[jleyank]

To the best of my knowledge, none of the Beatles had any formal training in music and they can’t (or at least couldn’t) read music. Yet they took their talent, did their 10k hours of practice and growth and generated a fair bit of music in various genres. And they were lucky with both timing and meeting George Martin and his engineers. Check out Starostin for his commentary on this.

It’s not that book learnin’, it’s practice and reading and interacting with like-minded individuals. As others have commented, CS != programming or even development. And Zuck and Gates profited more from timing and connections than sheer programming ability. Linus or the Bell Labs folks or the MIT family tree are way more learned in CS (they thought some of it up) and development but ya can’t call them famous.