When I went to school to study computer science in the 90's, it seemed like most of my classmates were similar to myself: grew up tinkering with computers and had "taught themselves" (that is, read books and worked examples without being told to by a college professor) programming pretty effectively before setting foot on a college campus. I have no doubt that if I had never bothered with college at all, I could have done nearly the same work in the same positions that I've held since graduation.
In fact, every once in a while on here you'll see somebody post a sort of ironic list of the things that they don't teach you in a CS curriculum: databases, networks, version control, debugging, command-line terminal usage, web security, usability... in short, all the things that you actually need to know in order to be a proficient software developer.
Still, nearly everything (computer related) that I learned in my CS degree was stuff that I never would have come across on my own, like calculus, linear algebra, statistics, complexity theory, numerical analysis. It sort of "ties together" the practical stuff, but you don't need to know any of it to be effective. I'm glad I did it because it's neat stuff and a different perspective. In a way, the nice thing about having a degree is knowing that you don't know what you might be overlooking in not having one.
That said... why not just go and get one now? You'll feel a little weird being 10 years older than everybody else and it'll look weird at first putting "15 years experience, graduated last year" on your resume, but you're nearly guaranteed a perfect GPA at this point. In a few years, you'll have the "checkmark" you need and you'll know what you were (or weren't) missing.
>That said... why not just go and get one now? You'll feel a little weird being 10 years older than everybody else and it'll look weird at first putting "15 years experience, graduated last year" on your resume, but you're nearly guaranteed a perfect GPA at this point.
I tried. CS classes were a total walk in the park. But I simply could not do the math. I hired tutors, I quit my job and studied full time, I've never tried so hard at anything in my entire life. I bashed my head against a wall for almost 2 years trying to pass calculus, and failed it 3 semesters in a row before giving up. It's why I have the utmost respect for people with engineering degrees now.
In fact, every once in a while on here you'll see somebody post a sort of ironic list of the things that they don't teach you in a CS curriculum: databases, networks, version control, debugging, command-line terminal usage, web security, usability... in short, all the things that you actually need to know in order to be a proficient software developer.
Still, nearly everything (computer related) that I learned in my CS degree was stuff that I never would have come across on my own, like calculus, linear algebra, statistics, complexity theory, numerical analysis. It sort of "ties together" the practical stuff, but you don't need to know any of it to be effective. I'm glad I did it because it's neat stuff and a different perspective. In a way, the nice thing about having a degree is knowing that you don't know what you might be overlooking in not having one.
That said... why not just go and get one now? You'll feel a little weird being 10 years older than everybody else and it'll look weird at first putting "15 years experience, graduated last year" on your resume, but you're nearly guaranteed a perfect GPA at this point. In a few years, you'll have the "checkmark" you need and you'll know what you were (or weren't) missing.