[tombert]

NOTE: Not the author.

I can't speak for Facebook, but I definitely feel like Apple made me stagnate intellectually. It didn't help that every time I wanted to work on something open source, I would get a nastygram from their legal team telling me that doing so would be grounds for termination.

That said, at least for me, college required a type of stick-with-it-ness that I don't really feel I obtained until having to sludge through horrible office jobs for years. Having to work for megacorps that I hated forced me to finish work that I didn't want to do, and trudge through meetings I didn't have any desire to go to. After the hundredth "glorified data entry" assignment and thousandth "sprint planning that I'm only relevant for two minutes of", pushing my way through college felt somewhat easy in comparison.

My path would be virtually impossible to recommend to people, but I honestly wouldn't change the order of how I did things given the option.