I was self-taught, then went to Yale where I (almost begrudgingly) chose to major in CS. The Yale curriculum is more oriented toward "fundamentals" than at most

I was self-taught, then went to Yale where I (almost begrudgingly) chose to major in CS. The Yale curriculum is more oriented toward "fundamentals" than at most schools, with introductory courses taught in C and a heavy emphasis on the more static aspects of CS that haven't changed since 1970. The professors insisted that you'd learn the practical skills like languages and tooling du juor at your internships, so not to worry about the heavy emphasis on theory during class. It actually became a big point of contention while I was there, and some students in the year ahead of me started HackYale as a sort of practical-skills bootcamp. After I left (2014), and the CS major exploded in popularity, they partnered with Harvard on that CS50 thing, which AFAIU is a more real-world oriented introduction to programming. In retrospect, the professors were right. I've rarely used C in my work, but the theoretical underpinnings that I learned have been an invaluable foundation. But I could have also spent those four years learning "more practical" skills and I doubt it would have changed much. Like many students at the time, I already knew scripting languages when I started the CS major, anyway. And I expect that's much more common these days. So, all that's to say - while I appreciate the theoretical foundation I got from CS, I don't think it was strictly a pre-requisite to becoming a software engineer. Besides, I still consider myself self-taught anyway, since I learned to "program" before I went to school for computer science, which - as my advisor was quick to point out - was a wholly separate different endeavor. And I have an easier time connecting and empathisizing with fellow self-taught engineers than I do with fellow alumni. Or at least, it's a different kind of connection - in a self-taught engineer I see a kindred intellectual spirit, whereas in a fellow alumnus I see inside jokes and a shared experience of college debauchery. Now I'm a co-founder of a startup, and we've hired five other engineers, including one former aerospace engineer who graduated from bootcamp and whom we've molded into a junior engineer with an initial skillset perfectly tailored to our stack. We've built a really strong remote team. We actually avoided hiring people with brand name degrees, and looked instead for demonstrably practical skills and the ability to work independently. Based on those evaluation metrics, someone who is a self-taught programmer is actually our ideal candidate. So I wouldn't feel bad for them - on the contrary, I'd feel bad for the prestige chasers who need to compete with every intellectually curious hustler with a computer.