Do you think a university degree is relevant for tech jobs?

A lot of great developers are self-taught...but I hypothesize that many of these developers had one of several advantages in their favor. (1) They began working with tech at an early age, (2) they had the financial wherewithal to focus on tech full-time if introduced at a later age, or (3) they're just really, really smart. I'm not going to categorize myself as one of the "great developers" - but I am self-taught and I did have the advantage of working with tech from an early age. There are different ways in which beginning to work with tech young may be advantageous, but for me, and for others I've seen it seems to be about the sheer quantity of time one has to mess around. It is much harder now to learn new technologies while maintaining other adult responsibilities (work, family) than it was during my child and teenage years. I also think there is some advantage to having been born in a specific period of technologies' explosion. For myself and others, we started with fairly simple technology and the technology grew in complexity around us. We were there every step of the way, so it was not as seismically different as it is for someone attempting to get up to speed now. From a personal perspective, I would note that while I am self-educated that does not mean I do not wish I had a formal education. There are areas in which I am not as strong as those with a formal education (and on the other hand, areas in which I have through hard experience become more flexible/knowledgeable than many with formal training). I don't have evidence, but I suspect that the suggestion that formal education in technology is too quickly outdated is not entirely correct. Sure, what you learn about a particular language may be outdated relatively quickly but other areas tend to stay fairly consistent over time - for example, underlying mathematics, lambda calculus, design patterns, etc. Or, at least, they provide a basic foundation upon which one can build (e.g. knowing x design patterns will help one learn newer y patterns because you understand the reason y is an improvement over x).