While I value a college education I have to say that a college degree is not a guarantee of performance at all. A programmer, in my opinion, must have some Col

While I value a college education I have to say that a college degree is not a guarantee of performance at all. A programmer, in my opinion, must have some College exposure. The OP does, as he says he graduated with a business degree. Aside from that, programming is a multi-faceted and ever-evolving discipline. We are always learning new things. A proven ability to approach something new and learn it is at the top of my list. He certainly proved that part. I come to this from the perspective that virtually nothing I do today existed when I was in college. This goes for programming languages and even hardware design areas such as FPGA's. I, as an engineer, have to learn constantly. That aspect of my profession never stopped and, in fact, intensified after leaving college as there's so much to learn. How is a college grad going to react to a paradigm shift such as what happened as the internet started to take roots? It was the wild west for several years as new ideas popped-up and you had to either play or get off the train. I'll take someone really smart who has the tenacity, drive and interest to learn new things quickly over a degreed engineer who is slow to react. I have known many engineers who have remained stagnant over the years because they simply didn't want to bother to learn new things or were far too comfortable doing what they were doing. Some of these guys are unemployed today. Their skill set simply doesn't match todays reality and a degree means exactly nothing. Now, to be sure, the combination of good, solid schooling and drive, tenacity and a rabid interest to constantly learn can be a very powerful thing. In my experience that person is more the exception than the rule. A lot of college grads just want to find a train to ride as long as they can with the skill set they acquired. The self-driven individual who wants to own a topic today and then another topic tomorrow is very rare. Oh, yes, and a lot of college grads write code that is as shitty as anyone else's. There is no monopoly on the ability to write horrible code due to the lack of experience.