Kind of tangent, but this is the reason I find a formal CS degree important, despite the "hacker school movement" that tells you otherwise. Sure, you may never

Kind of tangent, but this is the reason I find a formal CS degree important, despite the "hacker school movement" that tells you otherwise. Sure, you may never need the stuff you learned in Algorithms or Computer Architecture, but having gone through these classes you sort of develop a knack of recognizing these kind of bad code: you instantly know the time/space complexity of your code, and what the best-known complexity might be. Sure, premature optimization is the root of all evil, but there's a huge difference between not knowing there's a faster solution and actively choosing not to use the faster solution because it's harder to read/harder to maintain/more bug prone/etc.