ziegmeister
Admittedly the value of a degree has likely been diluted in recent years given that college standards seem to be getting more relaxed, but that doesn't mean that it's not still a somewhat useful signal, especially when you have to filter hundreds (if not thousands) of resumes for a single position.
Just like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no one got fired for hiring the candidate with a degree. Believe it or not, there may be more reasons behind this than 'self doubt' and 'insecurities'.
Interpreted languages such as Python or Ruby (or languages that run on a VM, like Java) go through an interpretation step _every time_ they are run that translates them down to machine language.
This gives compiled languages an inherent advantage in terms of runtime performance; programs written in these languages don't have the overhead of translating to machine code at runtime. This is typically why people advocate "next to bare metal" as having better performance.