Just chiming in to agree. I started working in embedded QA in 2008 and have made a couple of hops in those first years into more and more programming-heavy role

Just chiming in to agree. I started working in embedded QA in 2008 and have made a couple of hops in those first years into more and more programming-heavy roles. Time-wise, I think the amount of time it took me to get into a full time programming role from QA was about the same as or a little less than the time it'd have taken to get a degree. So not necessarily a time saver, but that wasn't really my focus anyway.