[punk-coder]

I went to University back in 89-90 in Munich Germany while my dad was in the military. When the first Iraq war broke out he went and I ended up heading home. I did some night schools, but never got a degree. In 96 there was a program in Columbus, Ga, called ICAPP. It was sponsored by Synovus, Aflac and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Thousands tried out for it, and after much testing, interviewing, etc it came down to about 60 of us making it in. We got paid to go through a program that taught us Assembler, COBOL, IMS, DB2, and other mainframe development skills for 6 months. After that we were guaranteed a job at one of those companies. If you worked in Georgia for 4 years your loan was forgiven. I took a job in Atlanta at Total Systems, a company owned by Synovus. 20 years later I'm an application architect making $155k at a different company in Atlanta. I have no degree. When I finished the program it counted as college credit and I was 11 credits shy of a Bachelors, but I don't see what that will do these days. I have 20 years real world experience, and in case you're wondering, the latest project I'm leading is a NERD stack app (Node, Express, React, Database). I quit the mainframe job back in 99. I wish there were more programs like that.