I pulled myself out of high school at age 16 because I felt it was holding me back from progressing in comp sci. Worst fucking decision of my life; please encou

I pulled myself out of high school at age 16 because I felt it was holding me back from progressing in comp sci. Worst fucking decision of my life; please encourage let alone force this on anybody else. My high school didn't have a computer science program at all (late 90's), but I grew up during the dot-com boom in silicon valley. My friends were getting internships at web and networking companies over summer earning an unhealthy amount of money for a teenager. I tried my hand at writing some computer games, and found I liked making games even more than playing them. So I thought: screw high school and all these classes which have fuck all to do with what I'm interested in. What actually happened is that within a year I found out that like any teenager I had no clue what really interested me, except that it was easy to find stuff which interested me more than being a code monkey. Yet I was getting more and more locked into that as a career path. Also, my social circle went to hell. I was neither with a cohort of friends my age I could relate to and could relate to me, nor did I get to share in the typical senior year of high school, and freshman year of college rites of passage. I did not really know what I was missing until later. I jumped around a lot trying to undo mistakes and find something I really liked, which ended up costing me a small fortune in debt via 8 years of college. In the end I still write code instead of doing something more intellectually and emotionally satisfying to me like archaeology or art conservation. Why? Because some mistakes can't be so easily undone. I enjoy what I do, and am paid well enough to support my family. But sometimes I wonder what could have been, and why in the world my parents let me do this...