I spoke and speak from personal experience; and I'm not going to copy-paste my HN profile. I do in fact hold rigorous formal education in high regard. But I do

I spoke and speak from personal experience; and I'm not going to copy-paste my HN profile. I do in fact hold rigorous formal education in high regard. But I doubt that more than about 70% of GA Tech BSCS holders have actually received such a thing; and a result from a 70/30 binary distribution is not a very informative piece of evidence. I don't doubt that a Udemy cert alone is as close to bubkes as you claim. I do doubt that an Anytown State University degree is in the same bucket as Udemy certs, rather than the same bucket as a BSCS from GA Tech. I have also seen recruiters that can very easily convert autodidacts' and Udemy grads' raw experience and competence into employer signals.