It's certainly not required. I work with a guy whose degree isn't in CS, and he's a fine coder. He doesn't know the theory, but he's paid enough attention over

It's certainly not required. I work with a guy whose degree isn't in CS, and he's a fine coder. He doesn't know the theory, but he's paid enough attention over the years that he knows what works, what the pro/cons of the various data structures are — he understands the code that well enough to understand why. (And practically, that's probably more beneficial.) The CS backing can definitely help, though. We've had plenty of problems at my job that involve writing a parser for often very tiny languages. Having an understanding of CS theory here — the various language classes, what an FSM is and where it is useful, etc. — definitely helps. However, often the language at hand is simple enough that a handrolled parser that skillfully uses a few regular expressions to get the job done suffices just as well. Googling for a parser library and just using that suffices, too. Or we have to build a somewhat custom file format, or parse a somewhat custom file format. I've interviewed a fair number of candidates that are not comfortable reading or writing bytes to a file. (And of course, this is not the only question we judge them on. But very few candidates in my experience only miss a single question.) They've worked on innumerable "RESTful" APIs, but seem to have no idea how HTTP works; they've done server side Linux/unix/etc. development all their life, but never worked on a command line. I hold a CS degree, and what grinds my gears is when it is just dismissed outright. As an example, I've had a coworker who was trying to determine what order various interdependent tasks needed to be accomplished in; to anyone who has been through graph theory, this is simply a topological sort, and there's a rather trivial algorithm that you arrive at in the course of studying graph theory. But at the suggestion of "this problem is a topologicial sort; X is a decent library that implements it", I get told "Now, I don't want to go down some PhD CS thesis rabbit hole." Right. > fianceè "fiancé" for a man[1], fiancée for a woman[2]. (Pronounced the same.) [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancé#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancé#English [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancée#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiancée#English