[suifbwish]

A lot of startups are starving for people who have experience even if they don’t have a degree. I’ve worked with compsci PhDs that spent hours/days doing something that 3 years of experience in a heavy industry will teach you to do in a few minutes using a different method or more tools. Sure advanced degrees are needed for some frontier type things but in practicality they have very little up on someone who is passionate with coding and has worked with veterans in several companies.

[saalweachter]

It's more that if the only thing stopping you is that you've realized you want to work in a different field[0] then while getting that degree may not be necessary or even useful for itself, it does just make a lot of things easier and more straight forward further down the line.

Any time you have a situation where people are filtering large number of candidates impersonally, from hiring to immigration to dating apps, some of the time you'll be blocked for not having a college degree.

Sure, you can find plenty of start-ups or other smaller shops to apply to; maybe you'd even prefer to work for people who can see past a degree or lack thereof. If your life falls out that you can't get a degree or just have better options on the table than starting or finishing a degree-granting program, it's not the end of the world, you have plenty of options and opportunity. But it's still probably worthwhile to keep all the options you can if it's relatively little extra cost.

[0] If you're epsilon away from completion, if you've already paid for your final semester, if you're not in actual danger from staying in the program, if you don't need to get a job yesterday because you've run out of runway for living expenses, etc etc.