>I am willing to bet that many of them do not share her drive The flip side to this: I'm self-taught and I've worked with plenty of CS graduates from good scho

>I am willing to bet that many of them do not share her drive The flip side to this: I'm self-taught and I've worked with plenty of CS graduates from good schools who didn't strike me as particularly driven or value-adding. On the theory side, I'm not sure they could talk through a basic DS&A problem if I gave them one as well (that they hadn't seen before). To your point, it's not where your knowledge comes from, but what you do with it that counts (and I might add, that the foundational bits exist).