2 years and a lot of classes later, I'm realizing I'm too old to compete at this gig, and I should have started when I was 12, if I wanted to be taken seriously. The only thing I have any skill in is various computer related things, but not one thing in particular. I've developed a very basic knowledge of C++, but that's laughable really. So I'm stuck, unsure of what it is I should really be doing. I could get a dead-end part time job and continue my schooling, but it seems almost futile at this point. I was denied to the University of Florida, yes the school that recently killed-off their CS department in favor of Football funding. It was the top school in the state, but they wouldn't accept my transfer because I'm only now up to the Calculus 1 and Physics level (rightfully so I guess, that was my mistake). Being that I could only take those classes now, it would probably be another year at least, to get to where I could actually transfer to a real university. The only reason I've been able to do this is because of the GI bill that's been granted to me because of my time in the service, but that's running out and I don't have anything to show for it. Other than a General AA, which probably wasn't worth my time - despite planning ahead.

I keep reading stories and anecdotes about how this field is going, and I'm starting to become very unsure if it's something I need to stick with to prevail, or whether it's already too late. I can't find anyone that will tell me the truth - just those that placate with notions of "you can do anything you're just not trying hard enough," despite my 15 hour course-load. From my perspective it seems like CS is an unattainable feat unless you're fresh out of high school at the age of 17 with several dual-enrolled college courses under your belt. The competition is outrageous. Don't you think I want skills that are worth someone's money?

I read about how people with experience with Java, C++, C, C# and so fourth, at least having the ability to put multiple languages on their resume, can't find employment because they haven't done a formal project or haven't been a part of, and accepted, within the OSS community. This frightens me because my skill level is nowhere near where it needs to be to do this, and I highly doubt how much I can persevere with the time that I have left.

I used to open up my IDE with the prospect of learning new things and freshness being able to develop a more solid understanding of what I thought I could do for a living. While I finish out the courses I'm still in, it would appear now, as I reflect, that I'm only doing it to pass the course now, as my delusions of grandeur have faded.

Edit: Wow. Thanks for all your input. This will give me a better objective view to reassess my path. Again, thanks.

I started programming in basic in 3rd grade. I graduated high school in 1996, spent three years in tech support and started programming professionally in 1999. According to my salary I never missed anything by skipping college, but I always felt like I missed out. Two years ago, while working as a telecommuter, I decided to pursue a degree and started taking classes at community college. The math and physics courses opened my mind to ideas that I never really put much thought into. College opened my eyes to ideas that I never would have studied on my own. I quit my job and enrolled at University of Illinois this spring.

While I have not yet pursued research, I know that there are many opportunities for undergraduates to research in computer science. Professors typically want junior or senior undergrads because they have enough coursework in the fundamentals to be useful. Right now there is a huge push from the school to get experienced freshman and sophomores into research. They have a funded mentorship program that pays graduate students to work with one or two undergrads on their research. The problem is that they can't get enough underclassmen to apply to the program.

Many of the people that post on Hacker News that post a low opinion of the college education were educated in college themselves. Only a very small minority of posters have seen both sides of the coin. I have become a completely different person in the last two years since I started college. This experience has been far more costly for me, at 35, than it is for a typical college-age student. If I add my tuition, fees, and expenses to the opportunity cost, due to lost salary, I am paying $140k a year to go to college. I have no regrets; this has been the best experience of my life.

You've probably heard the old saying that youth is wasted on the young. I think college is also wasted on the young. Those that denigrate college were not yet self-aware enough to realize the benefit they gained from that experience.

Maybe it's not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they're learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They're vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them.

Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I've tried to teach some of them programming but I've given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can't change that. I know I'm far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn't exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.

One thing I worry about for people who don't go is the lack of fundamentals that going to college can give you - about algorithms, low level languages, etc. The only way I've thought to solve that problem is to take (religiously) MIT OpenCourseWare courses, coursera, or some equivalent for 2 to 3 years.

But like others have said, you can always learn as you go and then go to college later if you feel like you need it. There are so many options -- it's a fascinating and difficult decision (and I've even left out the problem of societal pressure).

College is not solely about the raw skills used in your trade. It is also about exposure to several topics intended to round out the character of an individual.

If your good at hacking, maybe you could skip college entirely. But your also increasing your chances of being profoundly naive in life.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about college was the depth of study with dedicated time to go into foundational principles, and meeting and working with people far more talented than I am. But would I pay for that privilege if I had to foot the bill? Probably not, or I’d choose much more frugally.

I get the feeling from a lot of the “school is unnecessary” arguments here is that to some degree we fashion ourselves as Good Will Hunting’s who can make it just fine. And there probably are actually quite a few here.

There’s a quote I love, “Money makes happy people happier and unhappy people unhappier”. I feel like the same could be said about a college education. A passionate learner will find it rewarding in ways that the average student wouldn’t, or even a bored student may squander but feel entitled to a position in life because they got a degree, but I think a passionate and humble learner will probably end up doing well no matter the route they take.

For me, the reason I even got into developing was because, ultimately, it's the act of creation and building that I enjoy, and both design and software engineering allow me to accomplish that in a way I find rewarding.

I've known folks who graduated with either a BA in graphic design or a BS in computer science, and with some of them, my self learning, both on a fundamental principle learning level and on an execution level surpasses them. But of course, I know many who are passionate about their field and just blow me out of the water. And I've known autodidacts that also blow me out of the water creatively and on a skill level. So I believe ultimately, the final mix is really a result of raw talent, hard work, and a passion for what you're learning.

I also think some of the "you must get a degree" arguments miss the value of just pure, raw dogged persistence. I've had people with masters degrees in CS tell me I'm a genius simply because I banged my head against a problem until it cracked (the problem, and my head to some degree ;). I don't say that egotistically, because I know that had I had a more formal and dedicated education, those problems would have probably resulted in less time with me banging my head against them, and the scope of problems I could apply that persistence to would be greater. But if you choose to go for a shorter route, you will have to work harder in the end, both to compensate in the eyes of those hiring, and doing your own study and learning to actually get to the level you want, and even then, being self taught really only gets you so far.

Ultimately, it really comes down to, what do you want out of this life?

I honestly can't see myself being content with only doing software engineering or design. That's both a strength and a definite weakness that I am constantly battling with.

There are some other soft aspects not really mentioned in this article or the comments that I do feel you miss when you're self taught.

One for sure is that not having a degree feeds into Imposter Syndrome. You can honestly far exceed others with dedicated degrees but no passion, yet some part of you and your experience will eat away at those accomplishments (of course, this could be purely personal, but anecdotally, I've heard it from other self-starters).

Another is that there is a danger, until you get amongst people who knock your socks off, that you'll feed into your own Dunning-Kruger effect. It's incredibly easy to absorb knowledge on your own and assume you're God's gift to insert skill here until you are surrounded by people who excel in ways that you don't and struggle in ways that you don't. But the autodidact is very often surrounded by people who aren't in their chosen field and so it's very easy to seem far more competent. I would say that this definitely is addressed by learning on the job, provided you luck out and learn on the job from truly brilliant people.

These things are definitely not solved by having a degree (I think the internet and open source have really been a boon to many in addressing the second downside as well).

The other soft skills mentioned in the article are just flat out not true inherently. I've known people with varying levels of degrees who are atrocious communicators and their spelling and writing skills are ridiculously bad, and had them literally use the fact that they have a degree as a proof that they're a-ok in those regards. Being able to communicate clearly, being able to communicate expectations and meet deadlines and promises (or summing it up, clarity of communication and integrity) are things that most colleges definitely don't require in order to pass.

Like the other comments here, this is all purely anecdotal and going off of my own experience, so if I could sum it up in a way of how would I advise a family member to go forward, in general terms? I'd tell them to get the degree, hands down, if that's an option for them.

But there are so many other factors that for them specifically, I may recommend skipping the degree altogether and get to work on building something they love.

I honestly think there is value in either course that you don't get with the other.

> The main value of college, he said, is to be found in proving discipline by completing “annoying homework assignments” and in hanging around with people of the same age before entering the workforce.

In my anecdotal experience, I find this statement to be incredibly true. Effectively it was party and do the busywork it takes to get by in your classes from professors who have lived the majority of their professional life in academia. They berated me for learning web dev because, "web software just won't be a thing" - this is in 2005-6ish where it absolutely was already.

I worked in-industry at the time as a rookie sysadmin and web developer. It was a huge waste of my time to go to school vs. spending time learning on my own through my career and personal projects. I know this doesn't apply to all trades - I've always been focused on web development, automation, and ecommerce. Those were/are incredibly easy to self-learn if you enjoy it (even in 2005ish when I was in school)!

I resent my schooling because I had a FT job with real responsibilities, living at home helping to support my cancer patient mother (bio dad died years prior), and trying to keep my head above water socially/academically. As someone saddled with responsibility I felt I was in a playground for children riddled with booze, partying, and sex while professors demeaned my career telling me to "not to write software for the internet". It was bad.

I agree, at the end of the day Universities are businesses. But don't use that as an excuse to be lazy about your education. If you are proactive and motivated, you can get your money's worth out of your school.

The anti-college bias in the hacker community is really unfortunate, and ultimately it stems from a misunderstanding of what type of animal college actually is. I certainly agree that there are many talented people who do not need to go to or complete college. However there seems to be an assumption that it is the responsibly your college to stimulate your hacker ingenuity. Maybe that flew in your gifted classes in high school, but college is much more like the real world. In college it's your job to find your niche where you are intellectually simulated.

EDIT: And as for the complaining about general education requirements, you need to take a look at University of Chicago. They have the strictest general education requirements out of any college and it seems to work for them. On the other hand, if you really are against general education requirements, you should have picked your college better. A college like Amherst, for example, has zero graduation requirements (besides a raw number of hours). In any case, there is always a way to work the system. Find online courses that transfer and take them. Take a class at your local community college one night a week over the summer. And so on... At the very worst, accept the fact that your technical GPA probably needs padding anyway, and use GenEds to boost your GPA so you can get interviews.

Right out of high school I was not qualified for an entry level programming job (I mean truly qualified, as in able to do the job, not just get the job). I'm now confident in my knowledge and qualifications. It's been worth the time and money (read: debt) to me.

My only experience is with computer science, but I would suspect we would see a lot of rapid innovation in military fields were it possible for highly motivated and intelligent 20-somethings to drop out of the air force academy and become local warlords. The fact that the tech sector has so few consequences for failing and so few insurmountable bureaucratic standards is only for the best.

(I just interviewed a person sporting a BA, a Masters, a PhD and a high-falutin' title who couldn't write a simple "find the length of a string" function. It was . . . I don't have words; I was absolutely floored).

Show me that you can design, write and debug code, and that you're not a jerk, and you're in business. That's all I care about.

You won't meet anyone in CS that doesn't learn better on their own - fortunately college isn't about the force-fed learning you've endured for the last 12 years.

I can't think of any "I'm sure glad I didn't go to college" stories I've ever heard from any successful coders/millionaires - just "I'm sure glad I dropped out of college" (but you have to get immersed in college and classmates before those opportunities will start knocking).

A college education exists to teach you how to learn. A programmer who took 30 years to acquire skills that took another 4 years could be wholly inappropriate, especially if you want problems solved in reasonable time. My professors proudly stated that they had forgotten more than they had learned. A college education carries a cognitive component that must also be addressed.

A successful college degree requires persistence, organization, and emotional stability. A critical deficit in these attributes may make somebody incompatible with the modern work environment. It is not hard to imagine someone who bails early or is not sufficiently organized to asses the problem.

tl;dr Something other than technical skills happened during those 4 years

Of course, I'm good at self-promotion and I'm good at networking. Now, I'm the one interviewing college grads, and I gotta tell ya, it's amazing how many can barely write a for loop.

I think college is great for a lot of things like physics or philosophy, but maybe, outside of theoretical CS, it just doesn't matter anymore. And that's OK.

After leaving school, I worked for ~4-5 years before I started taking classes again. After landing my first internship as a developer, I've been working as a developer and completing a CS degree f/t ever since. My parents were sold a lie, but I was a fool to buy into it.

The punchline being that I don't even need the degree to work as a developer. However, the subject matter is enjoyable and it's better to leave some doors open for future options (masters, phd or whatever).