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You're smart. Get your GED. Get a Junior level position. People have been telling you your whole life that you can't get anywhere without a college education,

You're smart. Get your GED. Get a Junior level position. People have been telling you your whole life that you can't get anywhere without a college education, which is horse shit. You're in one of the few industries where the professional work you've done and the skills you have determine if you can get a job, not what college you went to. If a company snubs you because you dropped out, you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Source: I dropped out of HS, got my GED, dropped out of college, twice. Fell back on my Computer skills, now a dev at a startup making more money than all my friends who went to college.

matwood 13y ago
If a company snubs you because you dropped out, you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Depends on why he dropped out. Could he not get a long with his peers and refused to do what was asked? Not someone I would want to work with. Remember, work is called work for a reason. A lot of my job is fun, but work (and often grunt work) is what carries side projects from toys to releasable software.
cheald 13y ago
This is exactly the advice I'd give. Get your GED, but you don't need a college degree to be successful. Find a junior-level (ie, "shit work that nobody else wants to do") job on the strength of your experience, not your educational credentials. It won't be amazing money, but it will be great experience, which is the currency most companies actually care about. From there, you'll build experience that you can spin into a career. Don't stop self-educating. Research and consume good career-related literature. Push yourself to learn new things (something I learned from a former boss - I learn a new programming language every year. It keeps me exposed to new ideas constantly), and don't stagnate. Work on open source - a good Github profile is the strongest indicator of a good candidate from my perspective.

matwood 13y ago

If a company snubs you because you dropped out, you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Depends on why he dropped out. Could he not get a long with his peers and refused to do what was asked? Not someone I would want to work with. Remember, work is called work for a reason. A lot of my job is fun, but work (and often grunt work) is what carries side projects from toys to releasable software.

cheald 13y ago

This is exactly the advice I'd give. Get your GED, but you don't need a college degree to be successful. Find a junior-level (ie, "shit work that nobody else wants to do") job on the strength of your experience, not your educational credentials. It won't be amazing money, but it will be great experience, which is the currency most companies actually care about. From there, you'll build experience that you can spin into a career. Don't stop self-educating. Research and consume good career-related literature. Push yourself to learn new things (something I learned from a former boss - I learn a new programming language every year. It keeps me exposed to new ideas constantly), and don't stagnate. Work on open source - a good Github profile is the strongest indicator of a good candidate from my perspective.