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I have a CS degree, which I completed with a significant percentage of graduate-level classes where among other things I wrote a compiler, a raytracer, and a network stack. I agree that the breadth of knowledge from a proper CS program gives you the lay of the land in a way that a self-taught individual won't have.

But I certainly would never hold it against someone not having a CS degree, even in specialized fields. Frankly, you can learn more in a couple months on the job at places doing real cutting edge work than you would through an entire CS undergrad program, at least for the purposes of shipping software of value.

The bottom line is if you have what it takes to be a competent software developer, anything you would learn in a CS degree is easily accessible just by learning the right things to google for. There are certainly disciplines that require more specialized knowledge and have a much higher bar than your typical CRUD app, but even there I don't feel like school is any kind of important factor in determining whether one can achieve competence.

I can't put my finger on it exactly, but I think there is a baseline ability to grok software which can be unlocked in an individual through sufficient practice, but not by education, and this is the primary factor to one's productivity in all programmer jobs.

When I learn something completely new, the biggest obstacle is often finding a good source of information and path to learn it on. School definitely has it down once you hit graduate classes (and they often have free accompanying material!), but I'm not sure it's as good for basic programming skills. It's like learning an instrument, you have to work at it a lot and a one-on-one tutor would probably help a lot. What people do need are good exercises and a way to find reference material that is high quality. There's a ton of bad code tutorials and classes out there and its difficult to sift through.

And I vehemently disagree with this. Self-taught people know how to teach themselves anything they need to know. If a problem takes them in a direction that they don't understand, they know they can understand it with some effort.

My experience of university-taught programmers has been that they can't teach themselves, and tend to assume their knowledge is wider than it actually is.

And my original point is that experience is massively more useful than education when encountering difficult issues in the field. I stand by that. I've seen too many real-life examples to not believe it.

Self-taught people know how to teach themselves anything they need to know. If a problem takes them in a direction that they don't understand, they know they can understand it with some effort.

This is an extremely optimistic view of self taught programmers. While these type of self taught people certainly exist and I have worked with a few, they're definitely not universal or even, I would say, the norm. Most self taught programmers I've dealt with will brute force any problem they have into the one thing they know and are just barely scraping by on frantic googling and copy-and-pasting in random code from stack overflow.

That's bad project or team management, not down to quality of coder.

You could easily say the same of university-educated coders who only learned Python and C and are up against a real commercial deadline for the first time. I've seen those folks do some crazy shit.

Dumping anyone into a project outside their area of experience with no guidance will cause poor practices.

First I would suggest that being able to teach oneself and having a university degree are not mutually exclusive - and indeed a lot of courses are so bad you need to be able to teach yourself in order to successfully escape them

That said, a lot of people in both categories aren't that great in the workplace. Either through lack of discipline, lack of experience, emotional problems that prevent them acknowledging negative feedback and using it to improve themselves, or a general desire to overthrow capitalism whilst reading Facebook. But none of that has anything to do with going to university which is a privilege that may or may not be available to somebody given their class, background, and general life experiences.

As long as programming remains an uncredentialed occupation - compare and contrast with medicine and the law for example - people without degrees deserve the right to be assessed on the quality of their actual work, and not a general prejudice on how they acquired the ability to do it. After all, the people who laid the foundations for computer science, necessarily didn't have a computer science degree.

None of your fundamental topics except for graph theory and a tiny bit of distributed systems stuff will ever come up for 90% of developers.

If you happen to be in that 10%, then yeah, maybe some higher education on those topics is necessary.

wrt, to your fundemental topics, I'm not convinced companies are hiring BS grads for those fields, nor do they come up in "practice" all the time. Distributed systems are notoriously hard to get right, to the point you should almost always be using an off the shelf solution. If you find yourself in the industry, 1-2 years after college, needing to build and deploy a distributed systems, I don't really have confidence that "15-440 Distributed Systems" would adequately prepare you to launch a production system that actually serves customers. In Distributed Systems specifically, I believe experience trumps education as most (popular) systems now predicated on running some nodes in an expendable cloud over a flaky network. I can't really imagine a company hiring fresh faced BS grads to build compilers and distributed systems, even if they did attend an elite school.

If you know developers writing their own distributed system, chances are they are wasting their time, BS or no.

It depends what you mean by distributed system. A rich SPA type web app connecting to a server is in a limited sense a distributed system. Pretty much any common AWS setup involves distribution. These are things that a wide variety of programmers touch every day, not just people who are experts at formally verifying their CRDTs or whatever.

> I know a few smart and motivated self-taught developers.

> They're incredibly productive, but sometimes waste too much.

> time trying to solve known problems in an inefficient manner.

As a self taught with 20 years in field, I agree and am even in the process of getting ready to go back to school because of it.

All of these are niche topics, they don't come up all the time. e.g: I am doing embedded Linux and wouldn't dream of doing kernel development, it just wouldn't make sense when there are people specialising in that.