[jniedrauer]

Self-taught programmer here. A long time ago, I lucked out with an internal promotion that helped me bridge the gap from support to engineering. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part. Ever since then, lack of a degree has been a non-factor during the hiring process. I've got years of experience and plenty of references to vouch for my abilities.

The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.

[grigjd3]

I find Big O to be useful when designing solutions just to be able to quickly decide what data structures are appropriate for a task, though, admittedly, this doesn't come up that often.

[davidjnelson]

I find big o really helpful for designing back end caching algorithms and for optimizing sql queries. On a very rare occasion for spa ui as well.

[jniedrauer]

I do have a pretty good sense of how to structure things for performance, simply as a result of doing it over and over. But it's more akin to speed reading, where big O notation would be like sounding out each letter. It gives you the tools to explain to other people why something is better or worse.