Someone with no college education who's been working full time in a real world shop that follows good practices as a software developer for 2-3 years is about a

Someone with no college education who's been working full time in a real world shop that follows good practices as a software developer for 2-3 years is about as qualified for an entry level job building CRUD applications in a scripting language as a brand spanking new CS grad - maybe more so. That brand spanking new grad may need a lot more training on version control and the differences between academic projects and the real world. But I'd expect them to have an easier time picking up machine learning, designing a custom circuit board, or writing an algorithm to do groundbreaking new things. I love hiring people who are self-taught because it demonstrates that they're motivated and know how to learn. Faced with a problem they don't yet know how to solve, they'll usually be able to find a solution. It's not that people with education can never do that. It's that being self-taught in itself demonstrates that you can. Education, by contrast, sets you up with frameworks for understanding what makes certain hard problems hard, and a toolset for evaluating potential solutions to them. I don't usually hire entry level anyway, and my teams are rarely solving hard computer science problems. For this kind of work, by the time you have 8 years or so of education-plus-experience under your belt (in any combination), the differences are often minimal. I've had great reports and awful reports with and without formal education. So I don't really care. That said, you may have trouble getting your foot in the door early in your career without formal education simply due to the way many HR departments screen resumes. It may take a lot more effort to find a place that will hire you and train you up in formal engineering practices for those first few years of experience.