He did graduate, though. That little sheepskin may seem only like a small thing, but the difference between having it and not having it should not be underestimated. He also had parental support, which, until you live without it - in the US, it's many people's "safety net of first resort" - you just cannot imagine the benefits it gives you. You can fail in all sorts of ways and still come back - you have a place to lay your head when it comes down to it, and that counts for a lot. The difference between that and thinking "hm, homelessness actually possible!" is so stark it's hard to overstate. The poster "floated by" and is doing great; I can share some experiences on what it's like on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I didn't go to college because I had to leave home early (was told I had to be out at 16, was out by 17) to support myself, and received no parental support when I left. I did, however, manage to work myself from a tech support hamster at 17 to sysadmin, then junior developer, then finally senior developer. I never lacked for work, and have made OK, but not amazing money. That all sounds great, but it comes with serious costs, especially if you're just "decent" or "pretty good." Here are my experiences:
- You're probably going to have to work 2-3x as hard as an equivalently skilled person to prove that you deserve to be there.
- You may have to deal with much lower raises, or deal with simply being passed up for them altogether. This one can be more subtle, so can be hard to prove. So, you may be picked for the challenging work, asked to lead teams, told you're the best on the team by the boss(es), and receive the company awards, but when it comes to raise time, you wonder why you just went from 80 to 85k, and the people below you in rank went from 80 to 110 (and aren't happy with that and leave anyway. Heh.) This one sucks the most, because it's the one you have the least control over, and will ultimately impact the number of choices available to you later on.
- You may experience another subtle thing. This: "we know you're good, but you don't have a degree, so we believe you're less likely to leave because the hoops for you to change jobs is higher, so we can ask you for more than your degreed peers - and we're probably right about it." You will be the person on-call more often (if that applies to you - sysadmin/devops), you will be "expected" to stay later, and just generally push harder to prove yourself.
- You're going to spend a LOT of your free time teaching yourself knew things, honing your skills, and brushing up on the theory you never learned in a setting that allowed you to immerse. Now, maybe you have superior learning capabilities and can just sponge this stuff up in just a couple of your after-work learning sessions, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that for those of us who aren't, we spend a lot of time making them stick over the years. Now, we know that everyone needs to do this stuff these days, and that it's becoming more necessary every day. No question about it. However, you will have to do it even more to make sure you're at the top of your game. You may have annoying gaps in your knowledge, and will have to go back (in some cases, WAY back) to fill that stuff in. (Now that there's Khan/Udacity/MIT OCW/others, this is actually a LOT easier to do.) If you're only decent/pretty good, you're going to have run significantly faster to stay in place. Forget most of your social life. Again, this does not apply to you if you happen to just be an superhumanly fast learner, but for the decent/pretty good, it probably does.
- Culturally, your degreed peers may have some trouble adjusting to you. Of course this happens at every level (people who went to state school treated differently than those who went to a top university, for example), but you'll be the strangest of the bunch. People may wonder if you know anything at all(!), not just about your field (which is easy enough to prove), but about the world around you: politics, economics, sociology, literature, the lot of it. Sometimes you may be looked at as a strange feral orphan child. They just may not even have a baseline for what to expect from you. The software world(s) may be more meritocratic and/or egalitarian, but it's not utopia. Now, this sounds /all/ bad, but I actually have always liked this one; if you are a dedicated self-learner, you can blow people away pretty easily. They expect you to not be able to tie your shoes, but then you rattle off your knowledge X, Y, and Z and show them your elegant, well-structured code and they are agape. This one is fun!
- Remember that the degree acts as a proxy. It's a way for organizations to outsource not only judgment about your knowledge, but your socio-economic background (in most cases), your "level of socialization", your ability to "follow-through" (and your personal story about how you had to leave home early and support yourself alone and spend all your free time learning unfortunately will not count in many/most places. Sorry!), and how "convincing" you are. You may not be listened to (even if you turn out to be right, at least for a time), your opinions may be given less weight, people may feel more comfortable cutting you off when you're talking, etc. This one can be surmounted: if you are right enough times when others are wrong you may start be taken very seriously. Still, the bar is higher for you. Much higher. This one is probably obvious, but is worth stating.
- You may have to content yourself with smaller and/or less-respected organizations. I know, I know meritocracy, etc. If you're amazing, you can most certainly get into Google and friends, but again, if you're only decent/pretty good, you /probably/ won't. For those of you who have ever wondered "who works /would want to work at crappy place X?", it's not just CS grads who couldn't hack it at Google or the 'printer guy' who got promoted to LOB programming. Sometimes it's smart, pretty good devs who are either just short of what's needed for the bigger players or are incredibly intimidated by the interview processes/hiring filters. It's funny to think that these places are (based on comments I've read here on HN) inundated with resumes from people who are nowhere even close to qualified, but people who are qualified, or at least could be with some knowledge gaps filled in/"senior-level" mentoring don't even apply in the first place. Doesn't surprise me that something like Starfighters now exists to (maybe?) try to reach these people and mop them up. I would also say that you can be very valued at startups. You may be one of those great "get things off the ground" people, like many self-starters, and if you are, your metaphorical phone will ring a lot. I wouldn't say it evens things out, but it sure helps (and feels good to be real a go-to person!)
- Unless you really are one of the best, expect to always be questioned. You probably will need to psych yourself up a lot, because it's very easy to get disheartened and discouraged when you feel like you're never quite good enough/people are always going to assume there's "a lot he/she probably just doesn't know if we're honest" (even if you have been working for decades and proven yourself with real work)/you don't ever quite fit in culturally because you've never had the "college experience." You need to be tougher (psychologically) than your degreed peers, because you will have to work much harder to earn respect.
So this person floated, others swim upstream to get to where he is. It can be done for people without degrees, but it actually is hard. You really can't imagine what that little piece of paper - even if you just "barely" earned it - can do you for you. It's not just about getting hired.
"I’m already starting to see some really smart high schoolers skip college to get into the workforce because they know what they want, and good for them."
If these "smart high schoolers" have the ability to have someone else pay for their education, I recommend that they go to school. If they have Zuckerberg-parent level of support or are already mindblowingly skilled/knowledgeable, OK, sure, don't bother. They're probably going to succeed no matter what. If they are on the margin, though - parents wealthy enough to send them to a real university, but not wealthy enough to Zuck them, tell them to go instead. Or at least work for a couple of years, then go back. If someone gave me a few hundred thousand to go to a great university, I'd still go in a heartbeat. You cannot replace the quality of networks you'll get there. You cannot replace the immersion. You cannot replace the prestige. You just can't. The magic of university is being surrounded by "brilliant, ambitious, well-connected elites." I'm probably right in the sweet spot of the target of today's alternative education: I couldn't go to college, I'm a regular user of MOOCs, I do self-directed learning, I'm a devourer of books, I'm someone who does coding challenges, I'm fairly smart, AND I've managed some level of success, which proves it's possible, and yet I would still tell these people to go to college.