Not to be a jerk, but I have trouble understanding how someone obviously intelligent can make such an oblivious statement. To be a successful self-taught software engineer and quant you likely have a IQ a couple standard deviations above average and work in one of the few fields where someone can succeed through intelligence and hard work with little need for credentials.

"Quit school and become software engineer" is good advice for probably about 1-3% of the population. Granted the alternative shouldn't be dropping $200k on a humanities degree, but what is your "no brainer" solution for everyone else? A degree has long been a pathway to the middle class / white collar work.

Trades? I'm a self-taught programmer who started getting paid at "market rate" for mid-level dev a year before my colleagues graduated. For me coding is pretty much a "trade" and boot camps are like "mass apprenticeships".

I'd imagine other trades have similar avenues of employment as well. Maybe if we stop trying to convince people that a 4 year college is the only prestigious career path (even 2 years of community college + 2 years of a 4 year gets a stink eye sometimes!) they'll stop trying to force themselves into inescapable debt.

Software engineering is an outlier, and it sounds like your experience is too. In all my jobs and interviews (semiconductors, government, management consulting), employers cared about my degree. Even in my interviews with software companies, I doubt I would have gotten in without being a Stanford student, since I had little evidence of skill otherwise.

Edit: My point is not is to argue that degrees are worthwhile or today's system is best. I'm just trying to convey 'what the fuss is about.' Most people seek degrees to get past gatekeepers at employers. And most employers use these gatekeepers to save time and effort.

Well, that's what I've been busy with the first years — building skills and evidence, sometimes working for free (and sometimes paid). Much less expensive than a Stanford degree.

I am not saying that high education is without its merits. But for me, it is a luxury good, or a path to academia, not a prerequisite to a nice job and a house in suburbs.

The key word here is "for me". As a previous commenter pointed out, your experience seems to be an outlier that is the result on many factors (innate talent, country of origin, socio-economic status, upbringing, luck, etc...).

Others (a majority apparently) do not really have the choice, the risk (of ditching uni) is too much for them to take and there is considerable pressure in some societies on young people to go to college to prove their "worthiness". Hence the fuss.

I wish I could just stay at home, learn scala and start trading crypto, but I won't have any safety net to rely on in case of failure, specially where I come from (developing african country).

Russia in the 90s, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was arguably as dangerous and poor as some African countries. My family was never rich, and I left home early, changing careers, places of residence and learning relentlessly.

You are right about the safety net. For me, it was the fact that I always can get back to a relatively boring and stable job of Java (or whatever) software engineer, if things went wrong. And I often had to. But the key point is that you do not need 4 years of education to become a Java software engineer. In 2017, it is way easier than in 2001, thanks to GitHub (the fact of Java being still around is the incredible stroke of luck, of course — but I had to change the horse midway, as I had started with Perl, and Perl is much deader these days).

Every IT job I see wants a bachelor's degree or "equivalent work experience". So once you've got past the first job HR stops looking.

Instead you have to retake your finals on a whiteboard during the interview.

Well, this is a first test — you see the bachelor degree requirement and you apply anyway, being ready to explain how your specific experience and domain knowledge from previous free gigs will bring more value to their business than a generic freshly minted candidate with a bachelor's degree.

Proactivity counts. Relying on paths carved by other people isn't always a good idea.

Or, more likely, you never get called in for an interview because filtering on degree is one of the easiest things for a recruiter to do to cut down on the huge pile of applications for an open position.

My experience tells otherwise.

You're not being honest with yourself if you don't realize how lucky it was to start a career in IT in 2001 when degrees didn't matter as much.

Straight into post-bubble doom and gloom? The experience was different than today, but I wouldn't considered it lucky.

Most students don't go into IT; few industries pay as well