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

The purpose of a degree is to get knowledge (yes!) but, more importantly, work and get connected with people in the field and get a proof of your ability and the work you put in in the form of a degree.

Now, if you want progress further in the field, maybe you think about teaching or doing research, this is going to be pretty important.

On the other hand if only thing you are going to do is programming for a big co then this is, in my opinion, pretty much a huge waste of time.

You can teach yourself all the skills needed to be better developer than CS degree would ever teach you, better, and in shorter time while working for big co and getting paid at the same time!

Understand that programming in itself is pretty basic skill when compared with other skills necessary to be a good developer:

- debugging complex systems,

- dealing with complexity in large systems,

- getting good at very specific software stack that is used for your project,

- learning how to communicate with your team, your boss, your stakeholders,

- and so on.

Learning those things takes more time than learning how to program and learning them can only be done while working for a company.

On the other hand you can learn to program on your own and if you are really committed, just get a copy of CS curriculum and do it on your own.

There is some worth to having a CS degree (it gets you into interviews more and maybe a bit higher salary). But I think this is false thinking.

First, you only need to find one job. If you exclude all companies that require CS degree there is still huge number of good employers with as good rates to offer.

Second, your CS degree also means you just lost about 4 years of real world experience (I assume you would still need to spend about a year learning on your own before you can realistically start work as a programmer). This additional experience would count as much or even more than the CS degree and it would also be huge economical advantage for you (getting paid instead of getting in debt?)

The problem with "teaching something yourself" is that you don't really know in advance what is important and how things are connected. If you knew already, you wouldn't have to learn it.

Agree on the CS side. I received my undergrad CS degree almost 20 years ago now. It definitely laid a foundation for future learning, but beyond that it's hard to know at this point. I was also close to a minor in business, and what I learned in finance, economics, and accounting has been useful at nearly every stage of my career. The one thing I wish I had done more of in school was literature and writing. Through experience I've learned that writing (really communication in general) is the most important aspect of most jobs.

I've seen too many people when I was in school myself and subsequently interviewing recent grads, where people knew all the theory, but could barely pass a FizzBuzz test. You just don't actually have to write enough code in most CS programs to become competent at it, without doing it for outside reasons.

Many CS degrees do not teach how to code, they might give you some starting help but expect you to learn coding in parallel to doing the CS degrees.

Also IMHO learning time pressure, coding and teamwork Works best in a good company, where there is some time to give feedback/teach the junior. But the how many of the companies hiring Juniors do that? In how many companies will you not only learn not much, but potentially even mislearn thinks? Are you able to judge this aspect when you just get started as a junior?

My recommendation is to do a part-time Studium spending half the week in University and half at a company as junior programmer. Well at last if the universities you are interested in support this (many German universities do). Note that I explicitly do not mean a dual Studium.

PS: There are other benefits of a CS degrees which only matter in some cases, e.g. learning how to read CS papers , typical CS notations, better understanding of basic algorithmic things. Etc.