The sheepskin is utterly irrelevant for selling consulting engagements. If you develop a particular skillset which happens to be commercially useful in graduate school, such as machine learning or whatnot, that can potentially be helpful. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to study a subject in graduate school to make that subject commercially useful.

With regards to selling software, the only time in eight years that I've had anything about my college education matter was when an insurance company asked me whether I was formally trained in systems engineering, since they believed it decreased their risk for writing professional liability policies. My answer was bachelor's in CS at a good university, but they told me they also would have accepted "Have done this for five years" (which I have).

A. Nobody cares about your degree.

B. If you ever find yourself in a position where A is not true, you can go back and get the masters degree. Schools will very happily sell you degrees at any point in your life, never fear.

(Interestingly, this advice doesn't apply to medical school, where a friend once cautioned me that, if this were a universe where I wanted to achieve the life goal of having one of every degree, I'd better sign up for the M.D. portion before turning 35. But the other degrees are open to anyone who's ready to take on debt.)

Take the work. Work, work, work. School is a great thing to do when the market turns way, way south. This is not that time in our field.

I have a high school diploma and one semester of college.

While the advice you get here is likely to lean towards devaluing formal education, let me take a different tack.

Masters programs in CS at some universities can offer courses, research, and experiences that you can't get in some undergrad programs. Probably a lot of this could be picked up 'on the job' or with some self-study, but I learned a lot in my master's program and enjoyed it immensely.

So, if you have the means and the time and the interest, consider master's study. It's much easier to do when young and unattached than later. But of course this depends a lot on your life and work situation.

As a batchelor's degree with a very satisfying career in the past, the value to me was not the degree itself, but the very specific knowledge and skills that I picked up in engineering school, such as

  * learning a problem-solving attitude
  * exposure to highly useful engineering practices
  * learning some things that I didn't think were useful at the time
  * deep exposure to computer programming, largely outside of class

The degree is somewhere at the bottom of my resume, but is never discussed in either job interviews or consulting engagements.

What is discussed is are the projects that I have done.

Google made some splash not too long ago by stating they really do not even care about Grade Point Averages in their prospective employees. I can say that in the 18 years I've been supporting myself, through a wide range of jobs, I have never had a reference called on my behalf. I think that the education itself is all that matters. Don't worry about degrees or titles or any of the paperwork. The best way to show you can do the work is just to do the work, with no sales pitches for your abilities warranted.