Yes you should. I learned development on my own and, yes, I landed lots of jobs. However there are barriers: - without a cs degree several avenues of kernel de

Yes you should. I learned development on my own and, yes, I landed lots of jobs. However there are barriers: - without a cs degree several avenues of kernel development - ditto distributed systems - anything with a strong quantitative basis - formal tools/tooling - specialty data structures and algorithms Will be beyond reach. You simply won't be able to cope. I went on to get a mathematics degree and that saved my bacon when older and had needs beyond a paying gig (read family and house). Do not under estimate the need to write clearly. On above topics bubbles and arrows don't cut it. You need to write papers, and/or formally model if you want to communicate and prove non trivial results. Learning languages is one thing. Having a deep understanding of the libraries that come with the language (simple example: STL) is also quite important. Finally given a choice between a guy with a degree and a guy without ... The guy with shows he/she can finish something of difficulty in four years. This is not to say MIT grads are always better. But a degree is better than none.