I was a frat boy dropout at Kentucky in the early 80s when I got an opportunity. I started as a Junior Programmer back in 1983 when IT was called MIS and nobody had ever heard of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Since then I have fashioned an almost 30 year career in IT that has been quite successfull for me. So I'm not so sure a 4 year degree is necessary to be successfull. If I were a kid looking for a career in IT today, I would probably attend a 2 year school designed specifically for IT like an Ivy Tech.

In 1983 I started as a programmer on the old IBM Series 1 and my company decided to take a look at the IBM PC and sent me to Boca Raton, FL for a "How to support the IBM PC" class. I thought it was a complete joke and never thought it or personal computers in general would amount to anything. Shows you what I know. :)

Like you, I used to hate documenting my code but back in the bad ole 3GL days my immediate superior used to check our code and if we didn't document he made us go back and put it in. Therefore I got used to doing it. Now I don't even think about it. I document as I go and like you I have found it very useful especially when adding funtionality to and/or going back to debug an application I haven't look at in a while. I would even go as far as saying it should part of best practice.