I did the same thing; never finished Grade 10. Had been playing with coding since I was 5 [1]. Always knew one day I'd "do something with computers". My dad wrote one of the first books on the Internet in '92 so I got some good exposure somewhat early. Moved to a third world country at 15 cause they didn't card for booze. Ended up with some web site contracts, and kept diving deeper until I was a "real" programmer (not just web/CRUD stuff - but high perf, high-scale, life-critical, reversing, etc.).

It was only hard for the first little bit. No one takes a 17-yr-old seriously. But I had a 24-yr-old business partner and that helped. I managed to get a speaking slot at a 300+ person business conference and picked up some solid clients that built portfolio. Plus it was 2000, so a whiz-kid-Internet-thing had some sort of cachet perhaps.

I already had a real career and some recognition by the time I would have graduated, so, eh, it worked out and was fun. Though I do regret not knowing maths and not having taken really solid algorithms classes (OTOH, no guarantee I'd have gone to a real school - might have gotten fake CS classes like so many end up with). And I wonder what kind of connections I might have made if I had stayed with it, especially staying in the US.

1: Most elaborate thing was designing a fake grade tracking program (demo) to convince other kids I had hacked the school's systems (hint: they used paper) and could change their grades.

Home schooling in my jurisdiction carries absolutely no reporting obligation, so after registering for that I didn't need to do anything in particular.

I got my first job through a combination of meeting my boss at a meetup, and knowing somebody who worked for him. I started working at 17. My first week there, I learned AngularJS (by porting a vanilla javascript application). By my second week, I was already leading a project which was delivered ahead of schedule.

Without Wikipedia and the Free Software Foundation I would probably not have had it as easy.

Job success is mainly about a combination of basic mental health and general intelligence. If you have these two things, you can make it in software.

I think it also helped that I had a fairly mature outlook and lifestyle by then. It also probably helped that I looked like a goofy adult and not just a mature adolescent.

From time to time I wonder what life might have been if I stayed through high school and actually tried (I was a very bad student in primary school). I probably can't go to law school, though in some jurisdictions I could study independently to practice law; I almost certainly couldn't go into medicine. In a way, even though I am young enough to change course in life, a number of doors are closed because I did not go to high school.

As for me, I like my life a lot.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I didn't finish high school either. I dropped out, enrolled in a top ranked university, and graduated at the top of my class. Since then I've since then done extensive work as an engineer, hold numerous patents, and am a respected writer. I've also taught both college and high school classes on the side. Often the best thing someone can do is drop out of high school. I don't recommend it for anyone other than the developmentally disabled who need extra time to learn basic skills.

You can skip high school by taking a GED and applying to a community college.

"High School" as an educational trifurcation is very USA, most of the world seems to bifurcate into pre-teen and teen. No concept outside the USA of going to a separate building for ages 14-18.

For a good time there's also no enforced standard in the USA for middle school (older elementary) vs Junior High (youth high school). I went to a middle school that operated internally like a junior high, which was interesting. Construction/logistical reasons resulted in my high school experience being only 3 years sophomore to senior, freshmen year was the last year of middle school. Everyone who graduated with me had a middle school as their first year of high school on their transcript. When I was young enough for anyone to care about my education this sometimes led to bizarre conversations with HR people about why I transferred schools or why did I skip a grade, etc.