As much as IE belongs in the bowels of software hell, and as much as Microsoft completely missed the boat for the Internet and for the open-source software move

As much as IE belongs in the bowels of software hell, and as much as Microsoft completely missed the boat for the Internet and for the open-source software movement, kudos to this guy. I'm much the same way--took a job right after high school doing bottom-feeder ISP tech support knowing absolutely nothing, started reading everything I could get my hands on about computers, networking, programming, and ended up being a pretty damned good software engineer. Fuck CS college degrees, they're worthless--give me the autodidact guy who learned it all on his own anyday. And no, I'm not some guy who doesn't know CS--anyone want me to hand-hold you through the steps to derive the existence of NP-Complete problems in Cooke's original proof? Or how about let's implement a red-black tree entirely from memorizing the algorithm? Odd that Microsoft's culture has always followed the hacker ethos, caring only about how smart and capable you are to let you work for them, yet all of their software is crap, while Google will only stoop to maybe consider you if you have a CS degree from Stanford. Whether Google's software is all crap too, we need another 3-5 years to settle that decision.