> I got a job that used about 5% of what I learned in school.
1. That's not a bad percentage at all actually. I would say that is as its should be; it would not make sense for jobs to involve a huge amount of knowledge from multiple fields, unless your job is in a trivia gameshow or editing an encyclopedia. Although perhaps some jobs are indirectly like that, e.g. science fiction author.
2. You may have used 5%, and the same may be true for most other people - but for each kind of work it's a different 5%
> Most of the programming I did, I already learned in high school...
Then, either you stayed in high school for decades, or you've done little programming, or your programming is poor, or you're in some negligible statistical margin of people who program very well without any prior experience. Personally, I do quite a bit of programming and I'm still learning / honing my skills after 20 years. (Not to mention how programming languages and paradigms change over time.)
> 1. That's not a bad percentage at all actually. I would say that is as its should be; it would not make sense for jobs to involve a huge amount of knowledge from multiple fields, unless your job is in a trivia gameshow or editing an encyclopedia. Although perhaps some jobs are indirectly like that, e.g. science fiction author
Boring though. But university researchers for example use a lot more than that. At least when I was in research for a time, I used probably 80% of what I learned, if not more. And now that I've gone independent, I use a lot more too because I enjoy it.
One of the main reasons why I quit was in fact intellectual boredom.