I never finished school and obtained my degree - but not because I'm unintelligent or unmotivated. I wished I had but other circumstances prevented finishing and eventually I reached that point where, when weighing the value of experience versus education - experience has become more important.

I worked with a pretty inexperienced college grad at my last company and the difference between us was black and white. While he has a college degree and I dont, he could only write in 1 language whereas I was skilled in 5. He had never done any web development, SQL, XML/XSLT or anything else for that matter. He was a VB6 programmer and not much else. He was also not familar with any methodology or framework so what exactly did they teach him in college?

Now I've moved closer to family and changed jobs but the scenario isn't much different. My team lead is a young college grad and this is the only job he as ever had. He is extremely smart and after 5 years with this company (including an internship) he knows our internal systems better than anybody else - but he lacks the breadth of experience from working with other companies and/or customers to know any better. He takes the approach of trying to reinvent the entire wheel with every system when perfectly good 3rd party solutions exist. This bogs down our development cycle to a point where we are lucky if we can meet any deadline at all. Also, not having well rounded experience has created a vacuum so he has no experience with "newer" technologies. He loaded VS.Net for the first time just about a month ago and is still fighting it.