my best friend works for his dad and does other things to get money, he is a self taught coder and he's making a video game. I think connections matter more than anything else tbh, nowadays a lot of coding jobs have been replaced by AI, now, i'm not sure how good AI is a coding but I think it's likely not as good as a person is. I think networking is probably better than an actual education atp tbh, I could be wrong on that but i'm just going off of my friend. I think gig work is easier to find than an actual job in most cases tbh. my friend dropped out of computer science bc he hated it, and now he wants to be a plumber and just worry about coding as gig work, or a hobby