Starting to program at 18 is early. I took 2 programming courses in college (1 was a Pascal-clone, and the other was an assembly language course), but I essentially taught myself how to program after graduating from college, and have made an entire career out of it, and I'm more than double your age. Don't worry about it, you have plenty of time.
I spent a couple of weeks programming in FORTRAN for an internship when I was 16. I hated it so much that I vowed never to become a programmer. I didn't touch code until about 7 years later. A year later, and I just became a fulltime "Software Engineer" last week! :)
I'm glad to hear that. I'm entering my senior year of Economics and I didn't discover that I enjoyed programming until I took an introductory C++ course last semester. The other day I found myself worrying that I had already missed out on my chance, since I can't currently afford any additional semesters.
I'd like to return to study computer science some day, and in the meantime I'm just doing the best I can to learn on my own.
I also studied economics in college, but now program professionally, largely due to my experience at at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. If you are still looking for work after college, and I assume you are, I recommend you check out their Research Assistant program.
For me it was a great way to parlay my economics training into a programming career, even though that wasn't what I was interested in at the time. It's also a great career stepping stone if you're interested in graduate education (not necessarily econ), government work, policy work, law, or myriad other fields. If you want more info, let me know and we can talk offline.
Thank you. I imagine such a position would be very competitive.
I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about your application process, how prepared you felt you were based on coursework, and of course what the job was actually like.
