Well, nothing beats learning how to make informative decisions in your field, which is something you'll have a much easier time picking up at a university than

Well, nothing beats learning how to make informative decisions in your field, which is something you'll have a much easier time picking up at a university than on your own. Though with all the free video lectures online, the gap is slowly disappearing. Almost all the practical stuff I use for actual development has been learned outside of CS though. So you could easily have a talented CS degree with middlemanegement skills run an apprenticeship and teach someone how to be a great developer. You probably couldn't build an entire company around people who cant decipher the shit from the quality stuff though. But a degree isn't a certainty in that department. I've interviewed CS majors who couldn't explain ACID, hadn't heard of SOLID and who also thought the singleton pattern was absolutely vital.