Help a fledgling professional programmer makes some important career decisions.

You could also be bold and be independentish, but that's much riskier, and is hard without some family background.

The best thing to do at this age, if possible is to go to a regular University and get a degree. Even if you go to school, get a job for the experience. The best way to learn programming is to learn from other experienced programmers who review your code, you review their code, ask them what they think of technology-X, etc. You don't get that at school. While at H.S. I took some courses (e.g. UNIX, C) at the local comm. college, and it retrospect they were pretty low-level, so as a rule of thumb don't count on getting anything worthwhile out of there.

You can make this work if you try. Since you haven't made it work, one tends to worry that you aren't really trying. Someone who isn't going to work hard isn't likely going to be a good employee.

Now we are getting somewhere.

Look deep into your soul and ask yourself: "Is there an actual reason why I haven't become a web programmer yet?"

I'm going to catch hell for saying this on news.yc... but stop learning Lisp for a while. Nobody knows about Lisp but grad students and MIT grads, and they're going to hire other grad students and MIT grads, because there's a long line of people with advanced degrees who would love to be paid to hack on Lisp but can't find that job.

Where there's muck, there's brass. Learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript and -- god help us -- PHP, in the form of a good and popular toolkit like Drupal. If you can't stomach the PHP (after learning Ruby or Lisp, PHP can feel like typing in boxing gloves) learn Django, Pylons or Ruby plus Rails -- but, if you want steady work, PHP may be better in the short term. There's an enormous and growing number of PHP-based sites in the world, and nobody can find the coders to keep them all up.

Above all, learn SQL. If you're going to pursue some paper qualification that isn't a college degree, make it database administration. SQL isn't going anywhere for the next decade, companies need those skills, and a surprising number of developers have only the faintest notion of how an RDBMS works.

Web development jobs can be acquired one short-term gig at a time -- it's fairly low-risk for prospective clients to try you out, and the fact that you'll obviously leave for college in a year or two won't bother most of them. These jobs can be done from several time zones away. They can be done for clients that you've never even seen. If you choose your gigs carefully, each one results in a piece of publicly-visible software that can be linked in your portfolio and shown to future clients. Once your portfolio and reputation exist, nobody will care about what degrees you have or don't have.

I'm guessing that most systems programming jobs, and a majority of the Microsoft-stack C#/.NET jobs, involve physically sitting in actual cubicles in offices full of college grads. If you are intent on pursuing such a job, Columbus is probably the wrong place -- it has a relatively low number of jobs in your field and a relatively enormous number of college grads.