Thanks for sharing your experiences! It's a bittersweet feeling for me to look back at how I refused a traditional education having known only a fraction of wha

Thanks for sharing your experiences! It's a bittersweet feeling for me to look back at how I refused a traditional education having known only a fraction of what you do. My observation is that the base M.O. of academic-corporate apparatus is for any given transaction to be at least a low-level scam. Unless a business is a family mom-and-pop store making fresh pastries at a reasonable price, just expect anything being sold to you to involve some amount of shenanigans. The system leaks and misallocates currency so badly that ripoffs are the only way to get ahead. To have more subscribers, simply make canceling subscriptions confusing and time consuming. If the CEO wants a third home on Martha's Vineyard, he has the cooks use the same amount of pizza dough for the large as for the medium. You want that car at a reasonable price? Be prepared to have features that have been basic to vehicles for decades crumble apart after 80k miles. Don't forget that you can't put a price on education, so use that "good debt" to buy a bunch of paper weights you'll only read 10% of, and expect to be a "self learner" because important people like professors and corporate vice presidents don't have time to do their jobs. If they let you subvert the system, it's just because they know you need to "hit the ground running." Don't ask, don't tell! If dishonesty and swindling were somehow eliminated from the economy, the entire system would collapse. People must fail for others to win, and the system can only grow and replicate if it can create more failures, but not so much failure that the losers have nothing left to lose. > Imagine what people who have no experience and no college have to deal with. Hell, even with experience, employers by default assume that you are the one misleading them, despite many if not most job ads containing overt dishonesty. It works out for them if they can convince candidates that they are all at least somewhat inferior compared to it, and many fall for that. Someone will take that low paying dev job, especially given how few opportunities that seem to be for junior devs now in contrast to when I got started.