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

Hello HN people,

I'm feeling lost for a while and all the local people who I've tried getting in contact with, well, they all say the same thing over and over again. I want to drop college.

The big problem is that everyone is trying to make me feel bad about this, as if this would be the end of the world, as if there are only 2 choices in life: college or be a bum.

For me this feels wrong. I mean, I've started programming for fun at a really young age, and I've managed to get my first (full-time) job in the summer break after 10th grade and continued until I finished my high-school. Since then I've worked with a different company and in my spare time I've tried starting various projects of mine.

As I've said, I've started programming out of pure pleasure, and I consider that I've learned a lot like that, and now it feels like the only way to get by in life would be for me to merge back into some kind of slow-lane. I've tried going to college, and teachers either told me that I will be bored at their courses or that they will give me some extra course work (which the did only for the first time). The companies that I've worked for just treated me like some kind of valuable asset, and didn't even have a "career path/planning". I've stayed in a company for 1 year and carried out quite a lot of the work and was underpaid compared to the local standard. And when I left, they just told me they expected that to happen at some point.

It's really hard for me to believe that there is no place for people like me. All I'm trying to do is to keep learning at the same speed and with the same passion, bring my contribution to the world, but people just tell me that I'm too young, not experienced, etc.

Please HN people, tell me your opinion, help me understand what I should do!

*Sorry for my english, I may have slipped a couple of mistakes in.

College is not the end all be-all experience. There are lots of other opportunities and learning on the job is one of them. You will almost certainly be at an income disparity without a degree for at least the beginning of your career.

That said, if you can't find an engaging and challenging experience learning about software in your college, either A) you are at a bad college and need to change or B) you haven't actively tried to take full advantage of the resources available to you.

When I was an undergraduate I took graduate courses, TA'd intro courses, worked on research projects, got published, etc, and I wasn't some uber student. I just was really interested in things and spent a lot of time asking professors and graduate students stuff. I had the opposite problem, there was so much I wanted to learn about and so little time to do it.

Go to college, get your degree. Its shitty advice but you kinda have to do it.

As painful and stupid as it'll be you'll thank me. If you don't have a degree it'll be 1000x harder to get an employer to notice you. You'll either have to invest about 3-4 years of your life on a large software project that may work (and get you noticed), or a big rare certification with some company like IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, etc. that will take years of studying and several lower level certifications (and several thousand dollars to take the tests).

Otherwise your job prospects are meh.

In college just do what they tell you. You will learn things, but not as fast as from other sources. Some courses like OS theory, compiler theory, and data structures will introduce you to newer concepts, some you may have not know.

Don't stop coding, don't stop learning. But a degree is important in today's world.

Since you mentioned the slow-lane, I'd recommend checking out the Fastlane Forum.

http://www.thefastlaneforum.com/

The place for people like you is on your own...that forum will give you the support you need to learn, develop, and execute on what you really want to do.

There is so much stuff on there that I wish I would have known when I was 19.

Thank you for your response! I have felt a bit that the college I'm at is not really good for me, and that's the reason why I went online and got as much resources as possible (MIT OpenCourseware, Coursera, Udacity, Stanford lectures available). Those guys really do teach stuff! But it is out of my reach to go to one of those colleges, sadly :/