tanishalfelven

Hello! I am a high school student in the USA, and am currently thinking about my future. I've talked to a decent amount of people on these topics, but since they aren't programmers, I feel that they might not have the best answers, as Computer Science is such a vast and varying career field. I'm going to work professionally as a programmer one day, whether that's as a GameDev or any other kind of programmer, and I want to make sure I don't make a bad choice early in my career.

I've been programming for about 4 years now, and in that time I've been able to learn a lot about programming. Obviously not everything, but still a very in depth technical knowledge. I know that if I went to college, a lot of what I know would be repeated (in terms of Computer Science and Game Development), and I wanted to know my other options as to not have to waste time repeating education.

Assuming I had no degree, and I want to make a fair amount of money, here are my main questions:

Is it possible/plausible to get programming jobs based purely off of experience and a well put together portfolio of previous work?

Is college a required step to get well paying jobs as a developer?

Is working indie a smart way to try to make money?

Will I get glossed over because I don't have a degree, even if I have the knowledge?

tl;dr: Do I have to have a degree to get a job? If so, does it have to be a nice college?