School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don’t know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you’re a crackpot. If I don’t know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what “I have a degree” means. So basically, school degree is better for “impressing a lot of people a little bit”, while the things you did are better for “impressing a few people a lot”. Neither is strictly superior to the other.
School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.
And there will always be the question: “if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn’t you?”
So… if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.
School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don’t know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you’re a crackpot. If I don’t know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what “I have a degree” means. So basically, school degree is better for “impressing a lot of people a little bit”, while the things you did are better for “impressing a few people a lot”. Neither is strictly superior to the other.
School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.
And there will always be the question: “if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn’t you?”
So… if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.