Contrary to the loud signal you'll hear in much of industry, there is still a large part of it where you won't be taken seriously without a degree. If you want

Contrary to the loud signal you'll hear in much of industry, there is still a large part of it where you won't be taken seriously without a degree. If you want to work on good teams, teams that have been carefully selected, you have to be able to have been selected for those teams. I wasn't very strategic with my education (academic or self) with employment or with technologies I chose to be proficient in, and so on paper I probably look like pretty much any other high-school-educated "Open Source Hacker". People that hire me are also going to be hiring the guy that installed Wordpress for his church once, the guy that everything he writes takes geometric time and doesn't question it because he has no idea how fast computers really are, having only worked with synchronous multi-page HTML+JS+PHP "apps" running on shared hosting, etc. Nobody can tell that I'm different from these characters until after they have hired me (and after my wage is negotiated...) and I will have to work with the teams they have chosen and fix what they break. As far as I can tell so far, I'm not able to be hired on teams for which I would be a good fit ("I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member" but with bills to worry about). I've had received apologetic application rejection emails faster than it's humanly possible to have been considered - I can't even convince some (literal) HR robot to give me a chance. I've done well enough for myself despite this (I don't intend to be pitied), but I certainly do not recommend the situation. A degree is not the best filter to be able to pass to avoid this kind of fate (the best is probably social connectivity - but that can very easily be a side-effect of graduation) but it is one. Whatever you do, make sure you have many.