There is a reason senior role hiring almost never cares about degrees on your resume.
Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.
Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.
The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends).
However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.
I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.
To borrow from my graphics programming class from ~2008, we didn't actually do much. Every assignment, we were given an almost-working program, and the assignment was just to fill in a single function - the one I remember offhand was a simple linear interpolation.
Granted on the flipside, with my information retrieval and data mining courses, we weren't given any code to start with and had to implement everything completely from scratch.
In mine, which was pre 2000 (I'm old), we were doing matrix multiplication by hand to ensure we understood how the underlying transformations worked, building our own renderer's, and so forth.