A degree in almost every field only indicates that you have met a minimum set of requirements. It is not an indication of proficiency in the practical application of the knowledge you gained through your degree. The degree is still valuable though and we should not underestimate its worth but we should understand its limits.

First, great software developers come from all walks of life and do not need to have a formal education. We are in one of the very few professional fields where this is true and accepted. Most other fields do not provide people with the opportunity to self-teach the subject matter. For example, you probably don’t want a surgeon who has only read about medicine but never practiced it. Software development has a low barrier to self teach in that you can buy a computer for little money, pick up a few books and start writing code. That code may be terrible at first and you are not jeopardizing anyone’s life either.

Second, really smart and dedicated people have the ability to learn how to be software developers and are generally encouraged by the community. These people can take the time to learn the craft and become highly proficient. Then get a job and hone those skills. This is true of people with and without formal academic training.

Third, people with a degree in computer science, or in a multitude of other curriculums that require programming, are not necessarily going to be better programmers than the self taught. It is a matter of dedication and aptitude to the field. There are plenty of ridiculously bad software developers and CS graduates out there. The fact that they got a degree always frightens me.

Fourth, graduating form a top-tier computer science program does not mean that you are going to be a good software developer. Some of the top-tier schools use teaching languages rather than practical or rigorous languages, such as Java and C/C++. Practical languages get you a job if you are proficient. Rigorous languages, provided they are rigorous in the use of the machine rather than just having an overly complicated syntax for simple operations, teach real data structures and how to truly control the machine.

The value of formal computer science and programming courses are that the exercises and the reading materials are different from those more commonly available to the rest of the public. The books you generally find in Barnes and Nobel have a goal of getting you programming or solving a specific set of problems in the shortest time possible. These books don’t always go into the theory or the “why we are doing this” bu instead focus on how to do it. 

That’s what the text books and classes are supposed to do. The experience of guided instruction, programming exercises and text explaining theory are supposed to teach why we do the things we do. The implementation, or the how we do it, is an entirely different problem that is often easier to solve.

For example, I could ask you to write a Java program that takes a paragraph of text and displays each sentence with a count of the spaces within it. It takes about ten minutes to write the code. It isn’t hard at all. You can find out how to do it by simply searching the web.

Now, let’s say that I want you to perform string replacements for any expression within the paragraph bounded by curly braces. Then let’s say that I want you take what is within the braces and determine if it is an arithmetic expression and replace the expression with its results. The example paragraph may have a line that looks like “3 * 10 = {3*10}” and the output is “3*10 = 30”.

Can a person without a formal education in computer science do this? Sure, but pretty much any CS student can do this as a result of just the required courses. Especially any graduate student who has taken a compiler design class. 

The problem for the self-taught is that the commonly sold texts don’t go over these subjects very heavily. These books often cover an existing API or a technology that makes it simple to accomplish the task. It’s the difference between knowing how to use Apache Velocity vs writing Velocity.

Can the self taught learn these things too? Of course they can! The question is whether you will ever be exposed to the material and whether you will have the depth of knowledge that  one gets from a formal education in a subject. This impacts how far you will advance in your career and the kinds of problems you will be asked to solve later. 

Just to be clear, I know many non-CS software developers who are great architects, CTO’s, VP’s and leading software developers and they all have the same depth as a CS graduate student if not more. The difference is that they had to seek out the information rather than having it handed to them. Their dedication and intelligence is what led to ever more challenging tasks and their success. I have known a large number of CS and non-CS developers that were inept too. Their lack of dedication or intelligence led to their mediocrity and relegated  then to equally mundane tasks.