I left before I got into it. It seemed like the whole field went to web & mobile & saas, none of which I care for. And interesting things like OS research got

I left before I got into it. It seemed like the whole field went to web & mobile & saas, none of which I care for. And interesting things like OS research got largely killed by excessively complex hardware & software stacks and bloat that must be supported or nobody will look at the thing. Freedom got attacked (saas, centeralization, nat and other efforts to kill p2p, drm, browser & web apps to enslave you instead of user agent and desktop software to empower you, portability and choice got killed for "our way or the highway", list goes on) quite hard, hackers across the board dropped principles for "pragmatism" or whatever. None of the job ads I saw had had anything in them that resonated with me. So I got depressed, dropped out of high school and gave up on going to college. Since then? I did stints in various unskilled & skilled blue collar jobs. Can't say I had much passion for any of them. So now I'm back, without education (mild regret but I can always study more myself; I think education should be increasingly on-demand and lifelong), but at least the pay is better and I get to work in a clean office while listening to music of my choice. I think the field still sucks (well, I imagine there are jobs I would really like but the chances of finding them, without leaving my country and family and everything behind, is probably quite slim), the grass wasn't very green on the other side. Of course, I'm still a hacker at heart and I hope to create something nice one of these days. Probably nothing commercial.