The way I see it, school is like Ruby on Rails while learning yourself is like PHP. The first one gives you the current best practices while the latter is open

The way I see it, school is like Ruby on Rails while learning yourself is like PHP. The first one gives you the current best practices while the latter is open for you to explore and most likely mess up in the beginning, especially when it comes to architecture. Having a solid computer science base is not impossible to achieve without a degree, but it is pretty easy to tell when a system has been architected by somebody with masters or PhD in computer science as opposed to a self taught guy. Disclaimer: I'm a mix of both, but no PhD here. I had to work with some and they were amazing for architecture, probably not so much for the practical side of things of doing commercial software.