Meh, I'll go against the grain and say I'm happy I started programming in my teens, and got my …

If you want to make lifelong friends and spend countless hours programming and working together in all sorts of things, for fun and/or profit, go to University. I went and started https://makersupv.com/ with some friends, which could only happen within university-life context. The synergy of having hundreds of like-minded people working towards similar goals but each with a different specialization/interest, all while having energy and free time, is difficult to undermine.

The university experience is whatever people choose to make of it. The people who complain most loudly about how college was a waste for them tend to be people who took no initiative of their own and expected to simply be spit out of some pipeline of courses into a top tier job. OP is clearly not one of those people, and has an internally driven passion for learning, pursued of their volition. That doesn't mean OP is somehow beyond college, it means they are an excelent candidate for it. The combination of breadth and depth of knowledge and experience available at universities is unmatched anywhere in the world. OP may find themselves more interested in developing neural interfaces, working on processor hardware architectures, designing next generation microscopy systems for biology, or a hundred other things. It's true that there are other entry points into those areas that don't involv…