I am trying to decide between two completely different paths

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Degree vs Certs Dilemma: Is a 4-year CS degree worth $15k (20M IQD) if I already have live cloud projects and a home lab at 19? Hi everyone, I’m facing a major turning point in my career path and need some unfiltered, realistic advice from people working in the industry. I am 19 years old, living in Erbil (Kurdistan Region of Iraq), and currently completing a 5-year IT Institute Diploma with about 2 years remaining. Administratively, this diploma functions more like a vocational high school equivalent in our system rather than a university degree. My ultimate goal is straightforward: I want to secure a Junior Cloud Engineer or Junior DevOps role as efficiently as possible. I am trying to decide between two completely different paths: Path 1: Go to a local university for a 4-year Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/IT. Cost: 5,000,000 IQD per year (20,000,000 IQD total / \~$15,200 USD). Path 2: Skip the traditional university route, finish my current IT diploma, spend \~$220 USD on the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) and HashiCorp Terraform Associate certifications, and aggressively apply for junior roles right now. To give you context, I have skipped the basic tutorial phase and have been building/deploying actual production environments: • Cloud & Infrastructure: Hands-on experience provisioning AWS EC2, S3, RDS PostgreSQL, Lambda, and DynamoDB. • CI/CD & Containers: I containerize applications using Docker and automate live deployments to AWS using GitHub Actions pipelines. • Production Projects: I’ve built a personal portfolio with a serverless backend API, supported a live client website's deployment/DNS/CloudFront infrastructure, and built/deployed a live full-stack e-commerce store secured with Caddy rate-limiting. • Home Lab: I am currently building a physical bare-metal cluster using two personal PCs to practice separating compute and state for high-availability setups. The Dilemma: The 4-year degree is a massive financial and time opportunity cost. I know a university will teach me traditional computer science theory, but it won't teach me modern DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, or orchestration. If my goal is simply to get a job in the modern tech market (targeting agile local software houses, startups, or remote international roles), will having verified project execution, a physical home lab, and AWS/Terraform certifications allow me to bypass the lack of a Bachelor's degree? Or am I going to hit a brutal HR ceiling later on without that paper? Would love to hear from hiring managers or anyone who took the certification/portfolio route over a traditional degree. Thanks! [link] [handle]

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