> So now I'm stuck in the middle. I quit my job in January 2015, and I feel like I am at the halfway mark of completing the CS degree. I feel like I am already in too deep to turn back.<p>Why is it an either-or thing? If you get full time work, do one class a semester, either a weekend class, or a class that meets at night (one or two days a week). If you're not working and have the opportunity etc., take more classes on. Working full time doesn't mean you can't take one night/weekend class a semester. Lots of people do that - I did. Also, you tend to learn that subject pretty well, and get a good grade in it.<p>> For jobs like web and mobile dev, it makes less sense to go for a full CS degree, since in those fields you can showcase your work and get hired a lot easier.<p>That makes sense if your life goal consists in that first hire at that first job. I am mostly doing mobile dev right now and lean on my CS degree all the time. I recently needed to figure out how to transform a binary injective function into a proper output, and then derive the variables from the output. I first thought of Gödel numbers, but knew from my computational complexity classes and processor register classes how those could get big quickly, so then I settled on a function where the output of (1, X) would always be a triangular number. Without a CS curriculum, I would have never thought of this. It also allowed for my app to exceed the capabilities of even Google's app that dealt with this feature.<p>A case from a year or so ago - I had to deal with a race condition in someone else's code. My knowledge of mutual exclusion, critical sections and so forth from school helped me fix the problem. In this case it was critical, as it was a bug in revenue-generating production code.<p>Right now, I am working with some excellent programmers on a project. My architecture and code looks like junk compared to theirs, and they fix code I wrote with major improvements and simplifications. At least I'm at the level I am now, with a CS foundation and some experience. I feel sheepish enough about the quality of my work next to theirs, I am thankful that I'm not lacking the foundation of an entire CS curriculum.