>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years o

>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience. That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right. If you spend those 4 years making CRUD apps, then there will still be a large gap. I speak from experience by the way. I was a professional programmer for 5 years before I went back to get my CS degree. There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know. It's the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall or spending 20 minutes realizing your problem is just a variant of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.