This route still works out to considerably cheaper than a traditional college education, takes less time than college, and has the potential for immediate employment once qualifications and prerequisites have been met. Last time I checked, every company wants to hire a "rock star" if they could only find one...
I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.
Most of the people I know who do hiring, including some in Fortune 100 companies, very frequently identify through networking, not HR. Yeah, if the company hasn't heard of you until you hit the HR front door filtering process, your going to have trouble without a degree, but if you are coming in that way, you are already behind the curve.
Not everyone has the specific skills needed to do the job, either: to be maximally employable, those are both things that you would do well to develop (I'm much better at the skill side than the connections side myself, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing the fact that connections matter a lot.)
Yes, there was pressure to have a degree. But I knew several when I was there whose highest degree was high school.
The people who know the most and, moreover, learn the best, tend to be those who love to know and learn. It is that which is so rare in our society. The Tweet, the press release, the short pithy blog post; these are consumption disguised as learning. I come to HN to learn -- unfortunately even here I suspect that maybe a tenth of the articles teach me something.