I don't disagree with anything you said but I'd add that a degree can be very useful to improve your skills, even as a self-taught programmer. I learned progra

I don't disagree with anything you said but I'd add that a degree can be very useful to improve your skills, even as a self-taught programmer. I learned programming in middle-school and could program fairly easily in a couple languages by the time I got to college. But college forced me to learn things I didn't want to learn. When you're self-taught you tend to gravitate towards things that are interesting to you. There are many aspects of computer science (CS) that I find boring and never would have explored by myself. My degree in CS forced me to learn a lot of theory as well as a few enterprise languages and low-level languages that I would never have wanted to spend time on otherwise, but brought me a lot of maturity as a software engineer.