I'll throw another 2 cents in.  I think the value of a degree varies greatly depending on where you live. I now live in Russia and my wife tells me that the paper is worth everything here, and for some jobs your actual skill means next to nothing.  This kind of stretches over to trade skills too.  What they call a "master" here may be OK, or may do complete crap work.  I've learned to do a few things here like welding and some other construction type work, because hiring someone is a crap shoot.  Even if I do hire them, I'll sometimes stand over their shoulder and make sure they are dong a decent job.

On the other hand I was born and grew up in silicon valley. I had a high school diploma and went to community college but was kind of unmotivated until I fell into programming.  I got hired by a major semiconductor company as a tech in 1983 with not even an AA degree. I guess I must have impressed them in the interview. I worked there for nearly 25+ years and for most of that I was working as an engineer. I was higher ranked than a lot of the PhDs for much of that time.

 We had no world wide web, when I started but what we did have was "computer literacy", a book store that stocked all the latest tech books. To this day I think books are better than the web. I went there nearly every week and I spent a good chunk of money on books over the years.  I think my main strength is not knowing so much, but rather being willing to dig in and solve problems, by doing a lot of reading, and sometimes sitting for hours with paper and pencil and figuring out new ways to do stuff.  At this point the only reason I feel I might want a degree is to show it to someone else in a job interview.

That being said I think having the paper can help get you in the door in many places.  When you apply for a job, most times people just expect you to have it.  That's not to say they will never hire you without it, but it's just one conversation you don't have to have about why you never got your degree.  Again to the OP, I would say if you have the time, money and inclination, it's worth it, but the bottom line is still motivation.

40 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Of cource i has seen a guys with purchased university dipomas that know nothing. But i never seen a someone who able to understand and implement complexive tasks and not have a university degree.

I don't know about that. I think I can implement complex tasks quite well.  I wrote the final programming assignment for one of my friends university classes last year. So people couldn't copy each other's work he handed out different tasks to different students.  I had to write his in x64 ASM which I didn't even know when I started. He got a 5+ which means he not only got a perfect score but he didn't have to take the final exam.  He told me the professor had written the same program and said to him "How did you do it? You smoked my code!". So yes it's possible to do decent work without a degree.

...... My blog is pretty basic at the moment, but if you follow it maybe I can change your mind in the next few months.

8 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

And related to simulations games/engins development (that usually a successfull gamedev companies here made) it required not less then for real-world FA and CAD/CAM software. Becouse gaming worlds usualy pretend to be a most complete (but less precesious) simulation of real-world, so use algos of anything that related to FA, CADs, scientific phisic processes simulations and so on, that required to be plugged into one team and work realtime on very weak hardware(in comparsion with real-word software equipment per simulated/controlled object).

This more sounds like your personal vision of how all games should be made, but i doubt it's a reality for the very most of them. For once there is a lot of specialization happening in games, leading to offloading special tasks to very few experts in a given field. And those results end up in middleware, engines and tools. Often affordable or even almost for free. 

So your view is really that of one of the few experts and maybe not represantative for the whole industry. Think of the army of artists necessary to make a game, and also the majority of code where a degree in rocket science would be just a waste.

For second i rarely see impressive simulations in games. E.g. the popular physics libs used everywhere can not even handle mass rations of 1:10 well. Game developers often work around such limitations instead to fix them. They fake and trick stuff, and they succeed with it. It has always been this way, and even with constant progress in better tech it will remain so. Games are primary the result of creativity, not science.

Personally i agree with your visions if i get you right. Many game programmers are addicted to the idea of simulating reality. But we should not forget that we talk about games here, which are primarily about entertainment and not science. So there MUST be a place for less educated people as well, even in coding positions. Ruling out their creativity would be fatal.

On the other hand, in times where everybody can make a FPS just by downloading UE, your opinion is more necessary to be said out loud than ever. Keep it coming, but consider there might be people with similar thoughts and skills without university background 

9 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Math can not be outdated. And it is main tool of programmers.

No, and no it is not necessarily (depending on your field). 

Having been a programmer/analyst/consultant for more than 20 years there's probably only a handful of times I've ever needed to employ any above basic mathematical skills.  I have no maths qualifications apart from a fairly worthless GCSE (UK high school qualification).

It seems your real-world experience is somewhat limited and niche.  For sure, high level mathematical skills are required for certain domains (I would imagine graphics research is pretty tough without it), but having worked as a C# .NET developer a few years back for a company that develops finance calculators for the automotive industry (and hence being regulated by the FA) I can say for a fact that in the UK a degree/masters in the field of mathematics is not required.

I have worked with many highly qualified people who make absolutely crap programmers (and often had to optimise their code!).

You remind me of a guy I used to work with many years ago (developing a Dealer Management System for SAP, which later got bought out by SAP and became the SAP VMS module) who had a masters in pure mathematics.... he was a fairly average programmer who knew less about programming in that particular language than I did.  I remember one lunch time we decided to challenge each other to write a Sudoku solver.  Despite his background in maths he chose to opt for a brute force approach, whereas I opted for a smarter algorithm based on rules.  Both solutions worked I guess but considering his background I would have expected him to use it!

So you really need to drop the arrogance of insisting that a qualification in maths is essential to being a programmer or game dev.  It is not.  It can be helpful for sure, but not essential.  I do agree with you on one point though and that is as the market becomes flooded with candidates then a qualification can become the only deciding factor for an employer.  However, having said that and having been an employer and an interviewer in my time I can say that it takes more than qualifications alone to get you hired... personality goes a long way!

I also agree with the others... it seems you are trolling this forum.

8 minutes ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

Just i very good seen by my own eyes backface of communism. It backface has come nott from KGB and so on. It  begun from "scientific proven" tesises of Grandfather Lenin that engineers and scientists is a "remands of burgeous pasts" and "every cook can drive the state".  And we know results exactly. Nowadays something like it become a very popular into IT industry.

And there we have it.  Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between? Just as not everyone in the economy needs to be a master engineer or scientist, perhaps not everyone in IT needs to be a master mathematician?