Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.

I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice.

I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself.

What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dropped off college? Unless you're Bill Gates or Sergey Brin, you did a huge mistake there. Get back into school at any cost. Anyone can get a college loan. There are federally-funded ones, there are guaranteed gov't loans, there are scholarships, in-school jobs, grants, emergency cash crises funds at schools, etc...

To me it sounds like you wanted out of college and you took the first good excuse to get out. You are screwed now because once you get out and get the $9/hour full-time job (oops, you already did), it is REALLY hard to get back into school. Now all you need is get a girlfriend, get her pregnant, and congratulations, you have locked yourself out of school. If you have financial obligations (credit cards), consider filing bankruptcy. Otherwise, you WILL be held prisoner to your monthly payments (been there, done that).

Here's my advice: Get back into college. If you have a car that's all yours, keep it, otherwise sell it and buy a bike. Once you are accepted: Get a job. Any job that is compatible with school hours. If you have potential as a programmer, then get a job/freelance as a programmer while you study. If not, flipping burgers to pay for school is a very dignified thing to do. (It's bailing out of college for whiny reasons that carries no dignity)

Stop whining. It does not get any easier if you whine. Problems do not get solved if you whine.

Consider your own question: "Is there some alternative that would allow me to go back to school?" WTF are you waiting for? For the problem to fix itself?? You are waiting for something to "allow" you to go back to school... I will tell you right now, it's not gonna happen. You have to make it happen. Put your ass back in school first, and THEN figure out how the rest of your life will adapt to school life and priorities.

You are not the first person to have to deal with this, there is a huge mechanism in place already to allow people to stay in school. It just carries a cost (sorry, the new car will probably have to wait till after graduation). All things say you do not want to pay that cost. Snap out of it.

hang out at local user's groups. I've thought of driving down to the Ruby/rails UG, sounds like a really good crew

http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk=

(i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet).

I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all

I am not aiming for $85k, I'm not aiming for any sum of money. I just want to make a living coding. I'd be happy with $30k if it were matched with a decent work environment.

I have been considering moving to a better IT market, I just felt weak when it came to getting a programming job, so wasn't certain if I'd be able to get one remotely.

Thanks for the tips.

I'll second the recommendation of working on open source projects - with many hiring managers, the only way they're not going to care about a degree is you have commercial quality code out there that they can see.

The other thing I would suggest is to do some research on companies and target a few likely ones - watch their jobs pages over time to see how they hire - then look for projects that would be appealing to them. Individuals have to do marketing just like companies.

I know a previous employer of mine recently hired a web designer right out of high school based on the strength of his portfolio.

gm is a bit harsh here, but he's on the right track. I have my parents co-signing my loans (thank god) but thats all that they've done for me. Everything else I've done on my own and I'm paying for most of my college as I go and from summer jobs. I know if I needed to I could easilly get my own loans (it's not that hard... you just have to deal with higher rates). Also, a friend of mine is in the same boat as you and depending on where you go you may qualify as a 'non-traditional' student since you're older than the average freshman and in that case you will qualify for extra financial aid. Also, file FAFSA without your parents (which you can do so long as they haven't claimed you on their taxes for the previous year) and you'll probably get close to a free ride to school.

College is important, and you really will gain a lot just by getting the degree.