Within a couple of years of starting my CS degree, I was far better at programming than every hobbyist programmer I've met. I didn't have many opportunities out of school. I was from a poor country town that topped the state crime statistics. I know my mum hadn't finished high school and I don't think my father did either. I joined the military, got a trade and went to university at 30 as a single father working full time. University changed my life for the better, gave me a lot of tools and made me much more valuable.
I can’t imagine I would have developed the concept of LTI systems outside of academia (EE), nor realized how much of signal processing tasks can be deconstructed to just convolutions or correlations, but these modes of thinking have proved powerful in my early career and especially as a hobbyist.
When in the workforce one can pick up a skill/s, from a technical institutes or college extension programs. These programs focus directly on educating for an area focus with relevant industry experience and problem sets.
Reasons are more than I can cover in one post - gatekeeping is real, very super real in most well paid jobs. Nobody hires new accountants, managers, electricians, architects, any kind of engineers, and many more without school. Nobody is going to give them expertise coming from job required to grow. Not all jobs are learnable just from online tutorials and books. You don't want to have your house built by guy who aced some online architecture test but has no degree, do you.
You were lucky and seemingly very talented. That is great, but not a usable advice for maybe 95% of the folks. I don't like how things are, but currently they are like that all around the world and there is no change coming soon.
That's not really the primary problem I think, I gladly would. But what I would like even more is an entity (probably a company) that has enough assets that if something goes wrong with the house I can get compensation from them. And this company probably isn't going to hire that guy. That's where the actual problem is.
This is a highly questionable assertion, given that these firms largely recruit candidates from CS degree programs to staff their most cutting edge projects.
The point is, it's silly to condemn the value of college by waving around employment in a company that is well-known for recruiting from top-tier universities.
Computer science is still a young field with low-hanging fruit everywhere, all you need is a very bright person who knows the basics to make meaningful contributions on cutting edge projects because the "cutting-edge" isn't that sharp yet.
It's not just them either, there are tons of non-FAANG jobs that pay very well and do cool things, that recruit recent grads. There isn't even consensus in the industry that further education is valuable; sometimes people don't even trust those that go this route (I think this is a bit harsh, but it's due to bad anecdotal experience).
Straight out of college, I was hired to write code in a language that didn't even exist when I started college. Why? Because those companies rely on students learning more than just "language A". They want quick-learning generalists who can pivot to any tech or language if there is a need. And I can safely say, I definitely learned all of that stuff in college, and I am very thankful for the very solid understanding of CS fundamentals that have carried me in the industry over the years.
The very best case for the non-college trajectory which is that you were able to work on real, cutting edge problems from your entry into the workforce and had the discipline to learn the important parts of CS fundamentals required to work on them.
The very worst case of college education - doing only the required for the degree, no side projects, industrial placements, or advanced topics.
Yes, a good autodidact doing genuinely interesting work is going to be a more valuable contributor at 22 than someone who has spent the last four years doing a CS degree by the numbers. That's not a good example because those are two different people. Many people who enter the tech workforce at 18 may spend years doing paint-by-numbers business applications using a single set of tools, those people aren't going to FAANG jobs.
While focusing on developing marketable skills should be the top priority of students, there are a lot of other values that a college experience provides.
A degree doesn’t just steal value in terms of money, which puts you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of compounding debt, but it also steals your time, and indoctrinates you into a top-down style of learning. Your time, the most valuable asset in the world, could be spent solving real problems in the real world. The whole system is a scam, and I’m truly sorry for those who have fallen for it.
My advice would be to cut your losses and get into entrepreneurship or work for a company that interests you ASAP. Life is too short to participate in someone else’s profit centered system of learning (Doctors and Lawyers excepted, but only because the level of gatekeeping in those fields is so high and perverted, and backed by government, that learning only via apprenticeship has literally been outlawed)