I feel the same way as you. In high-school I had a chance to do a "co-op" program (like being an intern for the American's) for a company. I did web development

I feel the same way as you. In high-school I had a chance to do a "co-op" program (like being an intern for the American's) for a company. I did web development work there. I got offered a job there over the summer and continued to work there for 6 more summers while I went through University for software engineering. The thing that is funny is that University didn't help me in that job at all. The vast majority of skills I used at the job were self-taught. A good chunk of those were self-taught before I even went to University. University teaches a lot of theoretical and basically makes you teach yourself the practical. I started to realize that unless I planned to go the academia route and get more into the theoretical, then the degree was pretty useless to me. I ended up not completing the degree because it was just way too hard to stay motivated. It felt like I had to teach myself the important skills anyway, and then listen to stuff I could self-teach myself when I needed to know it. When I had group projects a good chunk of classmates I worked with sucked at programming. Like they didn't know how to use git, sucked at object orientated program, etc... They would produce code that was just in one big massive single file. It was frustrating because the degree really just made a lot of people book smart, but they weren't actually that hirable. I actually got to help with co-op hiring while I was in school for multiple years at the company I was with. When we would look at resumes the biggest thing I realized is that the degree wasn't really relevant. When almost every applicant has the identical degree it's not meaningful. What mattered was what kinds of things they did outside of school. What personal projects they had, what their github looked like, did they have their own website, were they involved in groups or starting their own sidegig websites, etc... Our best candidates were the ones that did a lot of stuff outside of school. And the funny thing is that the majority of those candidates had bad grades. We got the transcripts with every co-op applicant.