Graduate early?
jackowayed: I'm about to start senior year and really wishing I could either go work programming or, failing that, go to college.It sounds like academically, there's no reason you couldn't graduate early. My friend just did that. He was in my grade junior year, was taking 5 APs + calc 3 and ODE (after having taken 3 APs the year before and 1 the year before that. he basically had done all of the APs my school offered that weren't really easy (like APES)).He didn't try to graduate early, but he applied to Stanford and MIT as a junior. (I think he got some approval from the school saying "this guy is ready for college".) He got wait-listed to MIT, but he got into Stanford. They gave him financial aid and everything.Now he's about to head off to Stanford, and he thinks he's getting a HS diploma in a year.But it's a complicated equation. It depends on a lot of things. The variables include:* Friends. If you have really good friends that you really like, you may not want to leave them yet, and that's fine.
* The exact alternative. If you can get a lot of cool stuff done while also being in HS (I had a coding job this summer that I'll do some this year, time permitting, and I'm about to launch what may become a startup), there's less reason to need to leave. 
* Exactly how much you hate/are tired of HS. I'm really tired of the bullshit, the pseudo-learning (memorizing just for a test and the like), etc.
* Where you want to go to college. You may be a stronger applicant if you wait a year (though maybe not). If there's a school in your state that's strong in what you want to do, and you just want to go there, it doesn't really matter. But if the plan is going to Stanford/MIT/Ivy, you need to be a ridiculously candidate for it to even be likely. No one's a shoe-in. Then again, graduating early might make you stronger too. I'd do some research as to which colleges would prefer usually.And there's tons more. If there's a strong reason driving you to leave, you can definitely pull it off.The best option may be to try to do what my friend did, if you can. Then you get 2 shots at those elite schools. But you should probably be sure that you'll go to college if you get in. I'm sure they wouldn't be happy if you turned them down, and then they got another application from you a year later.