About 95% of what I know of CS is self taught.

This shouldn't be happening, or at least not this much.

I'll agree with ramen. It build a culture among developers that they tend to look for answer themselves (Google, SO) instead of bothering and wasting someone else's time.

I don't agree either. Most of my CS education is about learning about algorithms, different paradigms, time complexity and other theoretical subjects. Some stuff I didn't even knew existeded, any more than I would learn by my self.

@ramen Even though I agree, I don't imply that self education is better or not in comparison of what CS courses can teach you. I just get really exasperated to spend 6400€ / year in a school to learn things by myself :')

@Python I agree with you here.

@ramen While teaching yourself stuff can be very effective, the probability of you missing an important subject because it didn't peek your interest is too high (data structures and algorithms as an example).
There's a lot of stuff I wouldn't have known hadn't I started studying CS.
I'm almost done with my bachelor's degree, and it has introduced me to so many subjects I'd probably wouldn't have looked into before maybe in 5 years when I accidentally bumped into it.

I too belong to the self taught camp.

Academia is far too slow for industry needs, and it’s so broad.

If all you’re trying to be is a reasonably decent developer for standard business software (which is like 90% of all software anyway), then most of it is utter fluff you simply don’t need to know.

Yes it’s nice to know how to traverse a graph and implement a linked list, but honestly, how many times have you actually needed to? Code is already out there, and for the most part it just works.

Unless you’re a 1337 programmer working on crazy shit, self taught (and even potentially then) is entirely fine.

@Brolls It completely depends on what you want to do as a developer. If you are implementing algorithms, it's very likely that you need to know how to implement a linked list or how to traverse w/e data structure, if you care about performance.

It's not as white and black as you and many other put it.

@aaxa I agree, at the very algorithmic core of things, certainly.

But there’s very little original art to be had outside of the big / earth-shattering projects.

Most problems have been solved with a reasonable degree of performance etc and algorithms are either part of the standard library of your language, or you can find how to implement them online.

A broad knowledge of things and which data structures to use (and when) is super handy, but not super essential for most things.

@Brolls I agree :)