I quit my job last March and it was a bad idea.

Can you convince your parents to support you for a couple of years until you get your high school diploma and start college? Go into some money-making career that they approve of if needed. Once in college, you can start networking and planning your next move.

Just make them feel like you are back to being a good citizen and that you will go back to earn your keep once you have your college degree.

Oh, and tell your so-called "friends" to go pound sand.

Doesn't sound like Dad is doing great here, but we don't know enough to apply bad words to him. Maybe he's a jerk. Maybe he's confused about why his son doesn't value something he's pursued all his life.

We're an immigrant society, with each generation trying to improve the prospects of the next. When it works, we have the strange problem of the rising generation experiencing problems and desires the prior generation can't even imagine. This can recur over several generations. It's very confusing, because the old-school perspective often has a lot of common sense but it's very hard to transpose this into the new context created for the new-school. I'm sure a lot of good wisdom has been lost, along with the you-are-totally-out-of-date.

So, mannicken. There was a day when a high-paying job signalled security. If that is Dad's frame of reference, he likely thinks you're insane. The more someone learns about technology and change, the more they realize that corporate stability is an illusion. You're unlikely to convince Dad of this, not until you've demonstrated you can take care of yourself. So get busy figuring that out.

You quit your last job because they were jerks. Probably a good move, maybe would have been better to find the next job first but there you go. Your next job may not be ideal, but it just has to pay the bills without degrading you. Go find that, and keep working at figuring out what you're good at and getting better at it. College really isn't a bad way of doing that.

Yes, this is very hard. Do not find that surprising. This is why people hate uncertainty, and will put up with so much crap to avoid it. _You_ are not the cause of the difficulty, the difficulty is an unavoidable part of finding your way into the world. When you finally figure out your place, it will be _yours_, founded on your skill and effort and integrity. No one can take those from you, once you find them. And you will have something deeply valuable to offer your own children.

Whom you will not want living with you at twenty.

"When you're going through hell, keep going!" Churchill

True - though as a condition of this truth, there are many risk-takers who end up in far worse states than if they had played it safe. If careers follow a somewhat normal distribution, for every massive startup success there are an equal number of failures for whom the risk didn't pay off.

I agree with edw519 - get a safe job for a while, at least until you can take another risk. Good luck to you. I'm 21 and involved in the startup game, and would be happy to talk at any point. Feel free to email me (email in profile).

ps. Not working for the man is always a good decision. You will never starve working for the man, but you will also never get ahead. It sounds like you've got a crisis of faith. You need to ask yourself what you really want in life. If you can't stomach life without a safety net, then by all means, go back to a full-time job.

Here's what I did: I took a crappy job working full time at a coffee shop. I started on a CS degree through night school, and treated it like fighting for dear life. I did ten times more work on school projects than required and literally got a hundred percent on everything. I practiced programming and learned about it like my life depended on it.

I put out ads looking for any programming work, that ten dollars an hour would be fantastic. I got a job doing PHP for 14 dollars an hour eventually, this was after finishing a year of courses. They quickly gave me a few raises and after two years of that I was employable again - once I get my foot in a door I know I am going to be one of the best employees any given place has ever seen - it's the selling part that is hard. I got a job at a much more prestigious place, and am now firmly back on the road toward the salary range that experienced developers get these days.

(Now I'm starting to fight the malaise again that comes with moving up Maslow's pyramid, in particular being romantically rejected by every woman I've met in two years, but that's a different story. I think in your situation you can't feel the urgency of it enough.)