Lesson zero: You don't need an education.
No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.
All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.
Put in other terms, when you have to play cowboy on a production server, you take a backup first to hedge your bets; otherwise you aren't brave, you're just foolish.