[bigiain]

> If neither employers nor students care about the theoretical knowledge, then what is the point of going for that degree

Because you occasionally (but often enough to get a reputation for it) get to look like a god when you pull stunts letting them shut down 30% of the app server fleet by just adding one multi column index to the db...

It was probably 5-10 years into my career when realised I occasionally pulled out knowledge or techniques from 2nd year CS courses - which other people (even ones with way more university than me) didn't even understand when I explained what was going wrong and how we could fix it.

The old comp.lang.perl.misc gag saying "There are people with 10 years programming experience, and people with one years programming experience 10 times over" has a deep kernel of truth to it. 10 years of CRUD apps or Wordpress extentions or Django sites is unlikey to have prepared you to be Netflix's platform architect (to be fair though, neither has a mid to late 1980's vintage CS education - I don't get to show off my Pascal chops much professionally... ;-)