I learned to program at 8. My last 15 years of professional work have been in software development. I've led teams, spoken at major conferences, made signific

I learned to program at 8. My last 15 years of professional work have been in software development. I've led teams, spoken at major conferences, made significant contributions to open source software. I have never taken a CS course for college credit. I've been a licensed attorney for most of that time. All it required was me being willing to spend 3 years in school, then sitting in a room and writing for 3 days to pass the bar. Since then I spend one weekend a year listening to audio books for continuing legal education, and don't otherwise practice aside from minor advice at work. Which job would you be more likely to hire me for today? It'd be borderline irresponsible to hire me as an attorney, but I've proven myself time and again as a competent programmer. By contrast, I've interviewed people with master's degrees from reputable CS programs that couldn't explain what the Big O complexity of an array index operation was. I've known attorneys who fundamentally did not understand the purpose of their work. Accreditation is just a measure of someone's ability to pass accreditation, not their ability to do the job.