> You don't even need to waste time on college

Well that completely depends on where you live, and the culture there.

You could be a rock-star 10x dev in every sense of the word, but certain places in the world, if you don't have a degree or decades of industry experience, you will almost certainly never even get an interview.

You will need to seek out, and network your way into positions where you can actually impress some human being, and not get stonewalled by resume-screening software.

For every whizkid without a degree that managed to finesse their way into some hot startup or Big N company, there are likely ten that are wasting their talents on some irrelevant dead-end job doing data entry or whatever.