What sort of job are we talking about? Certainly, being a self-taught programmer and self-teaching your way through a CS degree are different things. Likewise,

What sort of job are we talking about? Certainly, being a self-taught programmer and self-teaching your way through a CS degree are different things. Likewise, Computer Science as an academic field and Programming as a career are different. Other responses have mixed this up... expecting someone trained as Computer Scientist and to be good at programming jobs is, I think, silly. The CS department at my Ivy league school did not teach very much that would qualify the students (my peers) for work. In light of that, I consider myself a self-taught programmer, even though I have a diploma with a CS degree from my school. So, I don't think that it's about having a degree or about (claiming) to be self taught. If you are applying for a programming job, it's about your programming portfolio, wherever and however it exists.