Best part of being a dev ?
You don't need college degree.
You will never get bored even if you are alone.
You can learn everything yourself, online.
Last but not the least, Being the dev is awesome in itself. :)

Depending on what kind of programming are doing.

@shasha whatever be the domain there are numerous moocs plus coding tutorials available online to get you through it. Plus the programming requires only a working pc and an active Internet connection to learn. I would say least resources required amongst all other engineering field.

Good when doing freelance or own products, not so good when companies require a degree.

@sgoel01 And you'd be wrong again. It takes time, a lot of it to do something truly important. It takes time to build a good knowledge and that's a resource you'll never replace. And sometimes it takes more of it than many other fields.

Anyway, you can easily do common commercial software but do you really think that for programming a stability control system for a plane, the internet and "just a computer" is enough? You need training with experienced people.

But for non critical software, yeah, you can do that with few starting resources.

@shasha You got me wrong. I said it takes RELATIVELY (as everything in this works is), less resources. As for the useful part, you have to put lot of effort and time to learn a small skull and convert that to something useful, so that's not even a point, you will have to learn to EARN. And you can meet awesome people to guide you online, as an example here on devrant, Seriously I have learned with my laptop and internet connection more than any other source. Peace.