Do you know what second normal form is?  Do you know what the three basic functions that form all mu-recursive functions are?  Can you write an A* search from memory?  Do you know what is stored during a context switch? <i>Are</i> you worth your salt as a programmer?<p>Tech is booming.  I know someone who went to a bootcamp for a few months and is working as a programmer right now.  A college diploma doesn&#x27;t matter now.  It matters in years like 2000-2002 after your company goes bust and you&#x27;re looking for work, or if your division does massive layoffs in 2008 and you&#x27;re looking for work.<p>If you&#x27;re going to go to school and take it seriously, the earlier you do it, the more it pays off.  The easier it is to do as well - you don&#x27;t want to be married at 37 with two kids and decide that you really need more than a high school diploma.  Then you&#x27;re juggling a full-time job, college and a family.<p>If you want to be worth your salt as a programmer you&#x27;re going to have to sit down and study databases, operating systems, calculus, theory of computation, computer graphics, algorithms, data structures and so forth any how, so why not do it while studying CS at school?<p>When kids ask me, I tell them if you can go, go, if you&#x27;re going to take it seriously.  If they have financial issues or whatever I tell them to not take a full course load.  One night class a week at the local public college is affordable (with Pell grants, loans etc.) and doable by most people.