Your possibly correct, but its only because of the way the market turned out for programmers. At age 14 I don't know if you'd know how the market would turn ou

Your possibly correct, but its only because of the way the market turned out for programmers. At age 14 I don't know if you'd know how the market would turn out. Lets put it this way, a home schooled mathematician or physicist is likely unemployed, but one with a MS from UNC can pretty easily get a job in a variety of places. I honestly can't say that if we were to have another bubble that acquisitions for startups wouldn't completely dry up. And, like music, services cluster around the big companies. It could well be the case that the next 20 years in SW doesn't look like the last 20 in that startup founders are simply a long shot, ala the rock star analogy someone made earlier. You happen to live in the golden age for SW. A similar thing happened for electrical engineers in the 70s (although not as broad or as big). I suspect something similar might happen for biologists in the future (although a homeschooled biologist would be lucky to drive a taxi in today's market). School does take time, but it also mittigates some of this risk. And more importantly, you can drop out of school if you see this happening. I knew a lot of people who dropped out of school. In fact I knew one guy who sold his company to GM for $5M and never missed a class (this was back in the early 90s when this sort of thing was a lot less common -- pre-web). I think blaming school is a bit of a stretch. Those that'll make it big, will do so.