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I'm a student right now (a senior) and I can tell you, college is not a
waste of time. Even if not necessarily for the education (although a formal
CompSci education is much different and, despite the dumb hoops you have to
jump through, useful in the real world), college life seems like an
important experience which I would recommend to anyone who has the
opportunity. Not only are you more likely to get a good job and a higher
salary with a degree, but college is where you meet friends (you probably
aren't going to keep in touch with most of your friend from high school),
experience real romance, experiment with sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, and
all in a convenient place where your parents aren't around, and yet you're
not really "in the real world" yet. If I could have gotten a $100k/yr job
right out of high school (I couldn't have, but hypothetically I would
still be glad I decided to go. So there's two cents from a satisfieds
student.

I have many friends who have gotten their degrees and are having a blast
working their dream jobs (Game programming... that's the dream and I
also have some others who opted for the
"tech-support-right-outta-high-school" route. Fixing stupid people's broken
computers gets old really fast, and it's not easy to get a real programming
job (php doesn't count) without a formal computer science education. My
opinion is, get a degree and get a job that you can enjoy for years to come.

-Jeremy

"happyrav" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> For those of you who work as programmers, what is your opinion of
> college education vs. self education? Does it come down to convincing
> an employer to hire you by showing him some programs you wrote?
> I want to get a job programming ASAP without wasting the next 4-5
> years of my life going to college.
> I learned enough about computers on my own to have been doing tech
> support for the last 4 years, sometimes making more money than my
> parents, with only a high school diploma. Am I just lucky, or can you
> still make it in the Industry with out a time consuming degree?