I'd bet many people could get a better applied computer science education in 4 years by trying to become an active developer. I'd say perhaps a better applied

I'd bet many people could get a better applied computer science education in 4 years by trying to become an active developer. I'd say perhaps a better applied programming education. Programming != CS. The things which I learned in my CS education and the things that I learned in real-world hacking have a relatively small overlap, however, having that CS background did open up some possibilities for working on interesting problems. That's not to say that you have to go through formal education to get a good grounding in the theoretical elements of CS, but it does facilitate it.