Here's the thing - Almost no one _ _is doing new work in jQuery. There's a few small projects around, but I haven't seen a big-budget project that uses jQuery for a while. I've also seen it used for prototyping. It's still really useful to know : because there's still tons of legacy jQuery code around, and understanding it will be necessary to work on updating legacy projects. So, I recommend learning enough jQuery . Understand how the selectors work, and the $(document).ready() pattern. After that, learn as the need arises.

There are some places that are just snobby about degrees - I know I wouldn't have been hired at the first place I worked without a degree of some kind. Other places wouldn't look at me because I didn't have a Masters. But things have changed. There's much more emphasis now on what you can do , rather than what you've learned. Since then, I've worked with all kinds of people and I've found that a degree has no bearing on the effectiveness of a programmer. Self-taught people sure don't have the same background in algorithms and data structures as grads, but the good ones quickly find out when a particular algo/data structure is required, and then how to use it.