I'm a successful startup founder (we're 100 people plus and making money) and I was lucky enough to have supportive parents as a kid. Although I didn't really s

I'm a successful startup founder (we're 100 people plus and making money) and I was lucky enough to have supportive parents as a kid. Although I didn't really start coding seriously until after college. It sounds like you are smart / articulate, so you'll do fine no matter what, especially if you work on things you are interested in. I think your instrument analogy is perfect. You might not turn out to be a rock star, but getting good at code is probably the most valuable skill you can get (aside from reading challenging books). So I'd tell my parents the truth. They are probably somewhat scared because people tend to be scared of what they don't understand. As long as you are asking for advice, here are 2 unsolicited points: * You don't have to study computers in college to be a world class programmer. Study art or biology or something and (assuming you keep getting good at coding on the side) you'll be able to create things that matter. Others who went to school may turn out to be better coders, but you'll write code that people care about. * Open source. Learn to love github. Share everything you can on there, even if it sucks. If you think something is just an experiment / hack, say so in the readme, but don't let that stop you from posting it. And don't be scared to send pull requests to projects you end up using / fixing bugs on. You'll run into some bad apples but a few people will be super happy to help you get your code quality to the point where they can merge your fix. Being good at open source collaboration is in a lot of ways a more important skill than actually writing algorithms or other coding skills.