[_wo6a]

I'm sure hobbyists with liberal arts majors and liberal arts majors with computer science minors can both be very good developers and leaders, but to really be "by far the sharpest, best­-performing software developers and technology leaders" I think would still require a CS degree.

I have a BS in CS, but from a program with relatively lax minimum course requirements, particularly in math, from what I've read about other CS programs. (Only Calc II and Discrete Math.)

This allowed me to actually take more non-STEM than STEM courses while still earning a CS degree. If I was required to take higher-level math or more advanced CS subjects, I probably would have failed at the time. Yet I still got aspects of a CS education that I wouldn't have if I just minored in CS, which have provided a good base for exploring higher-level CS topics on my own.

At the same time, the program has everything available for students who want a more rigorous courseload.

So I'd say that except for producing top individual contributors in STEM domain programming (physics simulations, etc.), low-level algorithms, and high-performance system-level programming (which admittedly comprise a large number of software engineering jobs, but probably not the majority), a high-quality CS program where you can still take mostly non-STEM courses, and that doesn't use math courses effectively to weed people out, would on the surface appear to be ideal for the vast majority of software developers and technology leaders.