The majority of the CS degree isn't very useful to dev work. Most of what you'll use in your day job you'll learn on your own, or on the job. A CS degree is mostly academic, and also mostly a sampling of a bunch of different domains to whet your appetite.

However there are a few topics I consider essential... operating systems, algorithm runtime/performance, data structures, basic software engineering/design patterns, memory management (seriously, everyone should have a course in C or C++) and functional programming (like Haskell).

Even hacking away at a PHP or Node server, there are times when a bit of knowledge of Big-O runtimes can save you from creating a script that never finishes.

I have a similar background in that I was primarily self-taught before finding a paid apprenticeship that lasted almost a year and then being employed as a consultant by the company.

If you can afford it, I'd recommend pursuing a formal route. It exposes you to a lot of ideas and ways of thinking that are hard to get in practice. After having programmed for around 4 years now, I often wish I'd studied CS.

In lieu of that, I think Udacity's nanodegrees programs are probably a good way to end up in a paid position relatively soon.

(I'm assuming you're looking to break into web programming. I can't speak for other areas.)

I'm self-taught and I got my first job through going to user groups and scoping out what was going. Second job was with a much more difficult problem domain, but I'd taught myself some CS from textbooks during my first job so in the interview I came with lots of examples of work (both day job and freelance) and piped up about CS topics where I knew about them, and admitted when I didn't but stressed that I wanted to learn. I beat several other people to the job even though I was the most junior.

A lot of devs even at a mid or higher level have little curiosity for the theory side of things, and eventually you'll run into problems that require knowledge of it, so being enthusiastic (and a bit self-starting) in that area pays dividends in my experience even if you're not the most experienced dev going for a job.

The only caveat is that both were/are small companies, so no HR apparatus to go through.

I can give you a little advice from seeing some non-degree-having peers make it.

Have some idea what you're doing. Talking the talk is great, but you must be able to walk the walk. Apply to everything that sound like you can/want to do it, even if you don't technically meet the requirements. Those are mostly for HR pre-filtering since HR doesn't really know what they're talking about in 99% of cases - they're just looking for keyword hits.

I had a friend who started his CS degree at the same time I started learning on my own, and he is just about to graduate while I've been in the field for about 2 years now. So it worked out for me to not seek a degree.

He's also a vastly different person than I am, writing code is not a passion of his, while it is of mine. I'd be writing code whether or not it was my job, while he'd rather be doing other things.