I don't have a single college credit, but theory is important for a lot of non trivial shit, for example cassandra, dynamo, project voldemort all use chord+ gos

I don't have a single college credit, but theory is important for a lot of non trivial shit, for example cassandra, dynamo, project voldemort all use chord+ gossip protocols , i. What about concurrency and parallelism CSP, and the actor model are from where academia. What about Zookeeper, Chubby, Etcd where do Raft and Paxos come from academia. You don't need a degree yes but theory is relevant however yes a CS degree is not a good indicator of any skill and too many CS educated people can't code worth a damn. Theory is not useless as long as you can implement it.