Stop telling me to go to college
teknically-speaking.com
teknically-speaking.com
I don't have a degree, and work exclusively with people with degrees, and they complain bitterly about the costs associated with education and frequently comment that I was the lucky one.
Do what works, don't worry about choices you could have made(you didn't make them!). If a degree looks like what you need to take it to the next level, do it, otherwise, who cares?
Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to college, but can't reason with me why.
1. To instruct you in a systematic manner. You can do a good job by yourself but for someone else who might depend on your knowledge and experience, it is easier to trust an institution to do that than to trust one to do it by oneself. There is the inherent risk of erratic learning. There are reasons to prefer having a guide or a mentor. This is not to refute any of your arguments. You may find free mentorship, your autodidact ability might be of high quality and the academic institutions may as well violate the trust of the benefiting parties - both future employers and future employees.
2. To asses in the end the quality of your enlightenment. Because the academic system's interests depend on this, it might be a faulty process. For one, the competition game and the perceived self value/image involved in this is driving the education prices like crazy (which is not like the other competition-ruled areas, mind you), and for other - the "propaganda" that is meant to keep the high demand for education, sadly regardless of its quality. Yet, the value assessment is a hassle into which many employers do not want to get involved. This is what maintains artificially the value of a degree.
The academic system has its dirty game and you were smart enough to reap its promised benefits without being played. Congratulations! I am sure you'll find a way to deal with the after-effects of those who didn't.
I think it was worth it for me, because it opened some career doors that would have remained shut, and I learned some things that my self-education had skipped.
On the flip side, I don't require a degree when hiring developers. It's nice to have, but to be quite frank most developers that didn't learn to code before they started college are generally (there are exceptions) not the type of people we hire.
I'm convinced that if you were to drop one of my people on a desert island, they'd build a computer from scratch and be programming again in 6 months. It's just what they love to do, and that's what we look for.