| Well, obviously anybody who becomes a billionaire is an exception. Otherwise, everybody would become billionaires.
However, I would hardly say that success in computers is all that exceptional. For example, Tom Anderson doesn't even have a technical degree (he majored in English and Rhetoric at Berkeley, then got a degree in film at UCLA). Yet he founded MySpace in 2003, and 2 years later, sold it to News Corp for $580 million dollars. Obviously he didn't get all that money (most of it went to his investors), but still, he's picked up enough money to retire. Not bad for only 2 years of work in creating an Internet company, when you don't even have an engineering or CS degree.
Or, perhaps an even striking example, Chad Hurley, who studied fine arts at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (not Indiana University, or the University of Pennsylvania, but the Indiana University of Pennsylvania), co-founded YouTube in 2005, and a year later, sold it to Google for $1.65 billion. Now, granted, it should be said that the 2 other co-founders (Steve Chen and Jawed Karim) did have computer science backgrounds. But the point is, these examples prove that even today, you can become extraordinarily wealthy in the computer industry, even if you don't have an actual technical education.
Even today, the merry-go-round continues to spin. Rumor has it that Facebook is being shopped around for up to $2 billion. Facebook was founded only 3 years ago (in 2004), and the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn't even have a college degree, having dropped out of Harvard. |