I wonder how much it has to do, also, with the fact that YC has become an educational brand as powerful as some top schools. You already have the top school brand on your resume by virtue of dropping out of it, why wait another 3 years to add the next big educational brand

venture capital does some weird fucking things to your brain

I can’t fault anyone for switching away from a CS degree; a bunch of folks I’ve been very close with have had to drop their CS careers when they found out firsthand how racist and sexist their degree program and the field in general is. also, some of the best programmers I’ve worked with have had degrees in unrelated fields (the best one had a psychology degree) and were better off having not dealt with the bullshit that comes with getting a CS degree.

with that said, I’ve also met a very significant number of assholes who came in assuming they’d learn nothing, couldn’t handle not being the smartest person in the room, dropped out, and spent the next couple years grifting as a “startup co-founder”. these hustlers are almost always the worst engineers you can hire, because for them the hustle never stops — they have no learning process, because they already know everything.