Show them they're wrong by being successful at what you do.
Of course that's going to take a while, and it could get really annoying if they keep nagging all that time. It would help a lot if you could get the idea across that real skill trumps GPA. Find some examples of highly successful programmers that didn't graduate.
A lot of the best known success cases did get lucky. For example, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Microsoft was a tiny, obscure company (they wrote BASIC compilers and such) until they got the contract to supply the operating system for IBM's PC. This happened, in part, due to the missteps of their competitors (like Digital Research). IBM's ineptitude also helped make Microsoft successful: IBM let Microsoft keep the rights to the software because they couldn't imagine how valuable it could be; they were still in the mainframe mindset where the software was ancillary to the huge, expensive hardware. Also, Microsoft didn't write MSDOS themselves; they bought an OS called QDOS from some other company for $50K (who also didn't know what it was really worth). So, yes, Gates got very, very lucky.
The vast majority of new businesses fail, even the ones that get VC funding (VCs have about a 10% success rate; a handful of big successes pay for all the failures). So your most probable startup outcome is failure, in which case you'll need to make a living by working for somebody else. A lack of a college degree or a poor GPA would make that path much harder.
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Show them they're wrong by being successful at what you do.
Of course that's going to take a while, and it could get really annoying if they keep nagging all that time. It would help a lot if you could get the idea across that real skill trumps GPA. Find some examples of highly successful programmers that didn't graduate.
It does take time! I can try that too, though I'm afraid they'll say they got lucky or something
A lot of the best known success cases did get lucky. For example, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Microsoft was a tiny, obscure company (they wrote BASIC compilers and such) until they got the contract to supply the operating system for IBM's PC. This happened, in part, due to the missteps of their competitors (like Digital Research). IBM's ineptitude also helped make Microsoft successful: IBM let Microsoft keep the rights to the software because they couldn't imagine how valuable it could be; they were still in the mainframe mindset where the software was ancillary to the huge, expensive hardware. Also, Microsoft didn't write MSDOS themselves; they bought an OS called QDOS from some other company for $50K (who also didn't know what it was really worth). So, yes, Gates got very, very lucky.
The vast majority of new businesses fail, even the ones that get VC funding (VCs have about a 10% success rate; a handful of big successes pay for all the failures). So your most probable startup outcome is failure, in which case you'll need to make a living by working for somebody else. A lack of a college degree or a poor GPA would make that path much harder.