I feel like this has become less and less true in engineering and software in the past decade. A portfolio of projects with varying complexity speaks equally or more about your ability to code or build things. Google and other companies have come out and said they haven&#x27;t found strong correlations between degrees (with GPA measurement included) and being a better engineer.<p>&gt; &#x27;college dropout&#x27; featured in nearly every early article. It became something of a compliment after a bit though and helped them stand out somehow.<p>&#x27;Standing out&#x27; is irrelevant in this context unless your business is entirely based on you being a famous figure in the press. Gates and Jobs are famous because of the incredible companies they built, not the other way around. The press needed to paint a story, so they went with the college dropout narrative. However their success, and the success of every company&#x2F;founder is entirely independent of founder social validation.