[homakov]

I was born in Russia, and i drop out of engineering univ. myself being 18. Life is awesome now, you can make much more money doing consulting, and you can get tourist visa for Europe/USA to make sure those countries suck (I was in pretty much all interesting cities). I do infosec btw.

Forget about degree, do your own business

[phillmv]

You're a bit of a special case, though. For starters, you've made enough of a name for yourself that you might get someone willing to go to bat for you as an 'exceptionally qualified' person once you get a few more years of work under your belt.

Do you plan on going back to Russia? You can't keep living on tourist visas forever. Even a permanent residency in Thailand seems to require a degree.

[homakov]

That's right tourist visas can't help forever. But "permanent residency in Thailand seems to require a degree" cannot be true, rather working visa requires it. Other migration ways such as investment visas are not so strict about degree. All you need is about half or a million dollars.

I don't have it yet but it doesn't seem so hard to me, and I believe i chose the right path. It's harder path because less people choose it. Countries' job, I guess, is to keep dangerous or unqualified people away, and degree was one of a few way to estimate how good is a person. This metric is more of a legacy than real reason to go to university imo.

@phillmv has his point, being famous can get you visitors on your website, but you still need to sell your services. A friend of mine, JS consultant, lives the same life not being that "famous".