Josh, I applaud you. Don't let the people in this thread, your parents, or anyone else tell you differently, either.
I dropped out of college when I was halfway through my second year to take a full-time job in tech. I left that job less than a year later and started my own tech company. I ended up selling that business for $1.1 million when I was 26--when most of the people who graduated high school when I did were still in school!
Running your own business, especially a tech company (when you're already geeky), is some of the best education you can get. My parents cut me off financially when I dropped out of school. My mom told me it was "the worst decision I'd ever made."
But something strange happens: When you are forced to succeed, you often do. You make ends meet. I consulted building shopping carts and CMSes for customers in this new language called PHP (4.0 had just come out!) for the first couple years of running my business. Those clients became my first hosting customers, and then my tiny little hosting company beat the odds to become a Silicon Valley success story.
Now I'm doing it all over again with another startup. We have 4 full-time people here in Austin, TX. Three of us have no college degrees. But I'm pretty confident things will work out even better this time.
So avoid the naysayers, find your role models, and be driven to succeed. Start your own business, learn sales and marketing, and then hire the guys right out of college and have them work for you. (They're good folks.) And never look back.
I dropped out of college when I was halfway through my second year to take a full-time job in tech. I left that job less than a year later and started my own tech company. I ended up selling that business for $1.1 million when I was 26--when most of the people who graduated high school when I did were still in school!
Running your own business, especially a tech company (when you're already geeky), is some of the best education you can get. My parents cut me off financially when I dropped out of school. My mom told me it was "the worst decision I'd ever made."
But something strange happens: When you are forced to succeed, you often do. You make ends meet. I consulted building shopping carts and CMSes for customers in this new language called PHP (4.0 had just come out!) for the first couple years of running my business. Those clients became my first hosting customers, and then my tiny little hosting company beat the odds to become a Silicon Valley success story.
Now I'm doing it all over again with another startup. We have 4 full-time people here in Austin, TX. Three of us have no college degrees. But I'm pretty confident things will work out even better this time.
So avoid the naysayers, find your role models, and be driven to succeed. Start your own business, learn sales and marketing, and then hire the guys right out of college and have them work for you. (They're good folks.) And never look back.
(Here's my full story [written as of 2009]): http://www.erica.biz/2009/the-end-of-an-era/