SCN: Dropouts

[Steve]

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Who Needs a Diploma? Why the high-tech industry wants dropouts.

by Mark Wallace

(NY Times)---A couple of years ago, just before Dan Hammans 
dropped out of high school, his guidance counselor told him that he 
would never earn more than $15,000 a year, that he would never 
hold a job for more than six months at a time and that, to put it 
plainly, he would never amount to anything. "He pretty much told me 
I was a loser," Dan says. He is sitting in his 1999 Mitsubishi 
Eclipse, which is fire-engine red, cost $23,000 and boasts 210 
horsepower off the factory floor -- though with Dan's modifications, 
that's up to 260. Dan is on his way home from a job at which he 
earns roughly $1,600 every two weeks, or about $25,000 more each 
year than a certain Mr. Sternberg of Gilbert High School in Iowa 
would have thought possible.   

"What the heck?" Dan mutters at a passing car. "That's a real 
interesting body kit. It's got Ferrari side skirts or something." When 
traffic is light (and the Eclipse running well), the drive to Richardson, 
where Dan lives, just outside of Dallas, takes about 15 minutes door 
to door, though on bad days it can take more than an hour. 
Commuting is one of the small annoyances Dan has learned to put 
up with in his new life as a computer networking engineer, though it 
is clearly not as frustrating as walking a mile through subzero Iowa 
winters to grade school. Such experiences, Dan says, help explain 
his preoccupation with fast cars. There is that, of course, and then 
there is the fact that he is 19. "I'm also fascinated by traffic 
patterns," he says after being cut off by another driver. "It reminds 
me of fluid dynamics."   

Mr. Sternberg can perhaps be forgiven his pessimism: in the United 
States, 25-year-old male high school dropouts make less than 
$25,000 a year, on average. Their compatriots with high-school 
diplomas make only about $31,000, the same starting salary as 
college graduates with engineering degrees.   

The Department of Education does not compile data for 19-year-old 
high school dropouts with a natural working knowledge of computer 
systems who teach themselves fluid dynamics in order to design 
airflow parts for their new cars. But perhaps they should: more and 
more American teenagers are forgoing college educations or even 
dropping out of high schools to "drop in" to jobs created by the 
technological revolution. "I've talked to some people who go to 
college," says Anthony Yarbrough, 19, a network engineer who 
graduated from high school last year. "They say, 'O.K., we read this 
book all day; we get to do a little of this.' From what they're telling 
me, I'm learning a lot more just working than I would've in the 
college system."   

Bonnie Halper, whose high-tech placement firm, Sendresume.com, 
occasionally finds jobs for such young people, says: "When I look 
at some of the resumes that I get from people right out of college, I 
think, Why are they teaching you these useless technologies?" Dan 
and Anthony, by contrast, learned their skills not in classrooms but 
in pursuit of the passions that grip so many teenagers these days: 
computer games, digital music, video editing, computer animation 
and film. They are hobbyists whose hobby just happens to be part of 
the fastest-growing industry on the planet, and they are learning to 
take advantage of it.   

Though Dan wouldn't like to admit it, we are lost. It is early 
afternoon, and a brief stretch of President George Bush Turnpike 
(estimated completion date: 2004) stands weirdly overhead to the 
left, connecting one patch of flat Texas sky to another. Orange 
detour cones have left us well north of the customer we are to see, 
but Verio, the company for which Dan works, gives him 31 cents a 
mile to take the Eclipse on site visits, and we've skipped lunch to 
arrive on time.   

At the site, a long, low concrete commercial block that houses a 
telecoms company, we are led through an open-plan cubicle warren 
so vast that the paths between cubes have been given street 
names. Just off Crowley Avenue, between Colleyville Road and 
Clyde Boulevard, sits the "electrical room," where Dan is to test 
three network lines. To do this, he has brought a small device known 
as a router, with which he will "ping" a similar device back at the 
office, some 15 miles away.   

Routers are the traffic cops of the Internet, guiding countless bits of 
information between computers, e-mail servers and Web sites 
around the globe. An intimate knowledge of routers comes in handy 
at Verio, one of the largest Web-site hosting companies in the world, 
but this is a knowledge Dan has only imperfectly at present. Most of 
his morning was spent back at Verio trying to get the two routers to 
talk to each other -- though at one point there was a break to check 
out a new screen saver, based on "The Matrix" ("awesome," in 
Dan's estimation).   

At the site visit, the problem is solved with a call to Dan's boss, but 
the morning has not been in vain. This is what passes for training in 
an industry that moves too quickly for textbooks and knows precious 
few rules. "When I got this job," Dan says, "they'd ask me, 'Do you 
know how to do this?' And I'd say, 'No, but I will by the time I get it 
done."'   

That Dan came to Verio with gaps in his skill set is fine with his 
boss. "I learned stuff on the job from scratch, which is the way I feel 
people should learn their jobs," Ric Moseley says. "I'm not sure 
Dan's quite as mature as he needs to be -- a lot of that maturity I 
think is learned in college -- but four years anywhere is going to do 
something to you, being out on your own for the first time, meeting 
new people, having to deal with different situations by yourself. 
Which is what he's doing now."   

The network test takes only a few minutes, and Dan is back in the 
office by 4 o'clock. "I'm going to be glad when this day's over," Dan 
says. "I guess I'm always just paranoid about doing things wrong."   

I first met Dan in Manhattan, where he was competing in a 
professional computer gamers' tournament. A past champion, Dan 
estimates he has garnered almost $100,000 in cash, prizes and 
endorsements since he began competing in 1995. Computer games 
have also been Dan's ticket to the job market. He learned his 
networking skills at "LAN parties" in the mid-90's, wiring friends' 
computers into Local Area Networks for all-night sessions of video 
games like Quake. (Ric Moseley, who is 28, learned his trade the 
same way.)   

And even in the Internet age, it is whom you know. Dan landed his 
first job in Dallas, testing computer games, through contacts made 
at Quake tournaments. In March 1999, he moved out of his parents' 
house and joined the skilled labor force. Most of us take much 
longer to reach that point. For Dan, it came when he was barely old 
enough to vote.   

Teenagers, of course, have been dropping out for as long as 
schools have been in session. While most probably still become 
manual laborers or minimum-wage toilers, our fast, new information-
age economy allows some dropouts to move along productive paths 
rather than simply run from age-old conflicts. Like Dan, some even 
seem to be doing both. "It really was hard having a pager in high 
school," says Michael Menefee, a 21-year-old product developer 
who dropped out of college after just a few months. "The principal 
would say, 'I'll just hold this for you, and if you get a page, I'll come 
get you.' Well, that's not the point. The point is, I'm making more 
than my teachers."   

Still, as Dan's mother, Alice Hammans, says, dropping out is no 
guarantee of a good job: "You don't get something for nothing. 
Daniel hasn't just begun in the work world without first acquiring a 
lot of knowledge." His schooling in computers, in fact, began around 
the age of 3, when his father got a Commodore 64, one of the first 
home-computer systems. By 7, Dan was programming in Basic. In 
high school -- just as the World Wide Web was exploding into 
America's consciousness -- Dan got a part-time job at a local 
Internet service provider. Dan describes his childhood as happy, 
sort of, until he got into school. "Dan had a really hard time in grade 
school," his mother says, "so he just chose an alternate path. 
Luckily, because of everything that he has internally, he was able to 
make it."   

Other "drop-ins" echo Dan's frustration. "I was always one of those 
people who sat there and argued with my teachers about why I 
should be in school all the time," says Matt Levine, who, at 18, has 
decided that starting an Internet-based media company is more 
important than college. "I looked at the opportunity and the 
opportunity cost, and sort of went where my heart desired, at least 
for the moment."   

Furthermore, says Peter Pathos, founder and chief executive of 
Theplanet.com, a Dallas start-up specializing in "advanced" Web 
hosting, "Right now, I think there's much more opportunity diving 
into the phenomenon than going to college." Pathos employs both 
Anthony Yarbrough and Michael Menefee, as well as other "drop-in" 
young adults. "There's almost a gap between the ones you catch 
right out of high school and the ones who've been used up and 
burned out by the time they're 21 or 22 by the high-tech jobs," he 
says of his employees. "The younger ones are some of the most 
talented people."   

It's a busy Friday night, and Dan is having dinner at Campisi's 
Egyptian with his girlfriend, Wendy, an 18-year-old pre-med student 
at the University of Texas, and his roommate, Mike, a 23-year-old 
college dropout who works in computer game design, something 
Dan hopes one day to pursue. The place is aclatter with waiters and 
barmen and locals cheering the Dallas Stars, but none of this seems 
to reach Dan, who is lost in a video game on the tiny screen of his 
cellular phone. "Take this away from me," he tells Mike, after we 
have put off ordering a second time. The episode sparks a 
reminiscence of early video games and the Commodore 64's Dan 
and Mike both owned as children. "We had one we actually used for 
a stepping stool," Mike says, "because it was so solid." Dan 
describes with pride loading games onto the Commodore system at 
the age of 4, which involved typing commands his father had printed 
on the disk. Though he couldn't yet read, he was able to copy letters 
well enough to get the computer to play the game.   

"Even back then," Mike says, "even when we didn't know anything 
about computers, I always thought it was silly that it didn't just load 
the game, that you had to type something." It is a small point, but a 
telling one. When the Commodore 64 came along, those of us old 
enough to read followed the instructions. But Dan and Mike are 
unburdened by such received wisdom. They are first-generation 
citizens of the information age, not immigrants to it, and are 
intuitively familiar with its language and its ways. We who 
remember the dawn of the personal computer may feel that the 
future has at long last arrived, but Dan and Mike were born into that 
future. It is nothing more exciting than their present day.   

Though Dan is currently wrapping up his G.E.D., his education is not 
over yet. With Verio's help, he plans to go after a Cisco Certified 
Internetwork Expert certificate, the information-age equivalent of an 
M.B.A. According to Cisco, the starting salary for the 2,000 or so 
C.C.I.E.'s awarded thus far in the United States is roughly $75,000. 
Even without a Cisco certification, it's impossible to tell how far Dan 
could go in the high-tech job market, where brain sweat and elbow 
grease are still the best predictors of long-term earning potential.   

Dan's stormy relationship with school may have cost him little in 
terms of salary and the kind of statistics tracked by the Department 
of Ed., but even at 19, he recognizes that stepping through the door 
to the adult world of work has left other doors to swing shut behind 
him. "The day I realized I would never go to college, I was really 
bummed out," he says. "I wanted to play hockey. In high school, I 
was, like, twice as good at hockey as I am now at Quake, and as 
much as I love Quake, I loved hockey twice as much.   

"That's really the only regret that I have. I watched people that I 
played with go on to play for Iowa State, and they won the national 
championship last year and they were awesome."   

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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