I came from the other way around. I only studied CS in college and my cs101 course is where everything clicked back in 1998. I didn't get my degree and took 10 years of IT to realize I needed to be a developer. I jumped to a company for abysmal pay but they took a chance and I proved I could hack it. The transition from .NET to PHP took a similar leap of faith where I wasn't even sure I wanted to take that divergence. Looking back, I feel I made the right choice but in both instances it required very good friends vouching for my skills as my interview chops were frankly abysmal and may still be.

Now I'm looking to jump to JavaScript or Elixir and analysis paralysis has set in. Unlike the previous transitions, I couldn't have these as my primary focus. I have to resort to personal projects or get very lucky to work with Vue from time to time. Proving myself to myself or other people seems much harder without a very current Github profile and gearing up for interviews requires a form of study that's difficult. I use these techniques consistently enough to be highly proficient but it's not easy to keep that breadth of knowledge on hand to answer most interview questions. I feel like this matters more than a degree at all tbh but there seems to be a bit of selection bias if they're specifically commenting on the type of degree you have. When CS is largely rooted in mathematics and a math degree tends to cover way more advanced topics that I feel are largely applicable.