I went to school but also taught myself as I needed to solve a particular problem (build a GUI driven desktop app) and my school work wasn't moving fast enough.

I went to school but also taught myself as I needed to solve a particular problem (build a GUI driven desktop app) and my school work wasn't moving fast enough. The curriculum was C++, lots of algorithms, and data structures. Good stuff, just not very applicable to my problem at the time so I picked up a few books on C++ and C# and by the time I worked through them I pretty much never had trouble with classwork again. It took about a year before I landed my first gig which I found through craigslist.