It sounds like you've had a great post-education career! Keep it up! That said, as a current senior undergraduate computer science major, I still think that college is an invaluable resource, or at the very least post-secondary classes. Working is great--it teaches you skills for working with others, how to use tools, and how to live in the real world. But education is not necessarily those things.
Go to college if you want not just a technical background, but theoretical grounding in ideas. I'm not going to college because I want to learn how to write code in JavaScript. (I learned that on my own time.) Introductory classes may do that (Arizona State gives you Introduction to Java as a freshman CS course), but nearly all my other computer science classes have been about just that--computer science. Computer science is not programming. It's applied mathematics. Computer science teaches you not only what is possible through computing, but how to judge ideas about computing and how to apply computing through computers.
Again, college is not a necessity. If you don't need it for your career, I have absolutely no objection to that. However, I'm incredibly grateful for the education college has provided me. (Make all the Arizona State jokes you want, but we have a fine CS department.) Computer science gives students an engineering toolset. Programming is not engineering; rather, programming is accomplished through engineering. This is why I believe in college for programmers; good programmers are engineers, first and foremost.
Go to college if you want not just a technical background, but theoretical grounding in ideas. I'm not going to college because I want to learn how to write code in JavaScript. (I learned that on my own time.) Introductory classes may do that (Arizona State gives you Introduction to Java as a freshman CS course), but nearly all my other computer science classes have been about just that--computer science. Computer science is not programming. It's applied mathematics. Computer science teaches you not only what is possible through computing, but how to judge ideas about computing and how to apply computing through computers.
Again, college is not a necessity. If you don't need it for your career, I have absolutely no objection to that. However, I'm incredibly grateful for the education college has provided me. (Make all the Arizona State jokes you want, but we have a fine CS department.) Computer science gives students an engineering toolset. Programming is not engineering; rather, programming is accomplished through engineering. This is why I believe in college for programmers; good programmers are engineers, first and foremost.