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Yes! 20 years from now, without education, you will hit a glass ceiling. Do it, finish it. It might seem today as a waste of time but that title after finishing the degree will go a long way later in your life.
By the time I started college I had already been programming for 6 years. I was self-taught and worked full-time (60+ hrs) as a programmer while pursuing my degree (accounting information systems because I wanted to understand the underbelly of business and I was arrogant enough to think CS wouldn't teach me anything).
While everywhere I've worked, I've been promoted and identified as a high performer, I still lack many CS aspects I wish I had gotten with a CS degree. I've even thought heavily about going back for a MS in CS, but the opportunity cost is very high for me at this point.
Based on my experiences (both good and bad) the one thing I would have changed would be to go back, set my ego aside and try to learn everything I could in the CS degree. Knowing it's not about the coding, but rather the deep and wide CS concepts I was to learn.
- without a cs degree several avenues of kernel development
- ditto distributed systems
- anything with a strong quantitative basis
- formal tools/tooling
- specialty data structures and algorithms
Will be beyond reach. You simply won't be able to cope. I went on to get a mathematics degree and that saved my bacon when older and had needs beyond a paying gig (read family and house).
Do not under estimate the need to write clearly. On above topics bubbles and arrows don't cut it. You need to write papers, and/or formally model if you want to communicate and prove non trivial results.
Learning languages is one thing. Having a deep understanding of the libraries that come with the language (simple example: STL) is also quite important.
Finally given a choice between a guy with a degree and a guy without ... The guy with shows he/she can finish something of difficulty in four years. This is not to say MIT grads are always better. But a degree is better than none.
I have a bachelors in a non-STEM field, and am self-taught (been working for ~5 yrs now, a few years as an IC and then now been an engineering manager for almost 2 years). I manage people who have bachelors/masters in computer science, and having the degree both grants you more job security and leeway in negotiating better compensation (I've seen qualified people without a degree get passed up/not been compensated as fairly for their skills). My company has a 'education benefit' so I've been looking to go back into school to get my masters in software engineering - maybe this is the year. But in my opinion/perspective, the degree opens up so many more degrees compared to if you didn't have it.
In the coming months, you are likely to face the ugliest labor market in living memory. A lack of degree and real world experience means you're looking at even more difficulties. Given that you have a scholarship, you'd be unwise not to snag the credential. Also, it does not need to be a waste of time. Don't do the bare minimums. Push yourself. Take the hardest relevant classes you can find. Dig deep into any topics…
You don’t need a CS degree to become a professional developer.
Whether you have a credential becomes less important the more experience you have. There will always be silly companies that do a hard-filter on degree, but you can have a perfectly happy and successful career without them.
But winter has come.
Available positions will become way more competitive, with more people chasing after few opportunities. It may be unfair, but the combination of no degree and no experience will be a large handicap.
" I've taught myself everything I've needed to know about Software Engineering " I respectfully suggest that you haven't (taught yourself everything you need to know). Not a criticism, we all thought we knew everything at that age, LOL. Besides the credential, the value of college is that you "forces you to eat your vegetables". By that I mean you will learn about things that you aren't really interested in (at the t…
The most charitable reading is that everything they have learned about software engineering was self-taught, and that completing the degree is a poor investment of time vs. more self-learning or learning-on-the-job.
Also in general, college is about growth and experimentation. Having a degree is definitely useful, but not enjoying getting a degree sounds like an awful waste of time.
My recommendation is to stay the course if you plan on achieving a master’s education in computer science otherwise you are just wasting your time and money. While that one line on your resume is helpful it would be better spent on a different major.
Edit: I read that you have a full scholarship. Stay course anyways because you don’t have the financial burden of tuition. But understand a good CS education is not enough to make you a good developer. Good developers produce good software.