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by rythie 5840 days ago
A degree makes it easier to get a tech. job, at some point you will care about how much you earn and having a degree will affect that. Getting a degree later in life will be much harder, I know from friends who later decided they wanted one.

There is really no rush, you should realise you'll be working for the next 45ish years, so a year or two here or there doesn't make much of a difference.

Part of getting a degree is showing that you can learn the stuff that your not so good at, like the Math. Your career won't just be programming, in fact you may only spend 5-10 years doing that before moving into management or starting a company which are different skills altogether.

Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates quit their degrees because there was opportunity cost around the businesses they had created. If they had failed in their businesses they most like would have finished their degrees.

1 comments

I second that. You can have a successful tech career without a degree, I have a close friend doing it now, but not having one will get you instantly excluded from many big organizations.

Also, even organizations that will happily hire programmers without a degree may balk at letting them become managers or even more senior level engineers. Even if you think right now you will never want to be a manager, it is probably a good thing to keep open. You may very well change your mind later.

If the problem with college is boredom, then perhaps I can suggest two answers which are not mutually exclusive so you can do both:

Work with your University to substitute something else for the classes you think won't teach you anything. I know it it is an institution by institution question, but my undergrad college was very accommodating at letting me substitute upper division classes for lower division ones when I balked at taking things like "intro to programming".

Take the extra time you have from finishing the homework so fast to work on other productive things. Technical certifications come to mind. I know many people mock them, but they really do open doors when you have to navigate HR departments or hiring managers that have MBAs and no technical skills. Open source software is nanother great one.