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I am a college dropout. I finished high school (just barely), and married my high school sweetheart a week after graduation (best decision ever - we are having our first son any day now. It's a blast). I'm 21 now - 3 years out of high school - and I wouldn't say that I've quite achieved a "successful" life yet, but I'm on the way. After getting married, I joined my wife's family business of commercial printing. I headed up the IT department there, which mostly meant making sure our servers didn't blow up, and building/enhancing some FileMaker databases. It was by no means the dream job, but it was pretty nice - I learned a ton of things I never would have learned if I dove straight into development. After I got fed up with being an IT guy, I tried out a semester of college - turns out I hated that just as much as I hated high school. I joined the startup world and became a developer at MySocialCloud[1]. That was my first job where I really got to work and develop with a team. It was remote, which kinda sucked, but it was pretty good for awhile. MSC had an exodus in December 2012 that I was a part of. I roamed around for a few months looking for a job. I almost took another job with a startup called Elicit Search, but I saw some of the same bad management traits there that I had seen at MSC. Instead, I took a development job with one of my friend's design agencies, Cultivate Studios. It's a mostly menial job - server management, leading an overseas team of developers, maintaining some of our legacies sites - but it's nice. The people are great. I've thought a lot about priorities[2] lately, and while it might not seem like it at first glance, I'm finding Cultivate Studios to be my dream job. As far as "success" goes, we certainly all define it differently, but I'm finding professional success in my side projects. The biggest challenge with not going to college is you start 4 years behind everyone else in the market. There's a lot of deep computer science knowledge that you can't learn just by "hacking". I've made it a point to dig into those things as often as I can with my side projects. It's starting to pay off, as my most recent project[3] was featured in the New York Times[4]. It's not success yet, but I think I'm getting there. [1] https://mysocialcloud.com/
[2] http://wegnerdesign.com/blog/on-priorities/
[3] http://getwaltz.com
[4] bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/new-clef-plug-in-lets-you-forget-about-your-password/?ref=nicoleperlroth&_r=1 |