The main thing I think I got from the degree is that it took away all of my fear of The Stack. In Operating Systems class they just sat us (a bunch of barely Java programming ninnies) down and said "OK, you're going to write a MINIX clone in C and assembly. First assignment is boot." And you do it. It'll take putting your heads together with friends, dragging tips out of the professor, and lots of trial and error, but you do it. There's a support structure there so that you struggle, but you make progress.
Of course I don't remember a damn detail about what we did, but for a brief period in 2000 I felt like burgeoning kernel hacker.
In Programming Languages they're like "ok, you're going to write a program in ML". And you do it. PROLOG too. You just have the experience over and over of "that is some bizarre shit... oh, but now I learned it."
I went in thinking "I can hack together some HTML files and I can write some stuff in QBasic" and I left four years later thinking "I can attack problems at any level of the stack".
Now, you can definitely get the same experience outside of school. That's where I agree with you. You just have to self motivate. I will say, I don't know a whole lot of 18 year olds who really have the skills to self-motivate themselves to dig all the way down to Assembly. But those who do: I'm super impressed.
And of course, being fearless about the full software/hardware stack isn't everything. You really only need to understand a couple levels above and below your wheelhouse. But I do think it's a legit, valuable thing, that self-taught developers are more likely to miss.
And, of course, some of my classmates never got past The Fear either! They just retreated with passing grades back to Javaland and at this point are surely better paid than my broke bootstrapping ass.
The main thing I think I got from the degree is that it took away all of my fear of The Stack. In Operating Systems class they just sat us (a bunch of barely Java programming ninnies) down and said "OK, you're going to write a MINIX clone in C and assembly. First assignment is boot." And you do it. It'll take putting your heads together with friends, dragging tips out of the professor, and lots of trial and error, but you do it. There's a support structure there so that you struggle, but you make progress.
Of course I don't remember a damn detail about what we did, but for a brief period in 2000 I felt like burgeoning kernel hacker.
In Programming Languages they're like "ok, you're going to write a program in ML". And you do it. PROLOG too. You just have the experience over and over of "that is some bizarre shit... oh, but now I learned it."
I went in thinking "I can hack together some HTML files and I can write some stuff in QBasic" and I left four years later thinking "I can attack problems at any level of the stack".
Now, you can definitely get the same experience outside of school. That's where I agree with you. You just have to self motivate. I will say, I don't know a whole lot of 18 year olds who really have the skills to self-motivate themselves to dig all the way down to Assembly. But those who do: I'm super impressed.
And of course, being fearless about the full software/hardware stack isn't everything. You really only need to understand a couple levels above and below your wheelhouse. But I do think it's a legit, valuable thing, that self-taught developers are more likely to miss.
And, of course, some of my classmates never got past The Fear either! They just retreated with passing grades back to Javaland and at this point are surely better paid than my broke bootstrapping ass.