What do you think, how useful is an academic degree in computer science? I just read again that due to the shortage (here in Germany) companies are lowering the entry hurdles even further.

@PublicByte That's for sure! Now it is so that I have already done an education as an application developer and already have a company that makes good money. However, I ask myself, also with regard to the future, whether it wouldn't make sense to catch up on my studies.

Any specific reason you don't think an "Ausbildung" is a good idea?

@PrivateGER "Ausbildung" ive already done. Maybe the next step is "Studium".

Oh! I thought you might have just finished normal school.
The chances are pretty good with an Ausbildung. Which one did you do?

@PrivateGER the companies want people from universities, people who made the Ausbildung like me are "too" unexpirienced for them. After 3 years in a company they start to recognize it.

@PrivateGER In German: "Fachinformatiker zum Anwendungsentwickler" :D

Very useful to become a professional developer.

As an aside, I hope this becomes a strange question one day, like it is in other professions. "How useful do you think an academic degree is in medical science or aerospace engineering?" Well, why would you not have one.

Companies in Germany will Take it as an opportunity to pay less. The worth of having studied CS isn't really visible in webdev and especially not in front end. It doesn't make sense why companies Care about academic degrees in webdev. Even startups do that. But it's self evident why other fields like Computer vision Care about that.

@VaderNT that not a problem the Ausbildung qualifies someone also for University. You can have an Hauptschulabschluss(lowest possible high school degree) and be allowed to go to university, where you would need Abitur(highest high school degree) with the advantage not to be forced to learn a second foreign language and be able to have already money earned.

Maybe I should have started out differently. without telling my whole boring life story. Through some circumstances in life, I inherited a few properties. All told, I make about 25k a month plus what my little company makes.

The reason why I ask the question is actually quite simple: Can I gain A) "quality of life" with an academic degree? and B) what advantages, apart from knowledge, would I have with it?

@Konstrukt probably none

@Konstrukt in your Case you won't benefit at all. You could use it as an entry ticket into scientific study If that's your goal. Or you could use it as a safety net. Who knows how long your current comfortable financial situation might last. But in the end you probably won't learn anything new that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.

It's your ticket into a job without having to overcome other hurdles.

It *can* also be very relevant and useful if you're taught a wide variety of interesting stuff - it exposed me to functional languages for instance long before they were considered mainstream or trendy, and gave me a solid grasp of things such as networking which came in very useful later.

But that depends entirely on the degree - I've known people do CS degrees and do nothing but a bit of Python, JS and web design - and truth be told, they may as well not have bothered.

If you want to do something other than mainstream web or app development, a CS degree is the way to go. It gets you through doors and also exposes you to stuff like robotics, embedded systems, algorithms and data structures, computer architecture and parallel/distributed computing, theory of computation, information storage and retrieval, compilers, machine and deep learning, DSP, graphics, reliable systems, cryptography and information security etc.

While you might have a hobbyist's or layman's interest in these it's quite different from having a degree in it, and for the folks who hire for these things it's *very* different from having a degree in it.