), nor fourth (Michael Spindler), nor fifth (Gil Amelio) CEO of apple. Not 'till he was fired from Apple did he become the CEO of NeXT...
Perhaps you could conclude from this that getting fired and starting your own company is the model for aspiring Tech Execs?
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Wozniak returned to college and received his degree after he became rich. He realized he needed it.
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Wozniak returned to college and received his degree after he became rich. He realized he needed it.
Uh, after he became rich? Then clearly he wanted a degree, he certainly didn't need it.
BIG difference attending college out of luxury vs. necessity.
Re:Confirmed (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs and Wozniak, to name two more...
and did anyone noticed the title is wrong?
"Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad Role Model For Aspiring Tech Execs"
because... he's not? He became his own tech exec, he wasn't elected, he wasn't hired, he didn't go to college to study business to be a CEO someday. Went to college, made a local "hot or not" clone, stole some guy's idea for a social networking, got noticed by the right people early on and the rest is history.
So yeah, if you want to be a CEO running a successful US high-tech firm, don't follow Zuckerberg.
But if you have a startup that you're trying to launch, Zuckerberg might not be a bad role model.
Re:Confirmed (Score:4, Insightful)
The main problem with this article is it is conflating two rather distinct things. It is trying to confuse founding your own successful company with running someone else's behemoth.
Gates and Jobs and Zuckerberg weren't just handed the keys to IBM or AT&T. They built their own empires.
It's an entirely different thing. Minding someone else's store once it has become a monstrosity is a different skills set.
When you are your own boss and you write your own tunes, it might not matter if you can't play anyone else's.
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So compare it to the total number of companies in the world
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Maybe you're setting the bar a little high for the summary writers.
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From the makers of "the exception that proves the rule," here comes "it's not a myth because it happened more than once!"
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If we want to be pedantic,
You must be new here; that's not allowed.
Nor is sarcasm.
many decades? (Score:5, Insightful)
run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades
How can you possibly say that Zuckerberg will run a company for many decades, when he isn't even many decades old? He hasn't even been old enough to drive a car for a decade, let alone old enough to run a company for "many decades". Being as facebook is doing less-than-brilliantly in the stock market, it seems at the very least overly optimistic to say that it will be around for "many decades".
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Question is, do you want to START a company, or RUN a company. If you want to START a company, you need to have a drive that doesn't mesh well with sitting at the knee of an authority figure and have him dump his views into your brain. RUNNING someone elses company, on the other hand... any retard can do that. When you get right down to it, the best would be to just go play golf and not screw up what was working before you arrived in an effort to leave your mark.
Re:many decades? (Score:5, Informative)
You really have no idea what it takes to run a company, even a small one. Your day is constantly filled with making decisions. With no game plan other than "don't screw up", you will run into the problem that one decision you made last year screwed up a decision you made this year. There are competitors to think about, cash-flow, investor relations, employee compensation, accounting rules, government regulation, community relations, employee relations, the direction of your industry, understanding what makes your company unique such that it deserves a niche, etc.
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You really have no idea what it takes to run a company, even a small one.
Which takes us back to why Zuckerberg is a bad role model. Neither does he.
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You're an idiot.
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any retard can do that
well in his defence, any retard can run a company into the ground. Running a company well is hard, putting the CEO title on your door is easy.
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And frankly at the end of the day, I'd be glad as hell to be known as "that terrible CEO", as a single year's salary and separation compensation are significantly more than most people will make in decades
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Actually, that was hubris hitting some very intelligent people. They built these bright, shiny economic investment models, and even hired real scientists to help. FPGA based super computers might have been involved at some point. Bleeding edge, heady stuff with mathematics to pique the interest of a string theorist. They created what they thought was infallible realizations of financial perfection, and released their digital prodigy into the real world... which proceeded to chew them up like wolves discover
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When you get right down to it, the best would be to just go play golf and not screw up what was working before you arrived in an effort to leave your mark.
Obama tried that, I don't think it worked.
cause and effect vs commonality (Score:5, Insightful)
Be careful not to automatically interpret correlation as causation.
In other words, the degree may not be what's making the CEO, but rather that the odds of CEO material also having a degree is high.
CEOs also tend to own more than one car. Doesn't mean you should go buy a second car to improve your odds of becoming a CEO.
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The question is what came first. Most CEOs probably didn't have a garage full of cars until after they were pretty close to having that position anyway. However, they probably got at least a Bachelors at the beginning of their career, so the likelihood of causation is significantly greater.
Re:cause and effect vs commonality (Score:4, Insightful)
There probably isn't much cause and effect between degrees and one-in-a-billion success as an entrepreneur. I imagine Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others would do about the same either way. The degree is for finding your footing when life informs you you're one of the other 999,999,999.
Re:cause and effect vs commonality (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes tremendous insight and a bit of luck to know that right now is absolutely the right time to be in this business and that even waiting a couple more years to finish your degree is waiting too long.
Now the thing is, if you guess wrong, you can always go back and finish assuming you haven't completely wiped out any hope you ever had of having any access to money (parents, loans, etc). So I'm sure there are a lot more people who drop out of school to start a business and then end up back at school trying to finish their degrees a few years later than there are people who have a meteoric rise to success.
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The the Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, are the exception, their success comes from being in the right place at the right time, and having the right idea, and taking the risk to try it out. For these guys everything lined up for them. If they failed they would probably be working a middle class job right now, because they didn't have the college degree (assuming they didn't go back to finish school), and no one will really want to hire them, or they will be doing a bunch of mediocre successful businesses.
Higher
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I'm sorry, exactly which one of 1 - 5 require "high education"?
1. So, you can't learn to research properly without going through "higher education"? Seriously?
2. Try managing your own business. You'll learn this one really quick or you won't be managing your own business for very long.
3. See above.
4. Or you could take the money you were going to drop on college and live in a foreign country for a year. Or, I don't know, find a new social circle.
5. Really?
Higher education isn't the be all, end all. It's a pa
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This gives me an idea for a new University...
Myth? (Score:5, Informative)
Gates
Jobs
Zuckerberg
That's most of the tech money that isn't IBM or HP.
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Ellison Gates Jobs Zuckerberg That's most of the tech money that isn't IBM or HP.
Tom Watson Sr., the guy that founded IBM also appears to be a dropout. From the wikipedia "Having given up his first job—teaching—after just one day, Watson took a year's course in accounting and business at the Miller School of Commerce in Elmira. He left the school in 1891, taking a job at $6 a week as bookkeeper for Clarence Risley's Market in Painted Post."
I don't know about H or P, but yes it would be interesting to see the piechart of the value of companies founded by college graduates
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Re:Myth? (Score:5, Insightful)
#1 While Zuckerberg has money now, I want to see if that is still true 3 years from now. The stock market is a cruel mistress.
#2 Ellison, Gates and Jobs are probably three of the most brilliant and ruthless people on the planet, who also lucked into a set of extraordinary circumstances (what would Jobs have been without Woz, and what would Gates have been without rich parents?)
#3 Dropping out of school because your business is far more interesting and time consuming than school is entirely different from dropping out of school because "degrees don't correlate with success).
#4 That's three people. Three people who made it without a degree. There are far more variables that impact success than can be properly identified and isolated through the anecdotal stories of three people.
#5 That's not to say that degrees are necessary - they clearly aren't necessary, by the mathematical definition of the word. But they give you a hell of a leg up on the competition.
Anybody who says that degrees are useless is trying to sell you something else, or is trying to make sure that you won't become competition.
So in that sense, yes, it is a myth that successful entrepreneurs don't need degrees.
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If he's not a moron, Zuckerburg has diversified his holdings in Facebook, so he's now holding millions of shares not only of Facebook but also a wide range of the S&P 500. So yeah, he could lose half of it in the net stock market crash, which would make him only half as fabulously wealthy as he is now, which is still fabulously wealthy.
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I think more to the point, those Big 4 weren't successful because they dropped out of college. They are/were hard working, driven individuals with good instincts on how to run a business. They would have been successful regardless of whether they finished college or not. In their cases, the opportunities they made their money on came up before they finished their degrees. In at least Zuckerberg's case, and possibly others, the opportunities arose because they were in college.
If this is your career plan:
Also Richard Branson, Amadeo Peter Giannini, ... (Score:4, Informative)
OK, BofA is stretching "high tech" a little...
Richard Branson - Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, plus all of http://www.virgin.com/company [virgin.com]
David Geffen - Dreamworks
Ted Murphy - izea.com
Tom Anderson - myspace.com
David Karp - Tumblr.com
Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com
Rob Kalin - etsy.com
Theodore Waitt - gateway.com
Shawn Fanning - napster.com
Steve Wozniak - apple.com
Kevin Rose - digg.com
Dustin Moskovitz - Cofounder, Facebook
Jerry Yang - yahoo.com
Amadeo Peter Giannini - Bank of America, perhaps you've heard of it
Craig McCaw - McCaw Cellular
Ashley Qualls - whateverlife.com
Pete Cashmore - mashable.com
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless.com
Ben Kaufman - kluster.com
Red McComb - Clear Channel
Bram Cohen - BitTorrent
Gurbaksh Chahal - Blue Lithium, Click Again
Does the industry exist? (Score:4, Insightful)
The real thing these guys have in common is they didn't just create companies they helped created industries.
So if you want to start a company that does something other companies do it would make sense to go to school and learn about those industries. But if you want to create an industry that doesn't exist you are not going to learn it in school.
Re:Myth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those are four people. Yes, they have a lot of money, but think of it this way:
Would you prefer a 1 in 10,000,000 chance to be a billionaire (and end up flipping burgers if you fail), or a 1 in 1000 chance to be a millionaire (and end up with a decent paying job if you fail)?
A college degree is both safer and has a higher probability of success. The rewards might be lower, but that cannot be concluded from such a small sample size, and at any rate they're still enough for any reasonable person to live comfortably.
And if you don't have a CS degree... (Score:5, Funny)
If you have a great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a great idea, you should see it through. You can always go back to college later, and the experience of pursuing it will be far more beneficial to you than any class you could possibly take.
If you don't have a great idea, than dropping out of college is stupid and will gain you very little.
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I agree with the AC, and would point out that the OP doesn't explicitly say it though.
There's a big difference between dropping out to pursue a new idea you haven't yet developed, and dropping out to expand an already successful idea to something more large scale.
Re:If you have a great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Being as big as a Gates or a Zuckerberg is more a function of opportunity than pure education or even talent. Not to underestimate their abilities, of course, but I'd say there are plenty of people with the academic capabilities (or better) of both of those two, but they will never be more than well-paid employees.
The important thing is finding and knowing what to do with opportunities, and then learning what you need to in order to take advantage of it. People with more education will have more specialized knowledge, but interestingly, I'd say that they gain more from the currency of simply having the piece of paper and any networking they can do in the graduate programs. In this way, I'd say that it is 100% true that the higher education *system* helps find more opportunities for advancement, starting with the requirement for a graduate degree for a better job, but going even further than that.
Still, the right opportunity and the means to take advantage of it is what is actually required. The rest of it is just positioning. In the end, you don't get rich being a great practitioner of a particular science or engineering field, you get rich either managing your business, or getting it to the point where others can manage it for you. Of course, dropping out is like buying only one lottery ticket instead of multiple tickets. You can still win it all on the one ticket, but chances are much better you win if you invest more.
Re:Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Being as big as a Gates or a Zuckerberg is more a function of opportunity than pure education or even talent. Not to underestimate their abilities, of course, but I'd say there are plenty of people with the academic capabilities (or better) of both of those two, but they will never be more than well-paid employees.
Yes, having parents that can easily pay for Harvard or Yale is more important to your future wealth than actually *graduating* from Harvard or Yale.
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The Lottery (Score:2)
And while humanity needs risk-takers, and it
What if... (Score:2)
It's funny, the things that degrees are required for these days. I would hire someone out of high school to be a entry level technician in my lab, and train them myself, if our hiring policies allowed me to do that. In that way,
extenuating circumstances (Score:2)
Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
There are always going to be exceptions to any rule. But if you are a betting person, you would increase your odds of becoming a tech executive if you have a college education and a senior executive if you have a management degree.
I respectfully disagree. What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniac, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They were smart enough to realize that you have to strike while the iron is hot. All staying in school would have done for these guys is ensure that they missed the boat on their respective opportunities and found themselves in arguably more menial jobs as a result.
This article sounds like it was sponsored by a bunch of universities or something.
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Is the article really lumping together statistics of people who start a successful tech company with people who run a successful tech company? A company is only started once, but run by N executives. The executives shouldn't be part of this statistic because aspiring entrepreneurs are not looking to jump right into the role of CEO at an existing company.
Great, an article from network world. (Score:3)
complete with annoying survey tacked on the article.
the site and article are aimed at essentially people holding masters in "business" - that's phb's, nobody fucking else would bother to read a site with hover-spam and popups.
(here's the print link, all in one page http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&pagename=/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/070212-tech-ceo-college-260546.html&site=printpage&nsdr=n [networkworld.com] )
basically, if you want a job running a big company _for someone else_ then you need a degree most of the time. but hell, they chose to include even a guy who's running a company because he inherited the position. sure zuck might not get an interview for ceo position at another company - but most companies would set him up for an interview to buy the fucking company - but if he didn't own facebook he would be just a regular schmo.
interesting list would be one of tech companies ran to the ground by ceo's with perfectly good credentials on paper, even McBride had degrees you know - on the very thing he fucked up!
besides, what the fuck defines "an aspiring tech executive"? I can understand what defines an aspiring engineer, but not technology executive - is it like aspiring to be a venture capitalist, only playing with someone elses money already given to him to play with, with projects already given to him?
I Disagree (Score:2)
First off business men absolutely should copy Mark's complete disregard for the law, friends, and common decency when chasing profits.
"RUNNING successful U.S. high-tech firms"
And that is the important part. Running, did these "tech giants" create these companies or were they simply the safe choice that was made when picking someone to run them?
Definitely a bad role model (Score:3)
But not because he dropped out of college, but for doing things like buying Instagram for $1B without consulting his board.
For every rule there are exceptions (Score:2)
There are outliers any any population. These are the folks who are at the right place and the right time. Some are astute and take advantage of the situation while others fall into it.
This happens with everything from insects to people to companies and it has since time began. So, the Jobs, Zuckerburgs and Gates of the world can be shown to be successful without a college education but there was also a few others:
John D. Rockefeller [wikipedia.org]
Andrew Carnegie [wikipedia.org]
Samuel ZeMurray [unitedfruit.org]
George Westinghouse [wikipedia.org]
Thomas Edison [wikipedia.org]
Most of the
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...villagers get their pitch forks and torches and kill the SOB.
Run Z-bone[1], run!
[1] I had a FB account once, so I'm close enough to Zuckerberg to call him Z-bone.
I disagree (Score:2)
What about the myth of the non-drop out? (Score:3)
Summary mentions the myth of the ivy league drop out...
Dare I ask? What about the myth of the grad student who has a stellar career in the midst of the biggest college/university fee hike --and possibly the shittiest economy-- in history?
Anyone care to tell them that their lifetime salary bump for having their degree will not necessarily pay for the debt they took on early in life, since the career prospects for many of them will be flipping burgers or waiting at restaurants anyway? (Don't laugh, most of you have been served at least once by a lawyer or PhD. It occasionally pays better [cbslocal.com].
CEO is an employee (Score:2)
The CEO is generally an employee of the company. Do you really expect a board (most of whom also have degrees and are often CEOs of other companies) to hire someone without a degree to lead their company? Of course not.
So yes, CEOs will generally have degrees. The only time there is an exception is when the person founded the company, and built it themselves. And apparently in tech, there are only 3 of those left at the moment (gates, zuckerberg, ellison).
College drop outs account for 20% of the 657 self-ma
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So I have to correct myself after checking the article. The 3 tech CEOs without degrees are zuckerberg, ellison, and dell.
Gates is no longer the CEO of microsoft, so he does not count. Likewise, Jobs does not count either.
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I actually it would do a great justice to corporate governance and the whole world if we reformed corporate boards completely. I am *not* sure that other CEOs are needed or wanted on boards. At the moment corporate boards are nothing more than one tangle of conflicted interests. We need groups of shareholders that will actually hold CEOs accountable and won't force wages up just because they sit on each other's boards. The whole system as it is right now is a disgrace.
Yeah, stay in college (Score:2)
Accumulate loans. Accumulate debt. Graduate into a crappy economy created by the same people you will be paying off for the next 20 years.
EDITORS: Title is too verbose (Score:2)
You should have cut it off at "Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad".
Brevity, Friend.
Shorter version. (Score:3)
Like other jobs... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember the woman who played the young John Connor's step/foster mother in T2? Yeah, I don't know her name either, and that's my point. She's one of those actors/actresses whose face you remember, but whose name you don't. But as a result of having small parts in so many movies, she's pulling in somewhere at the low seven figures from royalties. She's not Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter or any other famous professional from the acting world, but she embodies a more likely form of success to anyone who would choose acting as a career. But alas, the center of the bell curve is never all that interesting...and nobody wants to be at the lower side of what falls off the slope. So everyone focuses on the exceptional and strange (in a good way) examples.
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I once ended up on a plane next to a Hollywood actress. I started asking about work she's done, and of course I hadn't heard of it, and definitely didn't know who she was. She explained that almost all actresses and actors in Hollywood made a decent but not great living doing bit parts in various movies and TV shows, and that it was a fairly good job all told but not one that would ever make her millions.
CEOs, tech, what? (Score:2)
Plus think of all the companies that were bought out by a big co
Completely Disagree (Score:2, Interesting)
What is not mentioned here is that the methods by which those great tech startups got big.
" behind every great fortune is a great crime"
Apple
Microsoft
Facebook
Oracle
are all great heists
And thus it's good to study those crimes if you wish to become rich. The MBA is really good training for finding your mark to exploit and understanding risks..but anyone can steal.
Myth Confirmed (Score:2)
Dropped out: Gates and Allen. Jobs and Wozniak. Ellison. Zuckerberg.
On the other hand, if you don't want to drop out, you could go to Stanford, as Hewlett & Packard (HP), Bosack and Lerner (Cisco), and Brin and Page (Google) did.
And some just lie about it... (Score:2)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/13/farewell-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompson-ousted-for-a-resume-lie.html [thedailybeast.com]
Poor reasoning (Score:2)
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Hey Philosophy Major, is my latte ready yet?
Yes, English major. See you at lunch? Yes, I would like fries with that.
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True... But I know a lot of jobs you can't get without a degree. Where your resume will be tossed out after an automated first pass.
Re:seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning...
I read it as the only thing better than being surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls is being a multimillionaire tech startup CEO surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls.
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
How to be rich and successful in corporate America: be a selfish, backstabbing cunt with no conscience!
That's what we want! That's what we select for! The compassionate, mature guy well he can just go on welfare, fuck him. We love our sociopaths. Sociopath?! Where?!?!?! Here, Mr. Sociopath, let me give you some money and power, yeahhhh that's the stuff.
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Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, we're not posting this from a cave because the cave didn't impress women, so we built houses with electricity in them and running water.
Absolutely everything on earth came about because of pussy. If there were no pussy, we would be sitting in caves gnawing on raw meat.
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, we'd have probably invented beer without pussy. But we may have invented it sooner so as to engage the really fat cave girls.
Re:In Zuck's defense... (Score:5, Insightful)
[...] but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data[...]
That does not make it right.
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
THIS
Forget any minor shit about his education, Zuckerberg is a real-life supervillain, destroying humanity's concept of privacy and commercializing human relationships for his own personal gain.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
If that passes for a supervillain in your universe, where's the portal to get there?
In my universe the run of the mill villains slaughter people without remorse or conscience; win public office based on lies and then force their demented wills on the people with the full force of government agencies (staffed by personality types that love to get all up in your shit with force) at their backs; wage wars with vague purpose and no end game, or just because someone's great great grandparent did some uncertain bad thing to someone else's great great grandparent; head up thuggish dictatorships that commit genocide and slavery; run hideous anti-science, misogynist religions; leave dozens of decapitated bodies hanging from bridges merely as a warning to others; hire physicists to build economic models that eventually crash the economy; write laws that lead to the hiring of physicists to build models that eventually crash the economy; refuse to see the society destroying fallacies of their own ideologies despite endless empirical evidence, and, oh, so many other things.
Geez, your universe considered some jackass offering a free and voluntary service with dubious fine print a supervillain? Let me pack my bags!
Re:And... (Score:5, Funny)
On behalf of every would-be tyrant, autocrat, dictator, and fiend, I'd like to THANK Zuck. I mean Christ, who needs to invest in expensive and complicated counter-terrorism and surveillance services when you can just put a person in front of a computer and they'll happily blab away their every secret in exchange for links to silly cats and pictures with text over them?
Facebook is the best thing to happen to dictators in a while. It's a tremendous source of information, it's not hard to hack (and has BEEN hacked on numerous occasions), and gives the tyrant an almost complete picture of who you hang out with, when, where, and what you discuss. DickTater know what you like, what you do, where you work, where you studied, and who your co-subversives are.
So thanks, Zuck. Being a tyrant was never so easy. In fact "using Facebook" makes up a large part of chapter 9 (Communications & Media) of the Dictators Handbook (http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/ [dictatorshandbook.net]). True!
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Also he dresses poorly. Don't go to wall street hoodie in hand asking for people to invest their pension money.
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, you discriminate against people upon how they dress?
It's great to be comfortable or a rebel and all, but the way humans (and computers) interact seamlessly is through standards. Clothing may seem trivial to you, but dressing for business is a statement that you are there *for* business. You can still be there for business if you wear a hoodie, but it becomes open to interpretation, just as Zuck's choice of apparel was.
That lack of clarity can ruffle feathers and be enough to make a difficult negotiation impossible. Sometimes, that sort of clash is a statement, and as such, may be a good idea, but it comes with a risk.
One way or the other, anyone who expects their bits to arrive in an expected manner, but rails against people who arrive dressed in an expected manner isn't considering the value of convention to efficient and clear communication.
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Here's a basic and reliable formula for success - educate yourself, save your money, and don't be stupid. Oh, and position yourself at where money goes to.
Moderate success, working the corporate ladder. Crazy success you only get with major ownership in a an idea that goes sky high. And you have to have the balls to ride that rocket too. I think everybody here has heard of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but have you heard of Ronald Wayne? He's a co-founder of Apple but sold out very early, if he'd kept all his stock he'd be worth 35 billion dollars today. But as he admits, he couldn't risk it and cashed out.
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A great number of people in the U.S. equate success and wealth. It's pretty sad...
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A great number of people in the U.S. equate success and wealth. It's pretty sad...
And, also sadly, equate success/wealth with happiness. (As for me, I'm fairly successful and well-off, but my wife of 20 years died in 2006 and I'd happily be a penniless failure to have her back.)