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<p>I think you just actually inadvertently touched on one of the problems in engineering: that there is a rather large difference between an engineering curriculum and an engineering job, and that, simply put, there are many topics within an engineering curriculum that are not only painful to learn, but more importantly that you simply don’t need to know to just do the job. </p>
<p>Take the history of Apple. One might say that Steve Jobs isn’t a real engineer (although I believe he is). But I think nobody can accuse Steve Wozniak of not being a real engineer, for he personally designed the groundbreaking Apple I and the monster-selling Apple II. Yet neither of the 2 Steve’s had graduated from college at the time. But that didn’t stop them from developing some of the most important innovations in the history of the computer industry. Imagine how different the technology industry would be if the 2 Steve’s were required to take a bunch of theory courses before they were actually allowed to do real engineering work. </p>
<p>Or take Wayne Rosing. He was the Director of Engineering and Apple and then the long-time head of Engineering at Google. Yet he never graduated from college. </p>
<p>And of course you can talk about Mr. Gates himself. As Paul Graham put it:</p>
<p>*…I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.</p>
<p>And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.</p>
<p>The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>
<p>And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html[/url]”>Paul Graham;
<p>In fact, your discussion of music majors being forced to learn theory before they get to be real violinists precisely illustrates my point. Many of the most brilliant violinists in the world also never went to college at all. The violin genius prodigy Anne-Sophie Mutter never went to college. By age 13, she had been invited to the Berlin Philharmonic. Or, if you’re willing to look at the arts in general, the truth is, many leading artists (whether in music, visual arts, literature etc.) studied relatively little formal education in theory and certainly most of them never completed actual degrees in music, art, or literature. Stevie Wonder has been one of the most important musical innovators in recent history. He never went to college. Joseph Brodsky was a completely self-taught poet who eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature and became the US Poet Laureate. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway never went to college at all, and his theoretical writing education - such as it was - consisted of little more than his experience as a newspaper journalist. </p>
<p>What I am saying is that there is a lot of engineering theory that you are forced to learn within an engineering major that, frankly, you don’t really need to know, and important engineering innovations can and are made by people who don’t know this theory and don’t need to know it. Hence, much of that theory simply serves as an artificial obstacle that hinders people from being able to get to the interesting part of engineering.</p>