Oh, sure! Turn out people who actually know not only what they are doing but why. And are self-motivated to get the job done right, as opposed to thinking they can always whip up a fix or workaround or whatever it is you geek types call it.
What could go wrong?
stay safe.
In my experience, the latter learn through experience to DO the former.
Most of the GREAT devs i've worked with have very little formal college. Many are dropouts who just started coding on their own, got some dev certs, and went to work contributing to open source projects and doing QA and code review.
Same goes for IT folk. The best guys i know slogged it out in the help desk trenches, got interested in various technologies, and through tinkering and progressively asking for more responsibility, ended up with expertise in a given area, and then later certs. Many of em get the degree later as an afterthought.
