A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?

Long term everyone is teaching themselves to code, or picking up skills on the job. Maybe I'm an idiot, but almost every skill that I have has gone almost 100% in and out of cache over the years. Having had a decent foundation at one point is probably helpful, and struggling through a highly mediocre CS PhD (the program at CMU was excellent, but I was pretty shit at the research side) gave me some lifelong skills and interests. However, almost everything that I can do semi-competently now is a product of repeated independent study and learning on the job.

Many of the skills that I now think of as bread-and-butter weren't even a thing when I was an undergraduate or early grad student. SIMD programming was pretty much non-existent on mainstream processors (although I learned some nice parallel prefix stuff in a parallel algorithms course). Computer architecture is hugely different. C++ is nearly unrecognizable - when I started C++ programming, half the language wasn't even really there (no templates, and exceptions exploded in weirdo ways) and the emphasis of how people programmed back then was totally different.

In the end, everyone will either be a self-directed learner or GTFO into management.

The skills you will get from university can be deeper, but I've met plenty of people who managed to escape CS degrees without learning anything profound. They can also be 'wider' - I learned a lot of useful stuff in pure mathematics (graph theory and combinatorics). There's nothing stopping a truly inquisitive person from picking up a lot of this on their own, but the structure of university is good for a lot of folks.

Or you can tackle the really hard problems if you want. Make a CNC lathe for wood working. Maybe create an app to layout your cuts in the most efficient way.

I don't know enough about crotchet to suggest anything...but I bet there are problems to be solved.

As far as why you wouldn't use an already existing app? Why would you build a birdhouse from scratch when you just go buy one?

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I agree with this, I didn't take this approach and I'm regretting it (in a way). I'm in the computer science camp and just trusted that my education in it would be fine. Instead, I studied other things on the side (working on the side as a TA and studying psychology were my side projects and in my final years web dev, which is how I know what I've missed in my early years).

The trade-off is a tough one though: studying psychology and being a TA made me a much more well-rounded person. I have so much more confidence in my social skills. I would not have gotten that if I'd have teach myself coding on the side as well, not even if I'd do freelance projects on the side as well [1].

Not learning how to code as a web or app dev really limited my growth because of a lack of context. Discovering HN 3 years ago saved me a bit from it [2]. Now that I do have some context, I can more easily see how abstract topics such as theoretical CS or algorithms are important as they force you to simulate code in your head and not rely on a debugger! But I could only gain that context by teaching other people JavaScript and realizing that in the beginning stages, learning algorithmic thinking is the toughest still to become a web developer [3]. If I'd have learned web dev or taught web dev earlier on during my studies, I'd have understood the importance of abstract CS topics.

Instead when I learned them I was bored out of my mind and it was such a shame that I was, I shouldn't have been bored. I should've been fascinated, because it is fascinating. Unfortunately, I couldn't see it at the time.

But hey, at least now I can!

[1] Because just like computer science, psychology taught me something formal that I needed to learn but wouldn't be able to learn on my own which is: how to detect nonsense when people talk about the science of human behavior. I need a lot of formal training on human behavior, so knowing how to distinguish a good vs a bad learning source is of paramount importance, especially because about 1 in 20 resources are decent and the other 19 will make you worse off.

[2] Because it taught me general industry concept simply by reading the front page while also keeping my interest high in other topics.

[3] Almost everyone has some eye for design, so they are able to have that as a reference. HTML and CSS basics are always easy enough to learn for people. Where they struggle is with JavaScript and mostly stepping through code. The people who are mathematically inclined are the only people who will learn the basics quickly.

That's true now. It certainly wasn't true in the past; especially with larger companies who would hire people with the intention of training them.

I wonder if there will be a bifurcation in education. To some degree (excuse the pun), there already is; software engineering "boot camps" and the like that teach software engineering rather than CS. Maybe we'll see that split reach upwards to the formal education level; a more vocational college for the software engineers, a more mathematical alternative for the informatics enthusiasts.