Condescending, incoherent, and wrong. If you think that CS is about how computers work in practice you should take that up with Dijkstra and Knuth. It's an absu

Condescending, incoherent, and wrong. If you think that CS is about how computers work in practice you should take that up with Dijkstra and Knuth. It's an absurd position. If you think that 'can read code, can debug' is the benefit of a university education then what about that takes four years to teach? I'm a self-taught programmer. I talked my way into my first coding job with no experience and learned as I went. For the theory side of things I went with MIT and Stanford's online coursework, and the relevant papers when appropriate (e.g Turing 1936, Shannon 1948, McCarthy 1960). These days I'm getting into Haskell and J -- I hate being outgolfed by the array languages. Recently I audited a couple courses for a local coding academy. At the coding school, the default expectation is that you will be working with a framework that you have no prior knowledge of, possibly in an entirely new language, and expected to complete three to five projects per day, with specifications, unit and integration tests, and a meaningful commit history, five days per week for twenty-odd weeks. Most people require significant amounts of study time outside of class. This is not descriptive of CS coursework. It's almost like there are two related-but-distinct bodies of knowledge are being pursued in different ways! If you have the idea that bootcamps are easy then I definitely invite you to try one sometime. Discard the idea that what the university and bootcamp are offering are somehow equal. A CS education may or may not be a better preparation for a career in programming, but it's not good job training, and that's on purpose. If things were otherwise, coding schools would not need to exist, would they? A CS degree is a loosely-correlated proxy for being able to code. It happens to be very easily measured. This leads small minds to believe that it is a good proxy, especially if they happen to have CS degrees. I'm sure the rationalizations and condescension come naturally.