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I have worked with some people that are self-taught that ended up being incredibly good. However, I still bias myself a bit to people coming from a CS background because of other non-knowledge related reasons. Examples. They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs, painfully stepping through the code for the 110th time to find the erratic bug, or boring documentation, also part of the job. They are less inclined to just copy-paste a solution that you found on StackOverflow and more agreeable to go into the R&D mode of finding the right algorithm. This can be a blessing and a curse. People that have been through several years of education are more inclined to follow a schedule. We are very relaxed at Silicon Valley and yes some people do their best work from home, but sometimes you just have to be here. College helps form some of these habits. Last, a degree comes with a lot of soft skills that Universities just throw in sometimes. Communication skills, the ability to summarize properly, grammar and spelling .. not required for a coder but definitely useful for someone that wants to grow into a career into software, eventually you need to interact with Product Managers, Business, Customers, and those unrelated-to-the-job skills start becoming very handy. |