(i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet).
I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all
javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox
Now we are getting somewhere.
Look deep into your soul and ask yourself: "Is there an actual reason why I haven't become a web programmer yet?"
I'm going to catch hell for saying this on news.yc... but stop learning Lisp for a while. Nobody knows about Lisp but grad students and MIT grads, and they're going to hire other grad students and MIT grads, because there's a long line of people with advanced degrees who would love to be paid to hack on Lisp but can't find that job.
Where there's muck, there's brass. Learn some HTML, CSS, Javascript and -- god help us -- PHP, in the form of a good and popular toolkit like Drupal. If you can't stomach the PHP (after learning Ruby or Lisp, PHP can feel like typing in boxing gloves) learn Django, Pylons or Ruby plus Rails -- but, if you want steady work, PHP may be better in the short term. There's an enormous and growing number of PHP-based sites in the world, and nobody can find the coders to keep them all up.
Above all, learn SQL. If you're going to pursue some paper qualification that isn't a college degree, make it database administration. SQL isn't going anywhere for the next decade, companies need those skills, and a surprising number of developers have only the faintest notion of how an RDBMS works.
Web development jobs can be acquired one short-term gig at a time -- it's fairly low-risk for prospective clients to try you out, and the fact that you'll obviously leave for college in a year or two won't bother most of them. These jobs can be done from several time zones away. They can be done for clients that you've never even seen. If you choose your gigs carefully, each one results in a piece of publicly-visible software that can be linked in your portfolio and shown to future clients. Once your portfolio and reputation exist, nobody will care about what degrees you have or don't have.
I'm guessing that most systems programming jobs, and a majority of the Microsoft-stack C#/.NET jobs, involve physically sitting in actual cubicles in offices full of college grads. If you are intent on pursuing such a job, Columbus is probably the wrong place -- it has a relatively low number of jobs in your field and a relatively enormous number of college grads.
As I said in another reply, I found a community college that is cheap enough for me to pay for the tuition in cash. I'll just get my degree and go from there.
Great it's a good start! :) Just be careful that you don't take courses that won't transfer to a 4-year college (beats me how you'd determine this).
Plus, this discussion is good for anyone else in your position and it'd be good to keep the dialog going as you may get some other useful suggestions for the future.
Why not apply to MIT maybe they'll give you a scholarship! U never know. :)
I highly doubt MIT would want me, my high school grades were mediocre, and I did get a 28 on my ACT, but that was with a hangover. I didn't learn my lesson regarding grades and working in school until it was too late.
2 other things: put a blog out there. write a few good posts that arent' obviously derivative of somebody else's.
put some apps out there. They can be facebooks apps that target your geographic area, or greasemonkies that do whatever. These are like selling rolexes on the street. OR: take all the posts tagged "C#" on delicious and technorati, figure out which are the best x thousand, use those to produce better .nET documentation. This would be like selling heroin to junkies.
http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk=
(i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet).
I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all