One more for Doctors without Borders / MSF. I ditched ARC in favor of Doctors without Borders about a decade ago after one of the many publicized cases of mismanagement at the ARC. Hey, try this: I just googled '"american red cross" mismanagement' and '"doctors without borders" mismanagement". The results for the ARC are about problems at the ARC. The results for MSF are how their services are needed due to others' mismanagement. If you like the kind of work that Doctors without Borders does, then they are deserving of your support.

A degree isn't only about training. It is just as much evidence that you can set a long term goal and achieve it, and jump through all of the hoops necessary along the way. After hiring a number of people with and without degrees, I find it says a lot about their attitude towards how to accomplish something. I'm not saying it is bad, only different, and that employers pay attention to those things. I would add to other advice here that you should highlight long term accomplishments. If you set up and ran your own consulting business for a while, that would help to convince me that you are not looking to just hop from the easiest thing to the easiest thing and can really persevere through the BS to get the job done.

Metrics are valuable if you do the same thing repeatedly. If you build a new building that is like the previous one, you can collect metrics and compare your performance against history. If you write the same search algorithm again and again, you can collect metrics and compare to see how your performance changes over time. Of course, with software, you never repeat. Somewhere around the third time, you move it into some form of library, reuse it, and start on a fresh problem. Perhaps metrics are helpful in some situations, such if your team keeps repeating the same mistakes, you might find similarity in those mistakes (code smells.) There are plenty of people working on these problems and tools. But, from a management point of view, if you keep doing the same thing, you are doing it wrong, and code metrics are not going to help much.

Your boss has a job to do. He/She may not like it any better than you like yours, but that's the job (and why it comes with a paycheck). Figure out what they are trying to accomplish and help them do it. If you do this, everything else mentioned above will fall into place. If you don't know what their goal is, ask. If you can't help them achieve it you need to either change yourself (maybe a little less ego) or find another boss.

By far the thing that bothers me most about text messages is paying for the privilege of receiving SPAM. If they pick a price point that puts an end to SPAM then this is a great step. But, I don't suppose that could happen. Given the money they make from the receivers, they'll make an exception for the spammers so they don't cut out that revenue.