Silicon Valley hiring tech mavericks and trailblazers without college degrees and some are getting $100K checks to drop out

The tech world is being taken over by precocious prodigies without degrees.Elon Musk’s hand-picked staff at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) range in age from 19 to 24 and include a recent high school graduate, as well as a former SpaceX intern who received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel to drop out of school.Musk and Thiel are outspoken cheerleaders of college dropouts in Silicon Valley — and more and more companies, like IBM, Google, GM, and Apple, are following suit by scrapping degree requirements for tech gigs.“Where you went to school, and if you went to school, matters less, I think increasingly so,” Silicon Valley veteran and former Issuu CEO Joe Hyrkin told The Post.“The brightest minds are beginning to recognize that capability, competence, and effectiveness can transcend the university that you went to.”Dropouts are in good company too: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all quit college to concentrate on their tech empires.It’s about time legacy companies follow the lead of trailblazers like Thiel, who has long favored young entrepreneurs gutsy enough to pave their own way. The PayPal co-founder started handing techy dropouts $100,000 checks to fund their endeavors in 2010.

DOGE employee Luke Farritor was awarded a grant this year, along with Augustus Doricko.“There’s definitely respect in Silicon Valley for those that drop out,” Doricko, 24, told The Post.“You find a community.”Doricko left UC Berkeley in his senior year to start Rainmaker, a tech company that modifies the weather to make it rain more.He just raised $6.3 million in funding.“I think that any aspirational young person in college pretty quickly realizes how ridiculous the university system is, just because how un-intense it is, how much you’re coddled, how slow the pace of education is,” he said.

“But if it wasn’t for Peter Thiel, I don’t know if I’d have been confident enough to drop out myself.”Now that he’s hiring h...