[patio11]

FWIW, I'd self-assess at top 20% of my CS class (WashU), and I can say without reservation that as of graduation day it would have been rank insanity to have me coding on a production system. There are occasional times when the book learning comes in handy, but CS degrees are, in my experience, neither necessary nor sufficient to develop ability to ship working software.

[USNetizen]

Yes, to ship working software you need nothing - high schoolers do it. But to MAINTAIN and ENGINEER an efficient, secure software system (especially for enterprise environments), you need CS fundamentals. These CAN be learned on the job over several years of work, but no 6 week school can teach you them overnight.

[nostrademons]

I might be misreading this, but I read patio11's comment as "Even if you have CS fundamentals, you are still woefully unqualified to be working on production software. The ability to MAINTAIN and ENGINEER an efficient, secure system HAS TO BE learned on the job over several years of work."

This squares with my experience as well. I have a CS degree from a good school, but switched into it in my last semester after self-teaching myself much of the content while avoiding my physics homework. My first job out of college had many coworkers who had graduated from MIT; none of us knew what we were doing, as far as creating robust maintainable systems, and we needed senior engineers who had actually built stuff (regardless of where they went to school) for that. I've since worked at Google, founded a couple startups, written about a dozen programs from scratch (some of which got used by millions of people)...and found that while I use my CS fundamentals occasionally, the bulk of the know-how on how to engineer a maintainable system comes from actually doing it, over and over again, and dealing with the consequences of my missteps.

[patio11]

Total agreement.