[gm]

One thing: Different countries view college degrees differently. In some, if you do not have a college degree, you will not even get considered for the job, no matter what you've done.

It might affect work visas as well (some countries give a lot of weight to a college degree when assigning a priority to your application).

Of course, to get stuff done you do not need a degree and examples abound about people who "made it" without a college degree. Granted, they learned everything on their own, so if you have a low motivation to learn stuff that's important in your field but boring to you (for example, algorithms and data structures), you might want to get through the degree just to force you to learn stuff.

For me, I'm in the US, where college degrees matter relatively little, specially in tech. Still, I can say without a doubt my CS degree has opened many doors for me, even a couple decades after having gotten it. Also I have had to fight far less to get good salary offers. Once people know I have a CS degree, we move onto the advanced stuff instead of them trying to see if I'm an idiot or not.

That's my $0.02, your mileage may vary.

[ephess]

One of the things I'm most worried about is that a country I'd like to work in has really different culture in regard to university than we do here. To be honest, from my perspective I've always thought US to be a country where degrees mattered quite a bit.

Attending university in New Zealand doesn't seem to have nearly as much weight placed on it as it does in America, although that may just be a perception thing.

Thanks for your input =)

[gm]

To be fair, in the USA, it depends on the industry that you are going into. If you are planning on joining the startup world, the attitude ranges from indifference to the degree to downright hostiliy (do your best to hide that you have an MBA, for example!). Startups tend to evaluate you on effective skills that you know how to apply, degree or no degree.

In pretty much all other fields, including non-startup tech jobs, degrees do matter a ton more.

[sillysaurus3]

Different countries view college degrees differently. In some, if you do not have a college degree, you will not even get considered for the job, no matter what you've done.

May I ask, what are some countries in which this is the case?