[jbenn]

It might seem obvious to you, but the bootcamp crowd really underestimates the impact of computer science on their day-to-day work. I know because I used to be among them.

At least in my case, I was indoctrinated by my bootcamp to put a standard CS undergrad degree into the same bucket as the rest of our broken education system. So at my first job I focused on keeping up with the trends, trying to master web development by becoming hyperproductive with my day-to-day tools. I was trying to emulate the most visible engineers I saw at conferences, figuring that to shape the trends I'd have to be on top of them. Very naive of me, but then again, I didn't have much exposure to the world beyond web development, and you don't know what you don't know.

I wish I could have seen this post years ago! Would've saved me a ton of time.

[taurath]

Can you give an example of a time when having more knowledge in CS would have helped? I'm finding anecdotes extremely difficult to come by.

[seaknoll]

I think the problem with asking for anecdotes is that people don't necessarily separate their decision-making-due-to-CS knowledge from decisions they make due to experience. But if you don't have CS knowledge there are many types of projects you'll probably never be assigned or might not even try for, so you won't have the chance to use-or-not-use it.

[taurath]

I can totally see that, but it clashes a bit with self learning and research towards figuring figuring out whatever the problem is, or the domain space. Surely, a self taught web developer wouldn't want to take a job building a compiler for a DSL if they didn't have that skillset, but maybe they know or can learn enough about compilers to be able to track down a crazy bug?

I've always gone towards projects which may need a lot of research on my part, and I've had plenty of trusting peers and managers with hard CS educations who believed I could do it.

If I wanted to change problem domains to something much more grounded in CS (say operating system schedulers, robotics or microcontroller programming) Id read these books.

I'm trying really hard to see what the value is of learning this pattern or that pattern, and what sorts of worlds it can open for me, but so far (for me) it's usually been roads I don't want to go down professionally. Maybe my imagination itself is stunted by my lack of formal education, I don't know.