With the demands of life being what they are, this is much easier said than done.

If we are both 22, but you spent the last 4 years working on a political science degree and I spent the last 4 years working one or more no-post-high-school-education-required non-IT-related jobs, the answer will probably depend on the "prospects for advancement" in the company and whether those prospects would benefit from someone who had a 4-year non-technical degree.

If we are both 22 but you spent the last 4 years in something related to IT or to something else that gets the hiring manager's attention (say, we are applying for an IT job at a children's camp, and you've been doing children's-camp-ajacent work the last 4 years), you may have the leg up.

Unless you've got something equivalent or better to compensate.

Resume:

Work experience:

2020-2025 Senior Director of Widgets, Fortune 500 Company
2010-2020 Various positions of increasing responsibility in my parent's medium-sized Widget-making company, ending as Junior Vice President

Education:

2006-2010 Local High School, 4.0 GPA

In this case, the person had something unavailable to most: A guaranteed placement in a company that would nurture his career right out of high school. 10 years later he knew he had to leave the family business to broaden his horizons. By then, he was being recruited so finding a senior position with a big-name company wasn't hard.

Situations like these are unicorns, they are the exceptions that prove your rule.

"Working through school" is a good way to do it if you can swing it.

For some majors, undergraduate-research-assistant or industry-university-partnership between-semester jobs can help you graduate without any debt.

There are even some schools that have working during the school year to zero-out tuition as part of their educational model.

For decades until very recently, at degree that combined in-demand-upon-enrollment technical studies with a solid business education would meet this criteria. If your graduate date coincided with a "job bust" of your technical skills, you could fall back to your business education. If it didn't, you were still more valuable that someone with the technical skills but little or no business education.

I say "until very recently" because ChatGPT-style AI is very "disruptive" to the entry-level job market so it's too soon to say whether this is true for people who graduated in the last 2-3 years or who will be graduating in the near future.

The hard part is doing what amounts to a double-major (or more) without extending graduation (and tuition) more than a semester.

If you plan in "eventually" getting that degree, it's going to be easier to "go straight on through college after high school" than it will be to "work for a decade then go back."

Whether it's an apprenticeship, community college, a less-challenging college/major, or a hard-core-brain-buster degree, it's a lot easier to learn new things before mid-life than after. There's some brain science to back this up, but I don't have the references handy, sorry. Look up "fluid intelligence" and "crystallized intelligence" and their relationship to age.

For most people, it's also a lot easier to manage your time before you have a "full time job" or are raising children.

That's not to say you can't go back to school full-time to get your Ph.D. when you are 70, but it's going to be a lot easier if you do it earlier in life.

It won't be cheap for you, but you can file a trademark suit against the fake company then subpoena apple for the company's contact info and enough additional information that it costs Apple enough time and money to be annoying.

When the other company doesn't respond to the suit, or if they are out of the country, get a default judgement and an injunction to force Apple to remove the fake listing, at least in the country you are filing suit in.

If enough victims did this, Apple would find it very annoying financially and reputationally and might start being more pro-active about deleting trademark-infringers.

I ask them to visit the app store, search for Microsoft Authenticator, then I ask them things like "how many ratings does it have?" It's very difficult to match the real Microsoft Authenticator app for the number of ratings.

I think you mean "not used often enough to warrant the price of SSD storage" not "too large for SSD storage."

If you think a multi-petabyte file is too big to fit on SSD storage: combining multiple physical storage devices into one virtual device has been a thing for a long time now.

I want something I can type on a standard keyboard in the character set used by the computer language (typically a subset of those found on an English keyboard).

That said, literal strings or similar situations should allow* arbitrary characters. Ditto comments.

* Homographs, characters that render other characters invisible, and anything else that can introduce confusion should be treated in a special way (say, color-coded, or use a font that makes homographs like 1, l, and I or 0 and O distinguishable) when displayed or printed, to prevent hiding malicious code. When you add in Unicode, which is likely happening if you are allowing emojis, the opportunities for "fool the human eye" mischief get much larger.

The fast food industry uses a "non-permanent underclass" for many of its low-end jobs: Youths old enough to legally work and young adults.

Summer camps and some city parks do the same thing: They recruit from the college- and high-school-age crowd, and they don't pay all that much.

I assume he meant it's beneath the dignity of free citizens to perform labor and be paid less than they think their time, energy, and discomfort is worth.

In other words, if there's a lettuce-picking job that pays me $200,000 for 2000 hours of work (that is, about a year at 40 hours/week with 2 weeks off), sign me up. But at minimum wage, or even the wage I'm getting from my current job, I'll pass.

If Americans refuse to work for "non-American wages," (officially, minimum wage, unofficially, probably far less) someone will invent a cheap-enough lettuce-picking robot and then those jobs will be gone.

Substitute just about any job where people aren't willing to do the work for the wages that make it cost-effective for "lettuce picking jobs."

That's true if you are taking classes that aren't way too easy for you. But stick a smart/gifted-and-talented high school student in a non-advanced class, and he'll get the maximum grade without much work as long as he doesn't totally blow it off from boredom.

Of course, in that scenario, the A isn't worth much.

To get an A that really means something, the class needs to be challenging enough that a normal, don't-strain-yourself level of work plus whatever brains and experience you have coming into the class will get you a B at best. If you are getting all As and aren't pushing yourself hard, you should be taking harder classes.

For much of the last third of the 1900s and the early part of this century, you did "need a degree" to be promoted past a certain level, even if it meant otherwise-qualified applicants wouldn't even be looked at.

There's less of that now: Wise companies have realized that "a degree or equivalent experience" is better for recruitment than "must have a degree."