However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that.Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on.
PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html :
But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.
Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.