Alternatively: "students who wait to the last-minute to register for their classes get stuck with the 8AM classes and perform worse than students who registered early."
In addition to the other suggestions here, Academia could be another interesting route. Look at the job boards for local colleges/universities/research centers in your area. They're typically struggling to find technical people to either:
1. maintain and update the main websites
2. administer other IT-related systems on-campus (may require brushing up on some Linux or Windows Server skills)
3. help with the coding side of their research
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit available when it comes to coding needed for a research grant. Sometimes it's just standing up a basic website for a lab, but you'd be invaluable if you were able to help someone scrape together their pile of perl/R/python scripts into something that can be be hosted on a website. And IMHO the bar for quality is usually quite low -- many labs just want to have enough to earn/fulfill a grant and then move you on to the next project.
I'll warn you that there's not a strong career path available for software developers in Academia at the moment. So you may eventually need to break out. But it strikes me as a viable way to get a few years of real software dev experience working on interesting projects which would definitely put you in a better spot to branch out elsewhere.