Smart people who love coding end up pretty good at programming whatever their background. That being said, my (extremely generalized) observations have been t

Smart people who love coding end up pretty good at programming whatever their background. That being said, my (extremely generalized) observations have been that people with more formal training are able to spot issues earlier than people with less formal training, but end up more false positives (issues that aren't issues.) I've found CS majors also have a better nose for "code smell" due to having seen very well constructed code and dealt with graded assignments for years. Within the enterprise it world I've worked in, the self taught programmers tend to be very bimodal- likely to be truly excellent or unspeakable terrible whereas programmers with a CS credential tend to be more normally distributed. I do think that the credentialed programmers I've met are a bit more technically flexible than self taught programmers. A CS degree requires learning different languages, coding styles, and technologies whereas self taught coders are more likely to have come up through one language/technology stack and may never leave it. That's a massive generalization though and I can think of many counter examples. Note-I'm was a CS undergrad and mostly deal with very large IT departments rather than startups or consumer application development.