Hehe, are you me? Dropped out in my 2nd year too. I went to university in Europe though, and have no loans to pay back. Being a student definitely helped me ge

Hehe, are you me? Dropped out in my 2nd year too. I went to university in Europe though, and have no loans to pay back. Being a student definitely helped me get my break though, mainly due to the tax status. I had been programming for a decade when I got my first job, but everyone's shit and a drain on resources for a couple months regardless. Accepting peanut pay (relatively) + tax benefits made getting that first job easy. The amount I learned in my first couple of months does not compare in any way to university. You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. Meanwhile, it's the job of the senior engineers to be your babysitter at the start (bless the patience of the ones who taught me). And the few times you do get an audience, it's very short (as they have to see 50 other students), and much too vague. There's too little "you idiot, you do that and in 6 months you'll be sorry the DB is deadlocking". More "hm, do you not think you could turn this O(n*log(n) into O(log(n))", which, at the end of the day, I could probably care less for but not by much.