The majority of the CS degree isn't very useful to dev work. Most of what you'll use in your day job you'll learn on your own, or on the job. A CS degree is mos

The majority of the CS degree isn't very useful to dev work. Most of what you'll use in your day job you'll learn on your own, or on the job. A CS degree is mostly academic, and also mostly a sampling of a bunch of different domains to whet your appetite. However there are a few topics I consider essential... operating systems, algorithm runtime/performance, data structures, basic software engineering/design patterns, memory management (seriously, everyone should have a course in C or C++) and functional programming (like Haskell). Even hacking away at a PHP or Node server, there are times when a bit of knowledge of Big-O runtimes can save you from creating a script that never finishes.