Meh, if you're passionate about technology as a kid and end up building lots of useful things I don't see why you can't get internships which will inevitably lead you to higher paying jobs.

My company offered an internship to someone who was 17. At Digital Ocean one of the interns was 16.

Tech moves quick and the less outside responsibilities you have the more time you can commit to building and learning.

I started full time in 2008 when the recession was bad. I don't know if 2008 was a long time ago or not.

Turns out when companies are making money, they want to hire engineers to build new stuff. When they are losing money, they want to hire engineers to automate.

There were certainly some lucky breaks involved. I like to think of it as I'm lucky the doors opened, it wasn't luck that had me searching for open doors and walking through them when I found them.

I think it's still largely true. In some sense it can be harder, especially if you don't plan to go through some form of web dev path or mobile development path, but on the other hand there are more opportunities now to quickly build up your knowledge and experience and showcase it. Open source projects don't care, and the coding bootcamp craze can be a substitute to a full degree while still offering pretty good odds at job placement. There are several contracting agencies out there as well that will help you out, if you're good those can lead to full time. Once you get your foot in the door and work in a tech role for over a year (or bootstrap your own tech startup for a year), or sometimes being an intern is enough), just about every place after that will look past not having a degree.

I started learning to code in 2011 when I was 28. I've been steadily employed in this industry for over 5 years now. I have a music degree.