This is just my personal experience. I've been successful in this industry for nearly a decade now, working my way up from junior to senior dev as a self taught programmer that dropped out of high school. It can absolutely be done. But that doesn't mean it ever helped me to have not had any academic achievements. I once held it as a point of pride to be able to make it without a degree. But I find it increasingly embarrassing as I get older and work almost exclusively with people that have those qualifications to not just have that piece of paper. The reality of life is that given identical skills and experience between two candidates, people are always going to choose the one with a degree. And justifying yourself at the higher levels of a career without one becomes increasingly untenable.