This really depends on what kind of job you want, really. Some will require a Bachelor’s and will not look at you without experience. Most will care about the experience over a degree, but your resume will need to be solid so expect to put the time you’d have put into school into projects. I think the biggest benefit of attending college is that you’ll be forced to do tedious programming puzzles that a lot of employers like to ask people about. That can help. Otherwise, you might spend more time doing real work and have zero experience solving problems in a vacuum. Plus it will force you to learn a variety of subjects. You’ll be exposed to a bit of everything at a good school. Some might complain about taking an Operating Systems class when they just want to do Machine Learning, but I think being well-rounded is beneficial. The same goes for your general courses; you’ll be asked to read and write at a college level, and some STEMlords just fail at that and really need it. Going to school takes discipline but they’ll give you assignments with deadlines and that has a way of getting people off their asses more than “I promised I would work from SICP today”.
So if you’re bad at self-control when on a home desktop then the college has another benefit there. But the downside is the cost. Unless you’re going to a local school and your government is covering the bulk of it, the bill can be daunting. Definitely try a community college first to help with savings. If you go that route, sometimes an associate is enough to get a programming job. It’s also a minimum of 3-4 years of your life being trained, so you need to ask yourself where you want to be in 5 years and hold yourself to a schedule. Otherwise, you can spend forever lurking in the halls of a costly institution. The alternative is to just do web dev, which doesn’t require a degree basically ever. You’ll be a glorified graphic designer doing frontend work in JavaScript frameworks. Absolute cancer if you ask me. But the pay isn’t bad (although dealing with clients often is) and a total moron can pick it up with enough time. If you want to write software but can’t be bothered to learn “real” programming, you always have that as an option.
Your only real option is building a solid portfolio. Either by getting some kind of job, joining an open-source project, or starting your own project and actually making something of it. If you can walk into an interview with an entire GitHub/GitLab full of repositories demonstrating a solid understanding of material then you can theoretically get hired. The first job is the hardest one because you have no track record or “real” experience. After that, the first company can vouch for you to the second. Normally I’d never recommend books like “Cracking the Coding Interview” since I think companies that hire that way are asking for trouble, but you will be at a disadvantage since they are quizzing prospective hires on common Computer Science homework material. It’s an attempt to verify you know the theory. This will be your biggest struggle, so either give up on these jobs entirely or buy that book second-hand and work through it. For what it’s worth, SICP also covers a lot of that stuff and it’s more coding focused. The only issue is probably that it’s functional and not object-oriented like most jobs are looking for.
So once again, a post here comes down to “work through SICP”. You basically need to be able to say which sort algorithm is best for a scenario, draw a binary search tree, and tell them the runtime complexity of some arbitrary code. There are entire classes on this material being taught, and you’ll need to go toe-to-toe with applicants that have Diplomas. The good news is that most of them suck at these questions and fail because they just crammed the material without understanding it.