CS Degrees vs Self-Taught

Because lots of people with CS degrees don't have basic programming competence?

I would argue it is not about the little facts, such as specific sorting algorithms, but its more about learning how to approach a CS task, how to abstract and how to reason about code. The colleagues I know that were not as lucky and could not study CS, often they just hit a "wall" when they would have to argue about a certain SW architecture for example or when they were presented with an abstract problem, such as implementing some generic behaviour. And learning how to do this is a

thats more than some CS graduates can do

The differences within groups far outweigh the differences between them.I'm a 30yo self-taught programmer. I've worked with many CS grads over the years.There are pretty big gaps in my knowledge of what would be considered fundamentals, some of which are more important than others. I think the type of software you write largely determines how important these gaps are, and that being aware of the gaps in my knowledge has been more important than actually having the knowledge itsel

Your are way better off than a CS graduate who knows all those things but can't solve simple programming tasks.

What does this have to do with being self-taught? Everyone knows CS graduates who suck at those three.

Many people with CS degrees don't understand those topics and many people without a CS degree do. So I don't buy this.

What you miss out on from an undergraduate CS degree is a survey of the field—the original poster already likely has specialized knowledge, but is missing the general knowledge breadth that you get through academic subjects that don't have immediate application to your own work projects. So your question isn't helpful, or rather its answer should be "the kind of programmer who would better be able to answer that question."

This is one thing people don't understand. In my current work I need to regularly design a new algorithm or modify existing ones. I've to keep books like CLRS and TACP always accessible, not for show but actually looking through pseudocode and analysis. I regularly sweep through dozens of research papers to find the state of art. These are not one-off events it's my and my teams day to day life. Lot of people often gets surprised when I tell this to them because most developers t

I believe it's the other way around - most people who have computer science degrees have attended university with a rigorous math, engineering and theoretical computer science curriculum. And despite that, they struggle to use any of it in any meaningful capacity.Months can go by before I get to solve a good DS & A problem in production. Most of my job consits of fighting with the mundane drudgery of fighting with cloud providers or getting crappy frameworks to do what I want.I t