[Johnny555]

"However, I also have to acknowledge that the scale and difficulty of the problems I've worked on is unusual compared to the vast majority of programmers"

It's likely that the vast majority of programmers wish they were working on these interesting and difficult problems, but instead they are writing another yet another ETL transform for an ERP system (not that there's no value in that, but that was my job, and it was repetitive and dull)

So even if a Computer Science degree isn't necessary for the vast majority of programming jobs, without that degree, you can only do one of those vast majority of programming jobs, leaving the really interesting problems to those with advanced degrees (or special domain knowledge)

[vvanders]

I'll take domain knowledge over any degree every day of the week. In quite a few cases, we're still figuring out what the domains are or they're domains that academia doesn't care about.

More than that it's all about how much of a self-learner someone is. This industry is so new and changes so rapidly that if you aren't feeling that itch to understand some new aspect of programming you're going to be left behind. The really good programmers I've seen have all been full-stack, not in frameworks, but in a complete understanding of how a system functions top to bottom.

Also quite a few CS people would do well to examine EE or a proper engineering track. I've always laughed at the title "Software Engineer". Very few are, most of what we do is just throwing something against a wall to see what sticks.

[tnecniv]

What domain does academia not care about?