I’m 22 and I’ve failed

> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

I made this exact mistake at 17/18 and even had a very similar line of thinking as OP, but my decision was not to go to school at all.

I ended up in the industry a few years later, but have had a mostly crippled career. It was unfortunately drilled in my head around the time that people were handing out six figure salaries to anyone who could remotely program regardless of education.

You haven't failed at all. There's nothing wrong with being a generalist. Everybody who is into programming has a bazillion empty and half-finished Git repos with ideas that went nowhere. It shows you have been exploring, experimenting and learning a lot in the process. It may be a bummer that you don't have an official piece of paper to prove it, but any employer willing to look past this will see that you have a lot of potential.

In my opinion specializing in only one skill early in life is only going to limit your possibilities later on in life. Right now it's important that you have broad interests and are able to learn new skills quickly, and to me it sounds like that's exactly the case. College doesn't really fully prepare you for working life anyway; personally I wish I had spent a little less time on college and started my career just a little bit earlier.

Finding that first job is going to be a challenge without a degree but once you find a company willing to take a chance on you, you'll likely find that you have more than enough knowledge to do the job and are flexible enough to adjust yourself to whatever the needs of the company are. Once you've got that first bit of work experience, any missteps you may have made during your college years will simply stop mattering.

> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

Thousand times this. I'm 33, programming since 8, working in the industry since 18, and can confidently call myself at least a senior, with a lot of leadership experience. And yet, I routinely go through CS courses from Stanford, MIT and CMU on YouTube (intro to databases by Andy Pavlo right now), and really envy people who have got to go learn at those institutions.

There's a lot of knowledge to be gained by doing projects and tutorials and working. But there's so much "hard CS" stuff that is just not that easy to learn on your own.

I got fired at 22 from visiting WikiLeaks on a bank computer. That, and changing the printer status messages to display "Out of ink: Please insert more blood" via the telnet HP JPL hack.

Young and stupid, I thought my life was over especially explaining to parents what Wikileaks was. Now 32 and still employed; just another 50 to go until I can retire.

Dude, most developers who come from Uni are also totally clueless. They have to spend a week getting started with Rails/Django and three months getting fast at throwing together mediocre software using their framework de jour.

You've been coding since you were a teenager - and I assume that you understand the stack from bottom up?

Are your age, ability and willingness to learn + attitude is, in almost all cases, is the important factor. That's why a lot of graduates fail (or spend 5 years making the same little websites then move to management). They never had the interest to learn in the first place.

Get a job, find your limit, and surpass it. Do things that force you to learn something - they'll seem impossible at first, but you' d be surprised how fast you develop. The resources are so insanely good nowadays, you can literally follow a top class CS bachelors at home.

I'm almost twice your age, I didn't go to uni - I didn't need to, I have no trouble learning. I've remained as close to the code as I can, and have always been in the top couple of % of my profession. The only thing that really holds you back is having kids - you can't throw weekends into doing geeky things and 5-10 years of chronic lack of sleep is a killer.