"Intelligence can find an answer. It takes Wisdom to determine if it's the *right* answer..."

So says the chaotic neutral, paranoid schizophrenic, dual-club wielding, donkey riding, zeppelin flying human fighter running around in my head speaking gnomish to his clubs who are telling him to chop the tree down to get the cat out of the branches.

Wow, I don't even know where to start dissecting the FAIL in your post.

1. Some people write books for fun. Case in Point: NaNoWriMo. How many books have you written and published? (Why don't you go get ya shine box right now.)
2. Some people write books that may be useful for some people, but have a very small niche market. For example I wrote a guitar book, though I really stretch the meaning of "wrote" with it since it's mostly a journal with some useful nuggets in the front. I know 3 people who've already thanked me for it because there wasn't much in the market for that already.
3. I have 2 novels in first draft form that I plan on self-publishing through Lulu. Do they suck? well, right now yes because they're a rough draft, however when I publish them, I'm hoping they won't. I know enough talented people to help quite a bit with this sorta thing because...
4. My wife runs Literaryescapism.com which is a book review site. She quite a few books per month, and my favorite out of all of them that I've read is Pulling Strings by P. Vera, and he's self published.
5. To say we have no dignity because we self-publish is... more pathetic than anything. I really can't respond to someone who'd think that, I can only give you this advice:

6. Never go full retard (again).

1) - THIS

My college instituted internships for CS majors the year I started- I was friends with many cs majors that were a year ahead of me, and they weren't required to do them. One of them especially loved to mock me for it.

5 years later, I'm a sysadmin with a decent job, and the friend that mocked me has been working in retail (as of this month an office job at a new company).

The internship goes a long way to giving you a wakeup call.

2) - THIS.

when I was looking for people I paid attention to what side projects they were working on. I want to hire someone who's passionate about their work.

As a sysadmin, I look for people with some development experience- They need to be able to fix stuff themselves if needed. It drives me nuts when I find a sysadmin who "doesn't like to code" and refuses to learn simple scripting languages.

As a developer, I look for people who contribute to open source projects. The code you submit can tell a lot about the type of developer you are, and can show if you're passionate about development.

My suggestion for anonymous is to find a middle ground. I went to GVSU, and while it's not a great CS school, it gave me the exposure of a liberal arts school while still providing plenty of CS students and profs to bounce ideas off of.

But what do I know, I started off as a film and video major.