I"m in Toronto, and someone who routinely hires developers and quants. Lack of a degree being an issue is very company specific.

If you are talking finance with a sell side bank, its probably a deal breaker as they have large HR driven hiring processes.

If you are talking a buy side firm then its probably not an issue, though if you are expected to have any sort of math competency then a lack of a degree will probably put you under more scrutiny than you might otherwise be under.

Contracting is very real and very pervasive.

If you are attempting to contract in Canada from the UK then I'd imagine that might be the issue as there isn't a real shortage of devs in Toronto right now so I can see why companies might want to hire locally first.

I dedicate about 1 lunch a week to mentoring. If you are ever in Toronto and want to chat, reach out to me, email in my profile.

Working in Canada as a full-time employee usually accompanied by being low-balled on your salary from many angles. If you negotiate higher salary - hold you enthusiasm - you'll be the first on a list to be fired if things go soar (which pretty much is a fact of life for most Canadian startups).

High paid people in Canada are working as a consultants mostly for US-based entities or at an enterprises with a strong international exposure or as an entrepreneurs with US- or international exposure themselves.

Being pure Canadian employee in Canada sucks and always sucked.

Degree matters in large companies due to regulations and they tends to hire some extremely dinosauric skill verification firm to cause you major hassles to verify your background.

Smaller companies just need to make sure your skill match your resume and hence they'll bore you to death on their interviews with coding questions.

If you are hired, expect to become the one asking coding questions the very next day :)

I'm a Toronto dev. Last interview I went to (at a startup) I was interviewed by a high-school kid, who was picked up by the startup off the strength of his GitHub and portfolio. I never got the job (had a freshly minted degree at the time from the best university in Canada, with a plethora of side projects too). If you have an extensive portfolio you will do fine in my opinion. Yes, contracting exists but I don't have a lot of experience with it personally.

I also have a friend who went from doing low-level microcontroller work to working in finance. Financial industry might be tougher to break in to without a degree but if you know somebody there (as is typically the case with these things) and you score an interview you will be on an equal playing field with the devs with college degrees (again IMHO).

EDIT: A good thing you parenthesized London with (UK) as we have a London in Southern Ontario not too far from TO.

We hire devs in Toronto and area. I barely finished high school but have a lot of marketable experience, but that is by far the exception. Lots of local talent, from U of T and Waterloo in particular. We are the most educated city in the most educated country in the world and in my experience, recruiters and HR people won't even talk further if you don't have an undergrad. Finance (and any other more corporate culture like services, audit, consulting) even more so. The start-ups and hard tech companies less so, but there seems to be enough qualified people to fill these needs at the time being. Mostly 6-12 month contracts although we do 4 sometimes. We mostly hire new grads though, for some reason.

Large firms here, especially the banks, tend to put degree or other post secondary education in Computer Science as a requirement. Though, I can't speak to how much they care about that, or pay attention to it. I don't recall seeing that requirement on job posting with smaller firms and start-ups.

Yes, contracting exists in Toronto. Many firms, large and small, often post job openings for contract positions of anywhere from 3 months (uncommon, but happens) to 6 months (very common) or a year (very common).

small to medium enterprises and startups don't seem to care. big enterprises do care. speaking of contracting, the market is much better in the UK than in canada. moving from either britain or the states to canada for work makes little to no sense