[brogrammernot]

Hotly debated subject these days.

I personally learned programming on my own, and after about two years of doing it, I went back and started taking some computer science courses in data structures, discrete mathematics, algorithms as well as some other topics. I took some coursework through the University I got my undergrad from but most through local community colleges because they were 1/10th of the cost.

In my experience, I do not think you need a degree to be a programmer. You need to have extreme grit and motivation to learn it on your own.

I took the coursework after doing it because trying to learn advanced computer science topics on top of work in my own time simply wasn't working. It's not incredibly fun to learn, dissect and implement algorithms. At least for me it wasn't. Having no one to ask about advanced mathematics also sucked honestly. For those reasons, a quality education or professor is worth their weight in gold.

[battlebot]

As someone who came up through universities with the full traditional CS background, and as someone who has hired and been a tech lead over many developers, I can count only one person I know who didn't get a degree who is a great developer. The people with degrees all had to learn a lot after school, as did I, but the one who is self-taught is some kind of savant, I kid you not. And as great a developer as he is, he had some holes in his knowledge that I ran across from time to time.