I am a self taught JavaScript developer who has been writing JavaScript full time for corporate employment since 2008. I do not have a CS degree. In my experie

I am a self taught JavaScript developer who has been writing JavaScript full time for corporate employment since 2008. I do not have a CS degree. In my experience this decision comes down to two factors: competence versus conformance. If you want to hire somebody good you will look for someone self taught who does this for a hobby on various side projects. Being good at this meant a solid understanding of how web technologies work with a solid foundation in both theory and practice and none of that was taught by universities. Specific examples include: lexical scope, tree model navigation, accessibility, functional programming, asynchronous programming, and so forth. Early on I learned a lot about these concepts reading unrelated books about XML. I didn’t any of these skills coming out of my university educated Java developer peers, which for those guys life was limited to OOP and SQL only. If the goal is to put a body in a seat as rapidly as possible then you will look for somebody with a CS degree and remove competency as a factor as much as possible, which typically means double and triple down on large frameworks and third party tools. The goal is to ship features, not solve problems. I don’t want to be a nothing script kiddy, so as a JavaScript developer I am less employable.