[jaabe]

You can certainly have a degree in CS and suck, but the odds of that happening are much lower than with people who don’t have a CS degree. Why should I waste the resources if I have enough decent candidates?

The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.

That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.

[mattmanser]

Haha, the opposite of what you're arguing is true.

Anyone can get a CS degree without knowing how to program, you can make up the credits with all the irrelevant, purely academic, formal CS stuff.

But no-one can be a self-taught programmer, actually create a whole app, and lack the fundamental ability of being able to write a basic program.

[jaabe]

I think everyone can learn to write an app by following a few YouTube videos. This is how we’ve got our project managers and lean-operators to write RPA projects in python after all.

On the flip side, I’ve never personally met anyone who went through 5 years of university and came out knowing nothing.

The thing with CS is that it’s not the programming itself that’s actually valuable. It’s being able to create efficient, safe and maintainable code. If you can’t tell me the bigO of your program, if you don’t know how to remove the top node of a binary search tree or if you think using NPM packages to do simple computation is a good idea, then I just can’t use you, because it’ll be way too expensive to teach you.

If you suck at our specific tooling, but have already proven you can obtain a university degree, then I know that I can re-school you relatively cheap by sending you on a few courses.

I’m sorry this is rubbing non-educated programmers wrong, but an education is actually valuable, and it will be increasingly so as the younger generations are all getting them.

[randomvectors]

You're ignoring what I wrote above and you're arguing with a point that I'm not making.