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🎓 Is College Still Worth It in 2025?

Welcome to The Standup – where developers, creators, and founders debate the big questions. In this episode, we sit down with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp co-founder.

👉 Is College Worth It in 2025?

We dive deep into:

⏳ The ROI of college in a post-AI world
🇺🇸 Why American higher ed is broken (from a Danish POV)
📉 Are CS degrees still worth $250K?
💸 The myth of the “four-year luxury cruise”
🤖 How AI is disrupting the junior dev job market
🔍 Hiring: Is college even a useful signal anymore?
🧠 IQ vs wisdom vs vibes – what really matters in hiring
🧰 Is programming a trade? Should we move to apprenticeships?
👨‍🌾 Why every dev wants to be a farmer (and why that’s delusional)

Whether you’re considering college, hiring devs, or already knee-deep in student debt, this conversation pulls no punches and may just change how you think about education, hiring, and the future of software development.

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📌 Chapters:
0:00 intro
2:05 is college still worth it in 2025?
5:48 the cost of college in the U.S. vs Europe
6:57 sponsor: CodeRabbit
7:42 good point
9:10 DHH explains the Danish education system
13:02 is college just a luxury cruise?
17:45 what are you actually buying with a degree?
21:20 how companies really hire developers
26:11 Casey’s take: programming should be a trade
30:40 is college a filter for IQ or just vibes?
45:50 what skills matter more than a degree
49:20 how to actually learn to code in 2025
53:00 is college redeemable? final thoughts
57:15 wrap-up & what’s next on the podcast

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Headlines:

• intro
• is college still worth it in 2025?
• the cost of college in the U.S. vs Europe
• sponsor: CodeRabbit
• good point
• DHH explains the Danish education system
• is college just a luxury cruise?
• what are you actually buying with a degree?
• how companies really hire developers
• Casey’s take: programming should be a trade
• is college a filter for IQ or just vibes?
• what skills matter more than a degree
• how to actually learn to code in 2025
• is college redeemable? final thoughts
• wrap-up & what’s next on the podcast

Transcript:
welcome to the startup today we have on with us we have Tee say hi Tee hi Tee all right uh we got Casey Miratori hello everyone and we got DHH the race car driver himself all righty so by the way today we got a good topic topic is should you go to college i thought the topic was is college worth it that's a different that's a different question the topic is is college worth it nailed the intro he's got it first try right here all [Music] right uh anyways sorry is college worth it hey David you are on the show for the first time so why don't you kick us off is college worth it and as the only non-American well is it worth what is it worth 10 grand yeah I think it's worth 10 grand is it worth a quart of a million dollars in debt absolutely not unless you're guaranteed to be raking it in when you get out on the other side i think the weirdness of all of this is coming from Denmark where the state will pay for your college education the state will spend like last I looked it up I think it was something like 10 grand to educate you so to hear that people go to college where you can spend $90,000 a year for a four-year degree and I think that's even without room and board just sounds insane i don't understand why Americans married the idea of getting education with getting a four-year cruise like why did that have to be the same thing oh you also get a five-star hotel thrown in and by the way you got to pay for it for the rest of your life that just seems insane to me not the idea that you have to or should get an education if you're so inclined to get high education but that you're going to pay a ridiculous ungodly sum for it that you're going to carry on your back for the next 10 15 20 years is there any education that's worth it that is worth the 250,000 like is there some role that it's like okay it's fine because is it purely just because you're going to make money is that your argument like so like a doctor doctors come out they spend obviously hundreds of thousands of dollars because they have to go to you know college for eight 10 years just like me but I'm not a doctor and like does that is that the same thing are you okay with that because you know they're going to make a lot i think that's at least a financial sort of situation that can make sense i know in Denmark there are educations where you spend a lot if you want to become a pilot that's really expensive and you normally take on some sort of loan agreement or you sometimes take something on with the military you're going to do this amount of years of service and they're going to teach you how to become a pilot but in the US this idea that you can spend 4 years learning Russian poetry and that's going to cost you 100 grand 200 grand 50 grand 20 grand like on the other side like what the [ __ ] are you going to do how are you going to make that money back i think it's just absolutely mind-blowingly insane that there's a system set up where the loans are backed by the government which means that there's no skin in the game for neither the lenders nor the educational institutions to actually produce something that will create a return that someone is going to spend a proportionate amount on the education as to what they're going to get out of it from a job and I I mean I'm not even against Russian poetry i think there should be people who study that but they shouldn't be perhaps encouraged to take on an obscene amount of debt for prospects that just aren't there to ever ever pay it off in the end and I think that's really what just fires me up about all this stuff is that the economics are so warped and it all seems to hinge on this idea that like well if we can just convince uh I don't know a president to forgive all the loans without changing a damn thing about how the system works somehow that's going to be good no no the fundamentally flawed part is that there is there's no skin in the game for lenders there's no skin in the game for the universities and there's just a bunch of 18 year olds being asked whether they would like free money to take a four-year [ __ ] cruise to come out of the other side with a degree in Russian poetry that's going to pay $22,000 a year like what the why why are you doing this to kids i think that borders into something that's morally reprehensible even if you can say like well you knew you signed on the dotted line you could have read the It's not even fine print i mean you actually do have to be slightly [ __ ] to think that you can take on $200,000 or $100,000 worth of debt and that that degree in Russian poetry is somehow going to work out but you know what that's what 17 year olds are that's what 18 year olds are they're [ __ ] in the sense that like their brains are not literally not fully formed i think the the female brain formed a little earlier the male brain 25 that's by the time in my experience there's still sometimes a little time left to cook even after 25 so I think it's it's just I mean it's just a really bad construct to entice kids to take on these massive loan burdens with the entire pressure of a society telling them that if they don't go to college and preferably if they don't go to a prestige college they're [ __ ] right like their life is over they they're never going to make any money they're going to be a loser which by the way isn't true there are plenty of losers who finish their four-year degree and again saddled with a bunch of debt and can't get a job and like that's a fair definition of a loser in fact it's a worse definition of a loser than someone who doesn't go through all that and at least doesn't have the the debt burden right but this idea that we've shuffled all kind of societal pressures towards you have to get a college degree because hey look at the statistics over time blah blah blah yeah also we need some welders we need some carpenters we need a bunch of other professions to keep society [ __ ] running and some of them can be quite lucrative right so even just for an individual there is something really screwed up about how the encouragement system goes i think uh Mike RH and the whole 30 jobs things and so on I is absolutely spot on in my optics um but all right not everyone wants to be a welder and and some folks should go to college we should also have a bunch of educated people we don't need to take that a desire and a need for education and marry it to a luxury cruise that's going to cost an obscene amount of money like developers are you tired of code reviews that just say looks good to me or here's seven things I need you to change that are irrelevant to the PR well meet Code Rabbit ai reviews right inside your editor starting with VS Code Cursor and Windsurf sorry no Vim yet hit review and bam out comes feedback even before you open a poll request code rabbit can help flag bugs that your vibe coding with your LLM bots missed and with one easy click it can send all the context back to your favorite agentic tools for quick fixes line by line code Rabbit offers a generous free tier with up to 50 code reviews per day grab the extension now at codrabbit.link/primagen-vscode links in the description and ship cleaner code today you bring up a really good point which is these 18-year-olds can make a decision that's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars but they can't even buy alcohol cuz we think they're not responsible enough to be able to drink alcohol which is kind of like a really funny kind of world we live in where it's just like oh yeah they totally get a life decision that's going to saddle them with debt for the for the next 20 potential years of their life but hey you can't rent a car yet honestly you're not you're not capable to rent a rent a car but hey you can definitely make this decision like one is way worse than the other one and it's just far more impactful that's actually Well that's why the the car company doesn't want to let them rent a car cuz they know they're going to make bad decisions and the car company's going to be the one yes if if if that 18-year-old crashes the car and the company renting them can't recoup that money because the [ __ ] 18-year-old doesn't have any they know you know what that wouldn't be smart i should not rent this person my car because they're going to crash it and I won't be able to get my money back therefore I'm not going to do it and I think that's by the way at the root of all this is good intentions the good intention that if we underwrite the loans the student loans more people have access to loans which means that more people will have access to education and zero consideration has been taken to like the second order effect what happens when there's just free unbacked money with no skin in the game yeah prices are going to go to the moon and who's going to vacuum all all the excess capital administrators you you've seen the graph right it's like since whatever 1960 complete flatline with uh professors and educators and adjuncts and then you see from 1980 forward the chart just goes parabolical when you look at administrators i what was the the stat something like some college had a 10 to1 ratio of admins to students or something just truly bizarrely might have been Columbia I think or something yeah I remember seeing something like that yeah can't be real there can't be 100,000 he's not really exaggerating that i don't remember the exact point either but like there were there were numbers that would be absurd right i remember it being I'm going to [ __ ] ask AI it's more ridiculous than absurd number yeah it had to be like administrators to professors for every single professor there's 10 administrators because students would just be just would be the most ridiculous yeah it was it was something like 10 but it was like one to one with students it was like it was like the same number or something it was insane okay it's like having a company and you have more managers than employees like everybody's walking around like we're managing here it is thanks thanks uh chat GBT uh at Yale 5,460 administrators managing fewer than 5,000 undergraduate students more than a one:1 ratio what what you don't think you're paying for that you don't think you're paying for that hall monitor like all the time just dedicated to you and only you it'd be one thing too if they like literally followed you around they're like "Yo we're going to we have a person whose sole job is they're going to follow you for 4 years we're going to optimize everything about your life we're going to get you in the best classes i'm going to be reaching out to people to get you internships i'm going to be like yeah your personal assistant your Yale personal assistant right?" And also like it gets drunk for you like whoever that person is they get drunk for you they get in fights for you they date for you all the stuff and then you just get the outcome whatever it is at the end of it imagine you could just be like "Hey can you ask out the personal assistant of so and so over there and we can sort of figure out if we're a match?" And then like we'll go on a date i'm too busy studying and working hard but instead it's like "What are these people doing?" Absolutely what are these people [ __ ] doing well first of all they're making your life [ __ ] miserable 100% the college experience that had a 1:1 ratio of admins to students is infinitely worse than the experience of 1967 that had 100 students to one administrator whatever the ratio used to be 100% that experience is worth worse and I think I mean for me the great illustration of this was during co where student was just treated like cattle in a cage and you're thinking like wait what people are paying for this they're paying for this [ __ ] experience They don't even get to go to classes they don't even get to have the joy of that four-year uh cruise they get to be confined into a dorm and then there's an administrator that's going to run around and yell at them if they walk outside without a mask on well what are you doing this is just insane and then like did they not just admit like Yeah well we I know you guys didn't really learn anything this semester so everyone just gets an A they didn't even like pretend at the end of the semester like I had younger siblings in college like during COVID and they're like what we just didn't do anything and you're like "What do you mean you still got the grade you didn't have to like repeat or anything?" "Oh yeah I got a check for that." You're like "What what?" That's I didn't even know that was a thing that that is that's crazy that's like the Okay so I can't tell what is the worst part about or the best part about college whether it's the actual education or the fact that you're going through college with people approximately your age learning the same topic and being able to kind of learn how to argue with each other and really become a full-formed adult and all that if you're not even going to school or class during that time and you didn't get to be around other people like the whole entire college experience doesn't make any sense this is also my whole problem with remote education they're really there's a big push into like remoteify all aspects of life and it's just like how why would you ever pay to go to a university when like the true value of a university is in the moments of being around people and learning in some sort of co- kind of way like those were those were single-handedly my best experiences in college and really where I learned how to become actually a good programmer was act was the afterlabs after hours arguing about an ACM programming competition figuring out how to solve the coin chain problem because none of us were ever able to do it and there was no just chat GPT to spit out an answer it's like that's where the magic was well I would actually argue like one one greater than or one more severe than that I guess I would say which is that college what it really is as far as I've been able to determine is like a institution that is extracting money from you while getting the value from you so it's basically a a strictly one-sided thing all of the students who come together they're actually the value like you interacting with the other students and stuff like that and being there and you know going through the process is valuable to you and valuable to the other students because of each other but the actual education you're receiving is usually not very good compared to that right and compared to the other you know resources that you now have available for learning things and the reason that I think that's somewhat like the reason I think there's a reasonable amount of evidence for that is just because people right now are doing stuff like using chat GPT to cheat on their papers or whatever right and all this sort of stuff if you were going there for the education you would never cheat because that's like paying for something and then not taking the thing right that's like buying a car and then saying "Oh keep the car i'm going to walk it's kind of like getting a gym membership and never going to the gym so we know we know like basically it's like no the thing what you were getting was whatever was happening with you and the other students thing and the credential at the end is the part that you actually cared about and wanted to pay for but the the education receiving can't be that good cuz people aren't even mad when they don't get it or like with co people are probably like sweet I didn't have to read all the books for that class i just got the A for free that would never happen if you felt like the thing you were getting was really valuable right you would never do that you'd be like "Oh my god I object like I want those classes back i need to study that particular piece of Russian poetry and you didn't let me do that." Right yeah i want to inject one thing which is the reason why that's true is because these kids are [ __ ] in the same way we just talked about they're [ __ ] taking on 200 grand worth of student loan debt right they're not literally they their brains are not formed they are forming that is what the university college experience is supposed to do right but in that moment no they don't have that I didn't have that I mean I was always thrilled whenever class was cancelled I was like sweet um so they're not thinking long term because literally the brain is not done with the part that does long-term thinking so when you're asking them like hey do you know what maybe you should study because who's going to care about this diploma by the way not a lot do by the time you get into say uh programming if you're getting a diploma for for programming and you don't know how to program that diploma ain't worth [ __ ] right true there's a status token in that diploma that may open some doors may give you an opportunity may give you an audition you still got to [ __ ] act you still got to be able to do the thing i mean it's all good that you can apply and you'll make the first cut uh of the recruiter sorting oh this person went to Yale like let's make sure that they are in the second round of this [ __ ] and then you're going to be at the whiteboard and then [ __ ] what what are you going to do you don't know anything because you just coasted through everything you spend an enormous amount of money for a status token that's going to be revealed in a second to be worth nothing now I don't know how it works in I don't know investment banking maybe the status token there kind of opens some doors and everyone is full of [ __ ] in investment banking you don't have to know anything i mean that's the stereotype programmers would like to believe about finance people I think or maybe management or something you go into management consulting but also I mean government I don't actually think that's true i do think you'll you got to have some smarts to it right so I think you're exactly right it's an awful deal awful deal to pay way too much even if it has something of value it's an even worse deal to pay all that money for something of zero value and I think again that's part of the that's why kids go to school because they don't [ __ ] know anything or everything they have so they think they do i remember I I remember knowing everything dha okay and I mean that by the way that does have value right like the ignorance I'm actually a big fan of when it comes to a lot of things it has to be backed by some degree of competence or at least a trajectory towards competence but if you have those things ignorance is great right like it allows you to not know how hard it's going to be and you're going to start and you're going to be delusional about how big it's going to be and do you know what maybe it will be right like I started my uh programming adventure when I was 20some well before my prefrontal cortex was fully formed so I'm I'm not against that i mean I think what what you said about how wonderful these years can be how formative they can be it 100% has value 100% something that I'd say anyone who's sort of cognitively inclined to pursue higher education should try to get but why would you pick the most expensive version of that right so you know what i'm going to make a a computer parallel here i've been testing these mini PCs right and I bought this mini PC that's $313 from Minis Forum $313 i'm like "Holy [ __ ] I I'm making a lot of money i should just buy it the best." Right i buy this thing for $313 i'm like "I [ __ ] can't tell the difference i have a $2,000 computer next to it and a $4,000 $4,000 computer next to that i can't tell the difference." Like I if you're not just money is unlimited you're a [ __ ] if you buy the $4,000 computer if the 33 or the $13 computer can do which that's how I look at American education like hey if you just do instate if you just do instate like what 80% of it is paid for whatever the state rate is something like six seven eight grand or something seven grand a year for me it's a lot closer to the Denmark model if you go instate right exactly exactly because it's closer to just like sheer cost mhm why would anyone who does not have the money just to throw around go into debt to get essentially the same product right like I I understand there can be differences between colleges but for most people getting most educations like you know what if you're not really going to class or trying to learn and you're just using you're going for the sort of the social experience and all that good stuff that's great but I think it's just there's a weird um prestige luxury product aspect of this that is just so actually repulsive in many ways when you think about what it is and what the consequences of it is Like do you know what if you can afford to spend uh $20,000 on a watch and you just it's nothing to you great like do it yeah I've done that great i I That's the spoils of having succeeded in some ways if you're spending $20,000 on a watch and you're making like 40,000 $45,000 a year again you're [ __ ] what are you doing that no the Casio which by the way Casio makes some sweet ass watches one of my favorite watches is an $18 Casio right well you pay 20 grand it tells the time worse it's a luxury item for people where money at that scale just doesn't matter right it's the same thing with education like don't don't do the same thing unless your parents are paying for it unless there's some direct line where you can just see like all right if I do this it's going to open that door i want to work at whatever JP Morgan or some other company where I know the huddle goes through Yale or some other status token uh anyone else yeah it's just dumb so I guess can can we put some blame on the industry here though because I feel like if if the industry at large like let's say like you know a couple of these big companies you know Amazon Microsoft Google whoever if they actually came out and said we're not going to look at college degrees anymore period like HR is not going to use them for screening they're not going to get handed the interviewer we're just they're off the resume we just white it out and send it on i think that would have a major effect like overnight on whether or not people because there probably are nowadays especially with thanks to the internet and YouTube and all these things where people can hear more opinions they get more information they can access other things i do think people would be like "Oh cool all right awesome then I'll just study my on my own or I'll just work with some other people you know in a study group on the internet and I'll learn programming and I'll and I'll do this sort of stuff and then I know I won't be disadvantaged when I go to apply to one of these jobs." But the reality is that the HR departments who by the way none of them have any idea what programming is or how it works at all right i can just tell you this like they have no idea what a good programmer looks like none right they still use to do first pass screening and things like this they will use things like CS degrees and I've checked that recently like I've asked people at companies like that you know is that slabing and it is and so I feel like we're we are to blame to some degree for still using this like expense plus attrition plus whatever you want to call the like filtering process that college is like could you grind through four years of having to listen to professors who themselves don't know how to program tell you stuff and then still get through that after and pay $80,000 if you can maybe you're more slightly more likely to be a good employee for us so we're going to make you all do that first if we could get rid of that if we if we took it upon ourselves to get rid of that I think it would be a much better world but the industry isn't they're still doing that because there's a little bit of signal there i think probably right i I think you're also I think there is we're confusing a little bit which is that there was a time in computer science when it was just computer science and programming was like the expression of computer science it's just like hey Google we're doctorates we're researching better search algorithms oh wow we started a company hey we are a bunch of doctors and now we need to get other people to help us with this we should hire other doctors right like there's this actual computer science giving birth to something that was a product but most of the things that are happening today are more akin to a trades job like "Hey I need you to sit down and I need you to go to the pixelmines and swing that like pickaxe for the next eight hours to kind of just make some sort of progress on our product and then I want you to go home and then I'm going to call you at 2 in the morning when everything crashes and burns." Like that's what you're doing it's a 99% trade job it's a 1% like educational job whereas I think if you went backwards in time you would see much more hey this is closer related to research than it is uh closer related to a trades job and so I think there's a we're in this weird shift where we still have all the holding backs of the previous time and now we're in this kind of trades job because I'm sure there was other times that where this has existed in other industries i'm sure it has happened but right now I that's what I mean I think that's why education is still accidentally important is that we still have this hold back it I mean I can go backwards in time i was born in 1976 and now you can go backwards never was like it like there was never a time when the putting you know when actually dealing with the reality of computing didn't require the trades job part mostly like in fact if anything back then it was like if you weren't programming assembly language you probably weren't really going to have a pretty well functioning product right whereas nowadays no one does that right I mean not no one the ffmpeg team does right yeah and occasionally some of the people at RD game tools or whatever but everyone else right we write in something at least slightly higher even if we're doing performance stuff usually so I would say actually going back in time there was even less of an argument for CS yes it was a valuable thing to have a few people working on it you know you wanted your new and your dystras and and stuff like that doing work because we want to know stuff like how do we do shortest path algorithms or things like that but generally speaking that's a very small number of people and you usually don't need very many of those people if any to make a software product even then you didn't need that many of those people to make a software product i would argue I just skill man the other side for a second because there's too much agreement here and I don't like it yes go for Yeah go for it um do you know what i believe the 10X programmer is 100% real perhaps even an understatement because remember the 10X programmer is not saying that the best programmer is 10 times better than the average programmer it's saying that the best programmer is 10 times better than the worst programmer i think that it's a vast understatement i think it's probably the 100x programmer is true or maybe even the thousandx program 10,000x programmers i've seen some shitty programs written in my life and I'm like when I've looked at what that output is and I compared it to the best programs the best programmers I'm like I would not trade 10 of these idiots for one of these geniuses right well it's genius is worth way way more so to steal my like what if and I don't fully believe this but I'm going to present it anyway what if the kinds of people who can make it through a Harvard CS degree were in the just abstract classical sense before DEI [ __ ] like this was actually the cream of the crop of the crop right like it was your perfect SI SAT score individual just like IQ 150 that individual has been filtered through because Harvard only has these few spots and like that they get the very best and then you get arm that person with a CS degree and you let them loose on sort of run-of-the-mill software and what they do is they don't just they don't just do the thing right like they make a machine to build more of the things and that the leverage you get out of a 10 or 100x programmer is actually worth it now I don't actually think this is happening And I don't even think Google knows it's not happening google did this multi-year study on their hiring processes where they were trying to figure out like what's the signal who ends up doing really well and who ends up not doing very well they didn't find a signal they couldn't go like oh it's because they have an MIT background oh it's because they have this or that but at least the pursuit of it does make some sense in my mind because I've worked with a lot of programmers in my time and the capacity the productivity of the very best is just on a completely different plane so I don't I don't disagree that companies the very best companies the most valuable companies the richest companies in the world should try to find those because if you do find one they can do things that most people are not going to do now is your task worthy of that like if you're some regional office for a third tier rental company and you just need to have your form updated like is that worth the super genius to apply to that problem probably not right like we need multiple layers of it um but everyone also wants the best right like they or they want the best that they can get so I don't actually I a little bit sympathize with the idea that the Googles and the fangs and whatever who worth trillions would go like but think about the cost right this is the way I look at it it's like I I totally want them to be trying to get the best right and the problem is the college system doesn't do that filtering as far as I can tell and so what what I would love is if they took it more seriously and went okay how do we build something because What we know is that you could spend $80,000 per person and still come out ahead on that filtering because that's how much Harvard or whatever is charging these people right well now I think though it does get uncomfortable because if you're like what are the raw materials okay that's worth that kind of investment okay and I think and I didn't I I've never taken Naiku test in my life and I'm kind of afraid that if I do one like I'm not going to like the results just do three of them you'll score super high you just once you do one you get a higher score every time i'm thinking 100 still enough of them you'll be like this wonderful book about I went read this wonderful book about um the correlations with IQ and like it was actually kind of sort of depressing because the amount of set trajectories or at least um whatever confidence intervals that originate out of that point is actually rather great and that means that there simply there is a hardware difference right like some people can make up for a lack of hardware with some incredible other ingenuity but generally speaking if you take mass numbers you need a certain amount of hardware and that's partly what the SAT is it's an IQ test by another name um that's what lead code is lead code is essentially hey here's an IQ test or an IQ derivative and it sucks but it's going to produce a signal that at least like this individual has the hardware to perform at the top level because you know what there's no amount of smart tricks you can do at like 95 like you're not it's just that's not going to be your profession it's just not it's not there right so I think um this all these ways we're searching for it to at least find the sort of the potentials of the very very best um tie into that notion that both college the the admission to college and all the rest of it is essentially trying to sus out like who's the smart cookies again there's a million not a there are many other variables you're right very few of them are as determined as that one you you have a point there which is that at least in the US I guess companies are sort of prohibited from using intelligence test as part of hiring as part of like various sort of civil rights legislations and things like this i guess I've heard it said anyway i've never actually looked to see what the case law is on it but that they're not allowed to actually administer administer something that's roughly like how smart is this person they're not yeah they're not right and and so I guess you could say is you know if we want to be really blunt about it is this just a legal issue is it like does that just need to go and then it's like they could put a screening process in place that would allow anyone who could show sufficient ability to get through it without paying the $80,000 uh or it might probably mass $200,000 i don't know what it costs to go to Harvard these days it's probably absurd i think it's north of 200 and why would you think Harvard i've actually never met a good programmer from Harvard maybe there are some my hardware experiences are actually horrible yeah calte all the programmers for Caltech are unbelievably good right uh so yeah but so Caltech whatever it is but point being like whatever that cost is I feel like you know you you would want some way that people could just demonstrate that they they're good enough and they've studied enough on their own to get through it without having to go through that whole process that simply isn't accessible for anyone who doesn't have a lot of money or isn't willing to go into a huge amount of debt which isn't good but but also isn't that I mean and I'm not a big fan of it and I [ __ ] hate algorithm in general right but isn't that what lead code is like lead code essentially if if you can crack the top tiers of that i mean unless you're doing it with AI it is a intelligence test it is a filter and I think at least from what I've heard from a lot of hiring processes a lot of it has sort of leaned heavily into that that that becomes a qualifier if you can really smash lead code and have the tenacity and the time and whatever and the firepower up here between your neurons to grind it for three months and we're able to do those hards like at the very least maybe you're not a great programmer which I actually think there's something to that too i met some very very smart people who are also programmers who I would not want to program my code right correct but but I mean I'd say on on average you'd rather want a smart person than a not so smart person working working next to you um as a programmer i think maybe actually the industry what happened with lead code was some sense of trying to get towards that right can we can we just route around the fact that universities are actually no longer as you say all that great of a filter like they're broken in all these ways they're not as meritocratic and as focused on um objective scores as they once were and therefore they're not a great signal here's another kind of signal which by the way has been completely blown out of the water right like AI killed lead code right so yes I'm going to go with an opposite take on this one which is uh I I don't like the idea of intelligence tests um because I I think that intelligent tests one thing that they largely lack the ability of is to identify wisdom in somebody i'd much rather hire a wise not so smart programmer who's going to make the right decision given enough time than I would to hire the super smart person that can make fast decisions but their decisions may be incredibly unwise because I always define just for everybody intelligence is the ability to solve a problem wisdom is the ability to know which problem to solve right like which which one would you rather have and I I don't think there is a standardized test that's going to be like and this right here is how wise you are here's your wise score sir right because it's just going to it's just going to be completely broken it's going to be absolutely a crap test and so for me I don't like the idea of like gated things based on some sort of nebulous scoring especially when it comes to things like IQ or leak code cuz the reason why I specifically don't like those is any of those tests you take them more than once you will do better like that's a fundamentally broken test that if you're like "Hey how intelligent is this person let's make him take a test okay they did something let's make them take another test." They are now proportionally better than they were the last time they've done it there's something a bit broken that's a very wellstied phenomenon if you have if you just get one move it you're not going to move it that much you're still going to move it but 10 points is a generation of of intelligence like it it doesn't you're not going to you're not going to move IQ 10 points i mean I'll send you I sent you some references on this on this topic because I mean what's interesting about IQ testing is it's one of the few areas of psychology that replicates um where basically like everything else done in the last goddamn 80 years seems to fail replication time and again um IQ testing and its um correlation with positive outcomes in other aspects of life and professional performance is is very well established not to a total degree and I I completely agree with you in the sense that like I've met some very smart people who are also incredibly stupid right like they have the the firepower but it's not been programmed well right like there's like hey you got a you got an M4 chip here and you're running some shitty ass software on it like this chip could do amazing things and you're not doing that um now either way I think the fundamental problem is no one has cracked hiring and I say that as someone who who's currently in the final stages of trying to hire three programmers um two we're trying to hire who are juniors and one who's a senior and [ __ ] it's really difficult it's really goddamn difficult and it's actually only gotten more difficult now that the best test that we've used for years and years which is sort of an at-home programming test um not even test well maybe it is you build a product or something at home and just have we give you a constrained uh part of one of our applications like something that resembles the work you would be doing day-to-day and we ask you to extend it in some specific ways and I've always found it so fascinating how this test has been able to reveal to me almost right away whether I would want to work with this person or not in ways that all the other signals as you say like oh this person went to Yale like I'd be actually inclined to go if you could make it through a 4-year program at a Ivy League institution at least historically you would have to be pretty smart so that's a good signal it's just it's not it's not the determinant signal to me the determinant signal and now I can look back upon 25 years of hiring other people hiring other programmers seeing someone work with the real kind of code they'll be working on on a day-to-day basis with me is I found no better measure the problem with that is a it's hard to do at scale so the the tests that we ask applicants to to do they take like four to six hours i not only do they take 46 hours which is a lot to ask for someone who's applying for a job you better well be quite a ways down the pipeline before that request comes up right like you don't want to give that test to to a thousand people it also takes quite a while to assess it right so I can't process a thousand uh applications that had that kind of uh test in it um so it's a late stage but really nice test and now I kind of fear AI [ __ ] it right oh absolutely but I mean I say that and then we actually this last test we were just about to get we gave it to all the models right like every I think we did like six models like all right solve the thing and some of the models you're like do you know what that's not actually bad and what was interesting about it was the solutions that model would come up with would be quite reminiscent of a lot of junior code and you're like "Shit we're trying to hire junior programmers and if I can't tell anymore whether it's AI doing it or not because I'm giving a lot of allowances right if you're hiring a junior programmer you're not going to ask the same things." None of the models were even remotely close to the bar I would set for a senior programmer in terms of like the the code and so on that I I heard there's not just a new whatever cla dropped that people are freaking out about in my feed so maybe maybe now we're all the way up there but at the junior end of scale I it's really hard how are you going to figure out who you're going to give a chance yeah well I would also I do want to rewind a little bit can Can we re rewind i wanted to rewind with you Prime actually um Okay where So where are you rewinding to just I would like to be a touch more focused on college more itself in the sense that we haven't quite answered if college is worth it we we've all I think we all universally agree you probably shouldn't go $400,000 into debt over especially over an education that is like largely based in trades if you will with programming like I think there is a good argument to be made in that but there's also the argument that there are countries where you you must get a degree if you expect anything like if you go to India if you if you were born and raised in India you can't just be like ah I'm just not going to get a degree and succeed like they don't have a you know a culture around that you're going to largely fail simply because you didn't go to school So there are also immigration like a lot of countries immigration requirements including the United States you you get preferential treatment if you have a degree in something that you're getting hired for you will get preferential treatment in many c uh countries because the government uses that as a standin for competence and what I would say is the reason I think we're talking about the screening process part though prime is because that's the problem the problem is that companies don't have the ability to put in a good screening process i understand your uh your um uneasiness with something like an IQ test and I kind of share that with you because one of the problems I find so I know eugenicsis I can't eugenics all that is b IQ is based on I just can't well sure yeah I mean whatever there's a there's a bad history but also I think the process has a couple issues too which is that because they're trying to do a standardized test with something like an IQ test they're focusing on your ability to concentrate on very small problems So problems that have very low scope and especially in the world of programming one of the things that I find that people who I would consider very smart but are terrible programmers usually the reason for that is their ability to conceptualize large scope does not exist like their abil like their the degree to which they can spend a lot of time thinking about larger things or to hold the larger things in their head is compromised for whatever reason but they do have tremendous firepower on a tiny thing so you know that's not to say they're necessarily going to be a horrible programmer at all things you could you could really clearly like just go optimize this loop or something and maybe they could really do that because it's so tiny but when you're talking about I want someone you know like um David was saying senior programmer someone who's going to conceptualize this system and know like not to do stupid stuff they can't do that right even if they're maybe high IQ because they can't hold the whole thing in their head right whereas um some of the other things like is what could this person be a great novelist or something that actually probably bears more on could you be a great systems architect because you're holding all these things in your head and knowing how some fuzzy things will interrelate with each other and will they play out well and so while I share your concern about that I would say it's still no matter what you think the screening thing is still a screening problem at the end of the day and outsourcing that screening by saying what we're going to do is have this four-year thing that kids go to that they pay all this money for and then they get a degree and by the way the entrance to that is basically an IQ test it just it's ridiculous right it's not it's a nonsensical solution to this problem that probably made sense in the past when it was hard to bring people together right you having professors in one place to work on stuff together made a lot of sense before the internet right nowadays it's like do we need these antiquated ideas of buildings where the people gather like can we do something better and can we do something better than charging people $200,000 or whatever to go to certain ones with limited accessibility so only 3,000 people can go through it blah blah blah blah blah it's like it just seems antiquated like a horse and buggy and my question is just can we make that pipeline that's part screening part education can we make it better and I think the answer has to be yes and unfortunately we're not trying that's what I would say iq test aside i I think you're also focusing on we're focusing on unique colleges um there are a good university right now uh you may not I I know this going to sound like I'm just kind of tooting my own horn here but the uh school of minds in South Dakota a they've been uh in the ACM World Competition which there's only been like what 17 of them 20 of them has been hosted here because of that because of how good this school is at like just problem solving right but on top of it every single graduating class universally gets just hired out by Google every single time all 50 just go straight into Google straight into this pipeline and so I do think there are some schools that are just objectively better and they have created a culture and everybody that goes to the school it's not just about learning because that's I think that's one thing that we're kind of breaking down this is why IQ tests again fail completely is that a job is not simply your ability to apply knowledge it is also your ability to like interact with others and you will never get that in the day and age of on the internet that's why I think like Discord as great as it is is also a really kind of bad thing for a lot of people because they abstain from having real relationships real interactions being able to look somebody in the eye and talk to somebody for a while and instead they have this kind of nice filtered screen and they don't ever have to do that i actually during college one of my interviews was for uh the naval underwater warfare group up in Seattle and the reason why I got selected out of all the kids to go and do like the on-site interview is the lady was like "You're the only person that looked in my eyes while you talked to me not a single other student made eye contact the entire time." And it's just like I won by simply being sociable like that's how I got in so it had nothing to do with whether I was smart or not i I would like to think I was smart but nonetheless it's just because I was able to just talk to another human being which is a a skill I fundamentally received by being around people my age doing the same thing solving the same problems i think that's where like the real again that's where I think a lot of the value is is that I think it's just in the group with some sort of smart person hopefully at the head leading people tj you haven't said a single thing so TJ you got to get in thanks i've been trying but you know you keep you keep hopping in Prime it's just been your I got another thing to say and I'd like to say it right now no okay go i'm going to mute you right now uh I have that power so Prime you can talk again in a little while uh no I'm just kidding um do that i have to touch Riverside and ruin everything please don't do anyway so um the thing that it feels like so often there's there's two things that I feel like for some reason a lot of hiring doesn't at least try and factor in i don't know how you do it i've I've had experience with doing the take-home project before that's my favorite interview that I've ever had it was at the first startup that I worked on submitted it at the end of the week blah blah blah it was great they paid me for my time which was cool because it was a big ask whatever um but one is like what you're saying Prime programming like in a company is way more than like typing into the computer you have to like figure out what your customers want what your clients want what other people on your team want what historical decisions were made for the company because of differing business expectations 6 months ago or a year ago or 10 years ago or 40 years ago depending on where you work and like what are the things that are coming up so there's a whole bunch of like social and like relational things and like a lot of businesses relationships anyways outside of just like can you even get your product working like why does someone stay with your product or whatever so and like you know a bunch of these have no factor it seems like they just like the only way they test that is the first phone screen where they're like "Oh are you a human?" And like you talk to some HR person and they're like "Cool uh you can accurately reflect your birth date and your name congratulations you've made it past the first round." And you're like "That was it that's the only thing we're going to find out if I want to work with this guy later." Um and then the second thing which is kind of like it's related to the idea of like 10x programming is that like the worst software developers are like way negative x programming in the sense that they not only do they not do the thing you're looking for they actively set your entire company back either by like literally taking down prod all the time like the most obvious one but they can just make code that makes it worse to write more code in the future so it's not only that oh well we just had to wait 6 months and Billy finally finished the feature it would have been cool if that was six days but it took six months it's like no Billy took 6 weeks to make this and now no one else can ship to prod no like no one else can figure out what Billy did and now it's broken forever so that like and the long tale of that is like there's a lot of area under that curve of people I've like worked with or seen where they actively just make the entire product uh worse and then the last thing too is that there's some scales where you can't even compare like for me I can't run a marathon like I like physically I wouldn't be able to like finish one i would get eliminated i would get disqualified right like I wouldn't be able to finish literally can't get disqualified but somehow you would figure it out tj well they like closed it down at some point they're like "People have to drive on the road again." It's DNF did not finish this exists in a marathon yeah and that's the same thing is true for a bunch of software projects i've worked with people who like no matter how much time you gave them no matter how whatever they're just not ever going to fix this particular problem due to technical complexity or handling all the scope or like figuring out the way that the customer actually wants to use the thing so that's like infinity x programmer like the there's there's no comparison it's it never happens or someday it happens there's infinity difference between the two and like all of those things it feels like it just it doesn't seem like people care about maybe it's because HR departments at the big companies are in charge of a lot of the hiring process i don't know that's why I feel like I'm taking crazy pills over here you know can I say one thing really quick before we get in too like the before the YouTube comments just fill up it'd be an undefined difference between programmers not infinity cuz I just know I know that's going to be the top comment if I don't say that so okay keep going okay I'll go get my math degree out and then I'll have to burn it because I have It's a divide by zero yeah yeah right i have a mathematics major and I failed them sorry sorry uh cuz it's a divide by zero right so you you have you know you've got this person finished it in in six days and this person will never finish it so it's 6 over zero is the is the ratio between those two and it's not infinity infinity time zero will never be six i mean I'm sure there is a mathematician somewhere who's like actually in this particular type of group it is and I'm like so that will be the second top comment so I had to say that as well but I just that mathematician infinity oh go ahead Brian no it's just undefined infinity this is not You want a mathematician not me to tell you this so but it's undefined because there's no there is no ability to reach it period not not at infinity it will never happen this is the zerox programmer one who never finishes all right anyway go ahead well yeah so anyway so those are just some of the things where I feel like college college can help you in some of those verticals right where like you can get some skills for learning how to work with people if you're like actually trying at college like I went to a small liberal arts college i lived at home to save money and like you know didn't have to pay room and board thanks mom and dad shout out mom and dad they didn't make me pay rent while I was living at home uh you know and like but I did activities at school i met people i made relationships talked to my professors you know like they helped me get internships whatever i learned how to work with people and make connections awesome those things would have been a lot harder for me like otherwise cuz my dad's an accountant and he doesn't know anybody my my family is far from tech adjacent you know like what you know my mom's a music teacher and my dad's an accountant right like there was no connections to get into like software world so like that can be that first vertical can help you out a lot in college if you're paying attention and trying but you could also spend your whole day on Discord like you're saying prime playing video games and never talking to a real human at school which seems crazy it seems like that would be impossible but it's definitely possible twitch chat can back us up half of them are that guy go out and talk to somebody um right and and then it can also help you with some of the other problems because you can like talk to your professors and figure out how these like you could just you got to do some of those things though it's not going to be the school handing those to you i think yeah for me the bottom line here is uh if you I mean we're talking to programmers here if you aspire to be a programmer I think going to college is totally worth it at the right price and it's all about the price like a product isn't bad or good mo I mean some products are just truly bad at any price but a lot of things that exist in this world are bad or good depending on how much they cost right like you have completely different expectations about what you get out of something if you didn't spend the next 20 years worth of salary on it if it was something more affordable more approachable I'd say it'd be far more of a no-brainer i there's a lot of kids in the US where I just feel like no it wasn't worth it for you even if you got like a decent education it the price was just too high yeah it's like Warren Buffett uh always said like there's not a good or bad stock there's just a good or bad price for it again caveats of company going out of business is literally worth zero but with almost everything it's all about what is the price yeah and I think too like the opportunity cost like I was just talking with a guy who was in the middle of school and then I don't know if I can say the company some nice company that is doing well offered to hire him and so he just left school and then he's working there and it's like the opportunity cost was go stay at school and maybe get the same job later or just like go there and work for two years and then if he needs to he can go finish the other two years of school awesome good for him i was like "Dude that's so awesome i'm so hyped for you he's moving to San Francisco he's going to go do his thing." Like that's really good i tried to convince my younger sister she's 10 years younger than I am she just graduated school but when she was starting I was like "Yo I will you can come work with me for 4 years and you only have to pay me half of what your tuition was." [Laughter] And she didn't take me up on the offer but I was like a little bit serious actually that if she really wanted to like try and work with me like we could do basically like a tradesman thing I wouldn't have actually charged her money although I wish there was more of that i was just talking to someone about that that programming in general seems exceedingly well suited for the apprenticeship model exactly for all the reasons you guys were mentioning that this is more of a trade in many ways if you take the total sum of all programmers out there the vast majority of them are trades people and they would learn more quicker better if they were apprenticing under someone yeah and I was like "Your resume will look cooler." Like you have real job experience for four years as opposed to like one little degree spot that gets discarded like at a lot of places um but there were other you know there were other factors or whatever but I was like I would you know that would have been cool like to be able to do that and I think if there were more options like this or ways for this to happen it would be really exciting to see cuz I think like the tradesmen like I have a bunch of friends one of my buddy one one semester of college was like this sucks quit started plumbing immediately he was a professional plumber long before I graduated school was doing great owned a house married you know the whole thing and it's like that was awesome for him but they do the apprenticeship model he went and he followed a plumber around and did plumbing things you know and it's like that would have been way better if those opportunities I think existed in programming more often do you think Oh so do you think spending four years at an accredited place in the site of AI now that it's coming down and all that do you think that it is still just practically worth it at the right price yes i I I want to say that what David said is exactly the way to think of it it's like it you have to know how much you're spending and and if you don't know how much you're spending on it then I don't think you could make that decision because it certainly does change the equation it means that now like you know if you don't think you're going to be very good at this thing eventually then a high price school is simply not it should never really be considered at that point right because AI will be AI will be taking some of the hiring away presumably right uh if for no other reason than like the the junior programmer thing where it's like if you have someone who's never really going to get all that good well AI at least what I've seen of the programming from AI it looks like somebody I would never hire but that I know does work at a number of these companies right that's what AI looks like it looks like like I would never let this thing anywhere near any code I was working on but I know a ton of code bases where this is just a like accepted commit right microsoft start menu right oh yeah like for example this thing you know the the AI could just produce the same quality as that right like you know brought to you that by the people who said that it would take a very long time for them to figure out how to make it uh so that you could put it back on the top again like it used to that was like a huge thing they were like "Well there's a lot of work that would have to go into that." I'm like "Yes that's the AI would be operating at about the same level as that start menu right?" Um but I guess I would say that does affect the market though because plenty of programmers were currently in that trench of you know not very good and so that does remove that does change the the market dynamics even if AI never really gets any better than today it still changes those market dynamics at least a little bit which means that price that you should be looking for is going to change that price for education can't be as high it has to be a little bit less if if economics is you know if economics works the way we think it does right and the other opportunities can't be like as good that's the other thing that I feel like because if more people are like hiring or like trying to do apprenticeship or like you can even just try like I'm not a huge boot camp guy or anything but like you could try a boot camp for way less money and see if you can get hired for like and you grind on that for a year instead of going to school like just even making money for three years instead of paying money at like any ratio is like that adds up really fast like even if you're making 40,000 and not spending 10 that's 200k difference in your life like that's a lot of money you know so the other opportunities I'm interested to see what's going to happen with with like AI and with what is software development going to look like what what or like what are CRUD software development jobs going to look like you know cuz there's a huge portion of the market where it's like I don't know i don't know what that's going to look like market Yeah they're just like market firms that just build simple sites for people that's a big thing mhm and people need them so all right um there's a common thing that everybody says and I'd love to get everyone's got to go soon oh okay d I want your 15 seconds super hot take on this one shoot every single programmer says that they want to be a farmer are they delusional or is it true they're absolutely delusional i don't think most programmers who say that have actually ever spend a day on a farm looking at what it is but I also do I do think there's something true in it in the sense that working with a computer all day can be alienating in a sense that I don't actually get from as many people as I know who have worked farming that it isn't deeply alienating in the same way so I totally get the aspiration but I I think it is delusional and the vast majority of people actually would do better not to test their delusion because it's the delusion that gives them hope do you know what life sucks right now this week sucks right now but you know what i can imagine I could be a farmer and I'd be happy and if you test out that delusion and you find out it's not true at all and you can't hack it for 4 hours milking cows what are you left with no hope at all right like total nihilism so like keep your little delusions around like keep them little jars of um of illusions because if you take them down and examine them too uh close you might find like Yeah you know what a little alienation can uh get replaced real quick by existential dread love it that was absolutely great ending all right thanks so much for having me on that was really Thanks for coming my pleasure today's show was sponsored by Code Rabbit and so I just wanted to take a quick little moment to shout them out developers are you tired of getting code reviews that just say LGTM or NIT please take these seven things hey your variable name is rez it should be resolved and reject no uh meet Code Rabbit ai reviews right inside your editor starting with VS Code cursor and Windsurf sorry no Vim yet i know my heart is broken hit review and bam feedback appears before you even open a poll request code Rabbit can help you flag the bugs your vibe code LLM Bob missed and with one easy click hand the context back for fixes line by line to some of your frantic or your favorite Agentic tools they offer generous free tier 50 reviews a day no cost grab the extension at uh codrabbit.link/primeen-vscode and ship cleaner code today link in the description link in the description in the future thanks DJ oh I Yes it worked i just Dude I set up a second scene for three people just to see if this would work and oh my gosh it worked let's go let's go i did not expect this to work anyways uh hey that was awesome by the way no I Are we never met him before and he What a fantastic guest oh my god he was He is one of my favorite people in the univer are we still live are we still live we're still live okay all right just making sure i I thought we were still live i meant to say that live if uh if if possible because I I really enjoyed I really enjoyed what he had to say yeah no I absolutely uh I absolutely am just a huge fan of what he has to say and I think he he's right on a huge portion of things now I'm still not on your guys' team with the whole IQ test thing but I do say anything about IQ so don't lump me into anything well like I said that was more his thing than mine because like I like I said I I don't feel like it captures I don't feel like IQ tests capture what I'm really looking for in a programmer because they would only really tell me like how hyperfixated they can be on small things so like I don't know and you know I'm not up on the psychology research here maybe it's true that IQ generalizes out to that more or less like or as well as any other test we have and that could be true but at least for me I prefer screening to be something more actionoriented like okay here's this like larger pool of things go sort through it figure out how to do something with it right and uh uh that kind of stuff if you were going to do something for screening I would think it would be more like that and not like an IQ test but I so I'm not really I'm not on the same page as DHH was i guess if if he's actually suggesting that an IQ test would be useful but I am on the same page in the ter in the terms of like it it'd be better even an IQ test would be better than the system we have now is just saying bad college is like a very roundabout method of like IQ plus some other stuff i would also say I've definitely seen and or seen some code by 155 IQ Haskell geniuses that nobody in the world should have ever written and should be wiped from the face of the earth so if it's just IQ then they would get hired and they would bring the company to an end goodbye that's the end of everybody waiting right now bye everybody boot up the day vi potent errors on my screen terinal coffee and living the dream