The either/or nature of your statement makes it inaccurate, as far as I'm concerned.
If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.
For some, definitely. But if, for example, Jobs had the technical skills of Wozniak, he may have spent those critical hours hacking away at the machine instead of making smart business moves and we would have ultimately never heard of his name. The lack of strong technical skills was an asset for him.
My point is that there is nothing you can do to prepare for success. Getting your engineering degree might lead you to success, but it could just as easily steer you away from success. There is no magic formula you can follow.
I didn't make a single social connection in college. There is literally no one from my school who I know.
College, for me, was learning how to learn, mostly that I could successfuly teach myself. It also provided some rigor in critical areas (I had a great data structures prof, for instance).
Everyone has their own path, but broadly speaking I would say that avoiding social opportunities at college was not to your benefit. I, for one, learned almost nothing at college that I couldn't have picked up myself with a few hours of before-bed reading sessions. The social experience was the value.
It might depend on the college, and how it feeds into the industry you wind up in.
Mine was a Large Cow College -- the U of MD -- whose CS department seemed to feed into the Washington, DC government and defense contractor businesses. When I relocated to Silicon Valley, all of my contacts were useless.
Well, there was the Arpanet; I'd been exchanging email with some Atari enthusiasts at Stanford for a while, and wound up going to dinner and users group meetings with them a few times.
But Silly Valley was (and probably still is) a terrible place for a geek to try to learn to be social. I'll probably do a blog post about that some day.
One of the biggest benefits I've experienced while attending university is that I'm forced to learn concepts I might not otherwise expose myself to. Over my last semester I had an assembly language course which exposed me to many unique problems I wouldn't have otherwise encountered.
If I'd been learning on my own, I doubt I would have seen the value in investing a hundred hours in a language I wouldn't ever use in industry. Same goes for a number of other courses, all with varying degrees of relevance.
Take it from someone who knows: how good you are at your job matters very, very little in comparison with how much people like you as a person.
It's about mindset. Make sure that your expectations are aligned with your long-term goals. If you spend 100% of your time on training yourself in cs, then expect to be very shocked by the social dynamics of your first job. Conversely, if you spend 60% of your time focusing on becoming more social, then expect to have more friends, connections, and to connect with an overall larger number of interesting people during your lifetime.
So make sure you think about the answer to "What are my long-term goals?" and allocate your time proportionally. I didn't. I'd trade you my 10 years of advanced C++/graphics knowledge/gamedev industry experience for the college opportunity you have right now. And I wouldn't spend it by burying myself in studies.
> Take it from someone who knows: how good you are at your job matters very, very little in comparison with how much people like you as a person.
I think this is untrue simply because smart people who are good at their job are very likeable in general. Who doesn't like the smart productive guy? Conversely, who can stand the dumb guy on the team who never does any work? Of course there are exceptions, but my experience is that the social structure among nerds is largely a meritocracy. Just don't be mean to people.
If this hasn't been your experience, I think you had some misfortune by ending up in companies where politics dominate. There are both. Look at upper management - are they technically smart, or charismatic? Whichever one they are is likely what will have propagated throughout the company. Also watch out for mediocrity, that propagates too.
Of course, I'm referring to technical jobs, not business in general. If it were MBA, I'd agree with you.
I totally agree with being social at college, and being really friendly and helpful to everyone, but doing good in your studies is pretty much a guaranteed way to become good at grinding your way through things that are perhaps very boring. They are both equally important and unless you are working, you should be able to find time for both activities. Studying with classmates is also a good way to do both.
EDIT: I don't know what I replied to this comment and not your main comment about socializing at school, but w/e
> I think this is untrue simply because smart people who are good at their job are very likeable in general. Who doesn't like the smart productive guy? Conversely, who can stand the dumb guy on the team who never does any work?
I think in practice if you're in the middle 80% of the productivity spectrum, how well you interact with other people matters more than your technical ability.
You're not always just interfacing with other nerds. And in a startup context, as a founder you'll spend as much time talking to MBA types as you will on technical details.
Right, exactly. But there's many ways to form social connections. You can meet influential people in this ecosystem fairly easily. With a mix of friends of friends and just interacting on twitter or maybe hacker news and building these relationships.
At least it's worked for me. Been in SF for the last few days to have some meetings and coffees as It's hard to connect properly from London and it's been fairly good as i've spoken to lots of people in advance. People are willing to help with advice or connections, especially when you're early in your career.
