Probably my final post here.
To address the haters - yes, there's always some luck involved, that's true for everything, including getting a degree. How lucky that you could understand the lecturers accent, how lucky that you were living in conditions that allowed you to study, how lucky that you had support from the people around you. Hard work, being smart and luck. That's always the secret sauce.
Now let me tell you what the point of my post was - to let everyone know something that NO BODY at Uni is telling you. For the most part, in most industries, experience is the most important thing.
If you think I am not valuing getting a degree, then you're are wrong.
I will be getting my BSC (top up) and MSC over the next few years but I'm doing that for personal / interest reasons (always wanted to get PhD, would love to work at CERN or Nasa doing ML / AI).
I am where I am now, I'm doing well in the tech consulting business. I am there because I had some amount of luck, but isn't it funny how out of everyone on my course that applied for the same placement as me (23 people), I am the one that got it? When I spoke to these people about their interviews, they told me that they had all manner of difficulties answering certain questions about technology and industry trends - I did not struggle with any of those questions because I spent a very long time and a lot of work learning my trade and researching the industry, I spent years doing this before even thinking of getting a job.
I got lucky, but I always worked very very hard. Secret sauce = hard work, smart moves, and luck. I don't know what the percentage split is their, but to claim it's mostly luck ignores all the hard work. I would never claim getting your degree was mostly luck. I would never claim a promoted CEO is a CEO out of mostly.
I guess the fact (most of us) we're born to a rich country on the first world side of the world makes us the luckiest of all.
Whatever you want to, get experience and be smart, the luck just comes as a side effect.