No offense intended; I'm self-taught as well and can appreciate the sentiment immensely. But damn do I wish I made a few different decisions during high school. I'm ~1 year into my web development career and I'm concerned about what happens when I get bored of building APIs and web apps -- I seem to have a talent for picking up new skills pretty quickly, but I'm afraid my lack of formal math and algorithms training is going to limit the career trajectory of self-taught programmers like me. That's without considering the ramifications of an irrelevant college degree.
Why's that, might I ask? I've seen statistics that I haven't verified that indicate that while somewhere between 25 and 40% of CS undergrads aren't able to find work as programmers, around 40% of professional programmers don't have a CS degree. And I'm really not sure what to make of this.
I wanted a college degree because I see it as hedging my bets. I may not want to work at the boring companies of the world, but if I ever needed that stability I can have it with a college degree. Four years while I can work part-time in my field and the offer of my parents to fund my education made it a no-brainer.
All I'm trying to say is it's never so black and white, and while I don't plan on using the lack of a degree against somebody, I certainly wouldn't call it a red flag either.
Hedging isn't the avoidance of risk, it's reasoning what risks are worth taking and hedging against those not worth taking.
Put in other terms, when you have to play cowboy on a production server, you take a backup first to hedge your bets; otherwise you aren't brave, you're just foolish.
I can't speak for all, or even most, universities, but my anecdotal experience is that university education was invaluable. Even in classes that I went in thinking I knew everything and that the class was going to be a waste, I learned stuff. And in speaking with others who haven't had a full CS degree, it's sometimes surprising how much stuff they don't know.
