[wanorris]

I self-taught myself programming for a while, discovered I liked it, and decided to go back to school in CS so that I could learn even more about it. (The first time through school, I was interested in different things and ended up with a philosophy degree.) While some of people I encountered in the CS department were there to line up a job, school can just be an efficient, focused learning method for the curious.

In general, one nice thing about hiring CS students as opposed to purely self-taught programmers is that, in my experience, they're more likely to have a good understanding algorithms and data structures. Self-taught coders often only learn as much as they think they need to know about the topic to complete the task in front of them. (Obviously, for those interested, it's as straightforward to teach yourself analysis of algorithms as any other topic.) For some types of programming positions, having a rigorous background in this area is crucial, though in others not so much.