[sillysaurus2]

The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it.

This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.

[yaddayadda]

My mother talked me out of a computer science path many years ago. My biggest regrets are letting her talk me out of it and then getting myself locked into another career path, mortgage, etc. One (but not the only) reason why is the current differences in job markets between my field and comp science. The other big reason is that I feel like I'm nearly illiterate. (I'm not illiterate. I can hack on code, but I'm very much a coding 'immigrant'. I'm certainly too much of an immigrant to pursue a job in the field at this time. And I'm too bogged down in other responsibilities to truly pursue the experience that I need to gain enough literacy to get a programming job.)

[sillysaurus2]

The only requirement for a computer science education is that you believe in yourself, and that you work on it at least a little each week.

A third (rather modern) requirement might be to ignore what most people consider good practices and simply try to get as many things done as you can. The actual process of building things is mostly what increases your skill, not solely your study of how to build things.

The forth requirement for a computer science career is for someone to give you your initial break (hire you at a job). The only thing necessary for this is to find (a) an open-minded employer who cares mostly about whether you can build things rather than about what credentials you have, and (b) you can show a portfolio demonstrating that you can build things. Build a portfolio of personal projects -- the more visual, the better. Mine was to show demos of 3D game engines I made. They were simplistic, but they were pretty, and it got my foot in the door. If I wanted to become a webdev, I would put together a portfolio of websites I made. Note that you can make whatever you feel like making -- it doesn't need to have a purpose, just something like "here's my example checkout process I made for my example merchant website." Stuff like that.

There's always hope as long as you believe in yourself.