Background:

I'm a high school dropout who taught myself programming because of an interest in video games, making custom maps for Warcraft 3 and eventually learning other programming languages and becoming a web dev. Never did well in school, despite relatively high intelligence. Years later, in my 30s, I did eventually get a B.S. in a mostly unrelated field (environmental science), but couldn't find work in it. Graduated with a 1.9 GPA and went back to being a web dev soon afterward. Mostly lived and worked in small rural communities. Web dev salary started at $30k USD a year at my first job, eventually got up to $100k by my fourth or so job, and then went back down to $80k (all different places) – mostly just following market conditions.

Reflections:

Mostly this: Don't let your kid end up like that, lol. Believe me, I have a lot of gripes with the factory-line school system (both K-12 and college), but the harsh reality of the world is that they don't care about your gripes or how special or smart you are. Unless you're the entrepreneurial type (I wasn't), the credentials and connections you get from a prestigious degree are worth more than any skills you may or may not have actually picked up along the way, whether in formal or informal education.

Sure, if they have side interests, encourage them to pursue it and give them the resources to learn – it may just become their career or their side passion later. But don't let that take over their normal formal education unless you or they have a plan for how to make a living out of it afterward, however risky. We're all dreamers until reality smacks us into dead-end retail/delivery jobs.

School's main purpose is to teach you conformity and how to be a good employee. If you can suffer through it, do it, not because it's really a good model of education, but because you'll get a diploma and a network that will be worth it later.

Your network is the most valuable asset you can develop, and will largely determine your status and place later in adult life. It's mostly an insider's, who's-who world out there, and your hard skills like programming are mostly secondary, unless you are both exceptional at it and the market is ripe and desperate for it (like you're an amazing AI programmer now or a Carmack-like figure in the 90s).

Otherwise, if you're a mediocre person like me selling your mediocre skills, you're always competing in a race to the bottom with other commoditized labor and subject to the ravages of capitalism, especially if you're in the US where there aren't many safety nets. The two main things that could set you apart are other people's memories of you (your network & referrals) and some other institution vouching for you (like a diploma).

If you're working for an average company, it doesn't really matter how smart you are or how skilled you are. Most employers are not really in a position to be able to evaluate you anyway; they're typically not set up to find the best and brightest, but to weed out the risky employees from the ones who could probably do the job without making too much of a fuss. They select for slightly-above-average mediocrity, and the best way to prove that you can be that is to either have a diploma signaling you've conformed through 4+ years of educational adversity and/or to have someone you both know vouch for you. Employers would so much rather lazily trust the word of someone they already trust than to evaluate a hundred different candidates on their individual, unique merit.

And you really only have that one brief window of opportunity in your youth, mostly your 20s, to make it all come together. After that, fewer and fewer people will give you chances. Nobody wants a 30-year-old intern who's still figuring their life out.

I was lucky in that I came from a relatively well-off, middle class family who was able to support me through the chaos, but even then, I ended up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, unable to even reliably make a paycheck, much less own a home or start a family or any of that sort. I'll probably never be able to retire.

Do I regret it? No, not really... I mean, it's the only life I've known, I had fun along the way, I met a lot of amazing people, and I'm mostly all right now. But I would certainly never want to put another person through that. It's an extremely risky path that so far has not paid for itself. I'm a bit more empathetic than some because of it all, perhaps, but quite poor and unstable. And I was lucky enough to have been a web dev back when that was still a hot skill. My friends who were similarly not educated ended up mostly Doordashing or working at bars or stuck in dead-end jobs with no real hopes of a career. Don't end up like us, lol.