Thank you for not killing me for being successful. I will not lie and say that I'm some savant. The thing was, I was super poor growing up too. I remember getting the hand-me-down Commodore64 and living on it for weeks at a time. In middle school, my comp sci teacher slipped me a copy of Visual Basic and I was in love. Sadly though, I knew I'd never be able to afford to go to college and the idea of borrowing fucktons of money was out of the question.

I turned 18 and I did do shit labor. I ran cat 5 cable in office buildings that summer and learned how to wire patch panels, setup routers, etc. I tried to always take a job where I could learn SOMETHING useful, but the trade-off was climbing around in shitty crawl spaces in blistering Texas heat. Just typing that gives me a flashback. Then I took what I thought was an amazing job in a call center... at least I wasn't crawling around in insulation, right? So I worked overnights and people generally fucked off, but I taught myself PHP/MySQL with the help of the internet and eventually got moved to another group specifically tasked with writing in-house applications for the cable company. Great experience, but $12/hr. I never made more than $12/hr until I took that first programming job in my original post. However, I worked like I was already making that amount and got to learn on someone else's dime.

I concur with most of what you said... especially the saturation. College in the old days was only attended by those that could do well and it was kind of like those "10 habits of successful people" books. Most people correlated college with success. It's very different now and I hope people can see more success stories that don't involve a mountain of debt, but rather practical application of skills. I'd say my skill set came from working with people almost as an apprentice. I was a sponge and eventually I had the opportunity to provide that same mentoring to others.

What language(s) are you programming in?