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> I don't see the need for a degree if you have the skills.

What skills? I see everyone saying this but the idea what industry considers skills is kinda elusive, at least to me. And I am asking this sincerely as someone who wants to break the poverty cycle. I haven't been a kid for two years now and I sincerely regret not focusing on my education instead of playing around with friends while I had the time. But what's in the past is in the past, what can I do now to improve myself from here?

I started learning to code around September-October of 2016 and applied at quite a few places during the latter half of 2017. I got rejected everywhere because they were looking for someone with either a more formal background or years of experiences. Now I understand that I was wrong to expect that I can get a job after learning for a year or so. But still, what is the skills that one should have that can equate the value of a degree from an accredited institution? Is it the number of hours or years I will spend learning? Is it the number project on GitHub? Do people who hire care about Github? One of the guys who rejected me said that there's not much incentive to hire self-taught guys as jr dev or interns since now there's a steady supply of educated engineers for such positions and the supply is increasing.

Now, I understand there's a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I plan to continue to code as a hobby and learn programming properly this time from the basics. But even then do you think just being able to code is enough of a skill to break the poverty cycle?

>These kids

they're children. there's something tragically wrong with the world that we expect children to be so jaded that they'd rather be career climbing than "hang out with their friends". i say this as someone who occasionally wishes he did do that (hung out less and studied more) and did come relative poverty but my point still stands.

> they're children

At some point, children need to start maturing and thinking of themselves as adults. When they go off to college at 18, they're old enough to legally vote, drive, hold a job, get married or join the military. They still have a bit of growing up to do, but they're no longer children.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends in college, but I (and a lot of other people I knew) also worked hard at my classes (CS degree) and held down part-time jobs. My family wasn't rich, and I was old enough to realize that I'd have to support myself when I graduated.

I think we're doing young adults a disservice by thinking of them as "children".

Would probably be more practical for them in getting a tuition free, accredited Bachelor's in Business Administration, with you acting as their free proctor and filling out scholarships for them to waive the exam fees https://www.uopeople.edu/programs/ba/degrees/business-admini...

Then you can teach them something they wouldn't find elsewhere, like using Emacs Ledger for accounting, org-mode, how to code presentations/stats, other interesting free software relevant to business. With real accreditation they could pass the entry requirements to work for an airline, be a manager in some sports team, or just get a job at a bank entry level, or start their own businesses. Somewhere in there will be a small subset of students actually interested in the theory of computation or software hacking willing to put in the work to learn it.