I'm 22, my yearly income basically doubled this year. Coming from a low income family, this makes me feel grateful for the opportunity life has given me

You cannot possibly learn everything about architecture, networking, distributed (Cloud) computing, databases, and programming by yourself. Not to mention the resources a University can provide, mine has multiple labs in our graduate center sponsored by the US Department of Defense.

Six figure earning defense contractor college dropout here: Everything you've written in this blurb I've quoted is technically true, but it overlooks the reality that you don't need to learn "everything" in those areas you mentioned, you need to learn enough to be useful in a job for long enough to get promoted to positions that pay well. To say you need a college degree to make "real money" in computing is probably the least accurate and most naive thing I've heard all day. Anybody can get an entry level job in computing, regardless of how dumb they are, they just have to be able to get an interview at a place looking for bodies and not be fucking creepy at the interview. Most of your entry level jobs are basically just reading scripts, and if you start out at a small firm doing competitive bid work, they will take an uneducated rube in to pad their help desk while paying you less than your worth. It's not ideal, but it's cheaper than college loans. You do that for a few years and you've actually gained enough money to be useful, so you go to some mid-tier consulting firm and take an entry level job there. One of the benefits you'll see there is training budgets, which you can finagle into an iterative approach to learning more about one of the areas you mentioned above. I'd probably start in networking given the options you've laid out here, just because it's a pretty easy path to easy money. Doing database work or some sort of sysadmin work will lead to paths that overlap with a number of the concepts you've named, but I'm not going to get into that.

Grind away at your mid-tier firm for about five years and take every training option available. Make sure you're getting documentable certifications out of your training that is within your reach, because most employers are just looking to check boxes. Try to take job title upgrades whenever possible, even if it means not taking as big of a raise as might be expected in a shift. Work office politics. Get the titles. Pad your resume. You can do it.

Now you've got somewhere between 5-7 years of real world experience under your belt and you're probably making somewhere around $50k / year depending on where you are geographically. In most contract / consulting work, there is usually an option to sub in work experience for higher education requirements, so if a job being bid requires key personnel to have "a bachelors degree in X", you'll usually find text somewhere that says "5 years experience in work related to X can be subsituted in lieu of a bachelors degree." What's that? You're key personnel on billable contracts now, meaning you're probably making substantially more than you were grinding your way through things. Start pushing those training budgets as much as you can, work office politics to be allowed to take training that advances you further (and faster) than your apparent career path would take you. Don't be afraid to start positioning yourself as a senior technical resource within the organization, and start asking that your pay and job title represent your skills. Keep grinding in that mid-tier though, maybe move to another one at some point to keep your resume fresh or get better training benefits. Don't be afraid to take a lateral move or so, just keep grinding to the 10 year mark.

At ten years, a lot of work that requires a masters degree to bid on as key personnel can be taken by somebody who dropped out of high school so long as you have the work experience to back it up. It wouldn't be inappropriate to ask for upwards of $100k once you're at a point where you are taking jobs with lengthy experience requirements, and you'll get it. If you're not getting it from your current employer, upload your resume to monster that says "ten years of increasing responsibility and technical expertise plus certifications" and you'll have recruiters calling you every hour on the fucking hour like it's your goddamned birthday.

So, I invite you to reconsider everything you posted there, I don't think it really applies as generally as you believe it does.

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