You could entitle the post "stop telling me to do something I don't see the value in."<p>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.<p>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?
I was in a similar situation, except that I saw the need to get a degree so I could get past the HR checklist. I was able to do it in four years while working full time and managed to leave college with a whopping $1500 in debt.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Going to college made me realize that I wanted to study computer science. If I had never gone to college I may have never known that. I agree that it's totally possible to educate yourself at home, but for some people (like me) who had no idea, college is a great place to access those resources and network with people in the field.
Another alternative would be to attempt a degree part-time, which might reduce the financial/time burden. I just realized this comment might be violating the title of the post. Oops