I suppose the counterargument would go something like: four-year degrees are full of cruft that has no impact on your ability to do software development work. T

I suppose the counterargument would go something like: four-year degrees are full of cruft that has no impact on your ability to do software development work. That's undoubtedly the case to some extent; my extra year of French and my philosophy electives don't help me very much day-to-day. I bet you could condense a program down to something like 2-3 years, though I can't imagine how much someone has learnt in only 3 months.