Silicon Valley hiring tech mavericks and trailblazers without college degrees
The tech world is being taken over by precocious prodigies without degrees.
Elon Musk’s hand-picked staff at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) range in age from 19 to 24 and include a recent high school graduate, as well as a former SpaceX intern who received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel to drop out of school.
Musk and Thiel are outspoken cheerleaders of college dropouts in Silicon Valley — and more and more companies, like IBM, Google, GM, and Apple, are following suit by scrapping degree requirements for tech gigs.
“Where you went to school, and if you went to school, matters less, I think increasingly so,” Silicon Valley veteran and former Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin told The Post.
“The brightest minds are beginning to recognize that capability, competence, and effectiveness can transcend the university that you went to.”
Dropouts are in good company too: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all quit college to concentrate on their tech empires.
It’s about time legacy companies follow the lead of trailblazers like Thiel, who has long favored young entrepreneurs gutsy enough to pave their own way.
The PayPal co-founder started handing techy dropouts $100,000 checks to fund their endeavors in 2010. DOGE employee Luke Farritor was awarded a grant this year, along with Augustus Doricko.
“There’s definitely respect in Silicon Valley for those that drop out,” Doricko, 24, told The Post.
“You find a community.”
Doricko left UC Berkeley in his senior year to start Rainmaker, a tech company that modifies the weather to make it rain more. He just raised $6.3 million in funding.
“I think that any aspirational young person in college pretty quickly realizes how ridiculous the university system is, just because how un-intense it is, how much you’re coddled, how slow the pace of education is,” he said. “But if 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 degree is a moderate to bad proximate indicator of capability,” and more and more hiring managers are agreeing.
IT firm Accenture is among a slew of companies who have recently loosened degree requirements. Last February, they hired Seth Gallegos as a network engineer, despite his lack of a diploma.
“I think 95% of any tech job can be done without a degree,” the 21-year-old Denver native told The Post.
Gallegos took a fifteen week “bootcamp” in cyber security, which allowed him to get certification at a fraction of the cost of a computer science degree.
“I’m the youngest person in the office, but I’m at the same level and on the same career path as others who have gone through those four years of college,” he said.
He has several friends thriving in tech without a degree, including Alejandro Ceniceros, who also did a bootcamp upon his recommendation. Ceniceros, 20, works as a cloud technician for a hospital chain — a job that traditionally would require a college degree to even apply.
“I didn’t want to get into a huge amount of debt over schooling, because you’re not even guaranteed a job with a degree anymore in this market,” he said. “I also knew employers are starting to prioritize real-life skills and not just diplomas.”
Ceniceros believes tech is uniquely meritocratic because it’s easy to self-teach, like he did by binging cybersecurity podcasts: “Anybody can buy a computer 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 trying to get into tech without a degree but was only able to break the glass ceiling in 2022, when companies started relaxing education standards in the wake of the pandemic.
“I applied to all the major employers, and none of them would hire me [without a diploma],” Larkin, now 35, said. “The first pick was always kids coming out of college with an IT degree and like a three month summer internship, whereas I had to gut it out for years.”
“But now it seems like companies are hiring the best 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.
“In the past, you would use a university degree or company pedigree as the bar, but now you can use AI tools to weed through everybody’s application,” he said. “AI tools are going to provide more efficiency to access people’s true skill set.”
Some companies are even proactively reaching out to non-grads through apprenticeships. The Amazon Web Services apprenticeship program pays students for four weeks of training and often hires them after.
Kavary Hill, a 25-year-old working in HVAC in Virginia, had always dreamed of going into tech but never thought it possible without a college degree, until his mother told him about the apprenticeship program.
“I was always interested in IT… but this was the first opportunity to actually get my foot in the door,” Hill told The Post.
He and his mother, Sherrie, decided to go through the training together in November — and both launched careers as data center operations technicians at Amazon Web Services without a college diploma.
Other companies are looking to onboard even younger — like IBM, which partnered with specialized Brooklyn high school 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 at college,” Griffith, now 24, told The Post.
She foresees more young people looking to get a similar jump start in their careers: “Not a lot of students are interested in going to college anymore nowadays, so embedding technology early on… is really important.”
Besides, a lack of a college degree isn’t always a ding on a résumé. It can also be an indication of a precocious, self-sufficient, non-conformist trailblazer.
As Elon Musk recently put it: “We don’t care where you went to school… Just show us your code.”
