Ask HN: A 19 year old, what should I do?

It's a simple choice as long as you stay rational. People bullshit and fear as they don't see the picture themselves.

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody, if you go down that path, don't expect great council at every corner. In your lifetime, you will meet very few people who truly think like you.

Everybody pushes you to college because in their mind it's the only way. And that's ok, most people are weak. Now the rational bit.

If you want a 9 to 5 job, a wife and 2 kids and a ride into the sunset, go to college, internship, job, better job, retirement. There is nothing wrong with that, but some people want different things.

If you know programming good enough to make a living, take the job. College is great if you don't really know anything and you have to show a diploma or if your industry needs one(e.g. doctor), but otherwise almost worthless. Instead of a giant student loan, you can have capital for your first business.

If you want to be an entrepreneur and still go to college, do it but not for programming. Go to your exams, don't waste your time with classes. Instead work. Take a job, try and fail and you will learn more than anywhere else.

Your goal is to create a network and reputation, to learn about people. Keep the PR work with your family and friends, they don't have to know about this. Ace your exams, don't expect 100%, and keep everybody happy. As an entrepreneur this will be 50% of your job, keeping everybody else happy.

If you work, never, absolutely never let anybody underpay you because of your age. Never be taken for granted. Respect is earned by getting things done, just keep proving you have professional maturity well beyond the years in your birth certificate and you will earn respect. But never tolerate jokes or even hints about it. Never display ego, but never go the other way.

There is a place for people like you, it's entrepreneurship. If this is what you want, then man up, think rationally, manage everybody's expectations, but go with your gut. And remember, no one will every do anything for you and for your career. You have to get it done yourself.

I've been down the same road and I don't regret one bit. 15 hours of work a day are normal, but there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

Why is it out of your reach? Because they are too expensive?

If you want to study at a better college, look for professors in your field, find someone that does something interesting, and ask them if they will take you as a student. If you are good, some institutions will actually pay you for studying there.

This is easiest if you already have at least a bachelors degree, and want to go to grad school. At least in Europe, most grad schools pay PhD students (in science/engineering), and if you are smart, it's not that hard to get accepted.

The problems most people have with candidates not having a degree are: a) It's harder to prove they know their stuff b) there's an impression that they are bums and shied away from hard work, or somehow lacked the intelligence and drive

You can solve both of these issues by taking your career seriously. Getting your foot in the door is going to be harder at first because you're young and you have no degree, but it seems you've worked at multiple places already. Get references from them, have them talk to your future employer on the phone. This is the strongest vote of confidence one can get and definitely matters more than a degree.

Make sure each new job you take progresses in some way: More responsibility, higher rank, more / different tech, more complicated project. For each job, keep track of your accomplishments on the job as easy to digest one-liners. Put these in your resume. Your resume items and progression should tell a clear story that you're good (which is easy since you started so young) and you're getting even better.

In addition, show that you're not purely a cog. If you can reflect the fact that you also understand the business aspects and reason why you do things, that you can course-correct misguided top down policies from management, that you can serve not only as techie but also, say, marketer, that you can communicate with non-technicals, then that makes you doubly valuable.

Also, show that you have expertise. Go to conferences, be a regular in local user groups, speak in front of people, teach people.

Four years of progressing employment, combined with these bonuses should really negate the fact that you don't have a degree in terms of getting hired (I think degree is valuable for other reasons, but let's put that aside for now). The one exception is large employers like Google, MS, the Government, etc. which sometimes have hard HR requirements and just cannot comprehend bending them even if they like you. But anyway, I recommend that people with degrees try to do all this too. It really builds the idea of investing in you as a valuable asset and a person rather than buying a replaceable cog. Value-add matters.

I've been reading this site for a long time, and I signed up today just to tell you to go to college. I've been programming professionally for 10 years, since I was 19 years old; your age. I dropped out of college to work, and I've been making $100k+/yr for about 4 years now. I dropped out because I thought I didn't need the degree, but now I regret not finishing. If you don't think that CompSci is challenging, you can take another major and mix in your CompSci knowledge. Finance + programming is huge. Chemistry has a sub-field called computational chemistry which lands somewhere between theoretical chemistry and applied chemistry. If you want to work with super-computers you'll look there. There's physics and mechanical engineering where you can apply computer programming knowledge to do finite element analysis. Or learn computer vision or medical image processing (look into segmentation and registration). And I'm just scratching the surface. At your age the world is yours to conquer. Finish a degree in something about which you are passionate instead of going to make websites or crappy line-of-business applications for some company that wants to suck the soul out of you for what you think is riches but what amounts to pennies for them. The working world is not all it's cracked up to be. Trust me on this. Also, I'm Romanian too. Success, ma. Tine-te de carte ca vin banii.

Thank you for your reply! I too see myself crunching more than 10 hours a day to work on my own thing, it's just that all the people around me are exactly as you've described them, trying to see the only way to the nice sunset. Thanks again!