&gt; So now I&#x27;m stuck in the middle. I quit my job in January 2015, and I feel like I am at the halfway mark of completing the CS degree. I feel like I am already in too deep to turn back.<p>Why is it an either-or thing?  If you get full time work, do one class a semester, either a weekend class, or a class that meets at night (one or two days a week).  If you&#x27;re not working and have the opportunity etc., take more classes on.  Working full time doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t take one night&#x2F;weekend class a semester.  Lots of people do that - I did.  Also, you tend to learn that subject pretty well, and get a good grade in it.<p>&gt; For jobs like web and mobile dev, it makes less sense to go for a full CS degree, since in those fields you can showcase your work and get hired a lot easier.<p>That makes sense if your life goal consists in that first hire at that first job.  I am mostly doing mobile dev right now and lean on my CS degree all the time.  I recently needed to figure out how to transform a binary injective function into a proper output, and then derive the variables from the output.  I first thought of Gödel numbers, but knew from my computational complexity classes and processor register classes how those could get big quickly, so then I settled on a function where the output of (1, X) would always be a triangular number.  Without a CS curriculum, I would have never thought of this.  It also allowed for my app to exceed the capabilities of even Google&#x27;s app that dealt with this feature.<p>A case from a year or so ago - I had to deal with a race condition in someone else&#x27;s code.  My knowledge of mutual exclusion, critical sections and so forth from school helped me fix the problem.  In this case it was critical, as it was a bug in revenue-generating production code.<p>Right now, I am working with some excellent programmers on a project.  My architecture and code looks like junk compared to theirs, and they fix code I wrote with major improvements and simplifications.  At least I&#x27;m at the level I am now, with a CS foundation and some experience.  I feel sheepish enough about the quality of my work next to theirs, I am thankful that I&#x27;m not lacking the foundation of an entire CS curriculum.