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

Indeed, or teach yourself to code while getting a degree in virtually anything interesting. If you've committed yourself to attending college and getting a 4 year degree for reasons good or bad, why does it have to be CS? How about physics, or math, or poetry? Use the 4 years to get "domain knowledge" or even just to develop a rewarding hobby that gets you through the days when programming seems like the pits.

I learned to code while in high school (in 1981), and had summer internships in a computer facility. My mom was teaching CS at an extension campus of a state university at the time. She was the one who didn't think a CS degree was necessary for becoming a programmer. Her students were getting good jobs after 1 year in her class. And the programming work that I observed at my internships seemed like it would be ultimately boring.

So I went to a liberal arts college and got a double major in math and physics. At the college, it seemed like the people doing "cool" things with computers, were in the physics department. I kept learning more about programming, and also taught myself electronics. And then I went to grad school in physics. Granted, this was all before the Interwebz.

A lot of people whom I've worked with over the years were programmers with degrees from all over the place: Natural science, philosophy, music, and so forth. The programmers with non-traditional backgrounds tend to be happy to be earning more than they were in their original fields, but also tend to do non-traditional work. At my workplace, any job involving math goes to a handful of "math people" who happen to have math or physical science degrees.

Survivor Bias Alert: I can't say that I discovered a magical career formula. Many of you are vastly richer than me. I'm reminded of the saying: "You go to war with the army you've got." I don't know if I can ever be self disciplined enough to sit in front of a programming screen all day. I do a great deal of programming, but my background allows me to do enough non-programming to keep me from losing my sanity. And my interest in electronics supports a fairly rewarding side-business.

Becoming a programmer at age 19 isn't a panacea. My friends who did that, many of them were swept into the vortex of alcohol and consumer debt. A couple didn't survive. For some, going to college is a way to break away from their hometown culture, and try a new life.

This is a very poorly reasoned perspective. Case in point, I have a CS degree background (from a top school) and think it was completely useless in terms of my career. I got my first job through a random connection and from then on my experience and practical skills have gotten me work.

Also, even though I've worked for various "top" companies, I've never once had to write my own binary tree, hashmap, Dijkstras search, etc etc. Note, I also think FAANG style interviews are a waste of time too, which is why at my current company I make all applicants do a take home test which is analogous to the kind of work they will be doing if they get the job.

I would make the observation that mere "dozens-to-hundreds of hours agonizing" over theoretical topics leaves one very far from qualified to design critical complex systems. At best, it gives one a shallow understanding of the domain but no expertise in the theoretical design of operational systems. Every CS grad knows how to design a database engine -- a very poor and naive database engine that has little resemblance to what an expert in the theory of databases would design. Same story with parallel systems, networking protocols, etc.

For as much time as is spent in school on theory, one still needs to spend (at least) an order of magnitude more time going deep in a theoretical domain to understand it well enough to apply it competently. The difference in the amount of self-study required to grok many classes of complex systems design between someone with a CS degree and someone without falls below the noise floor. No matter what, you will need to do inordinate amounts of self-study to acquire theoretical competency.

A CS degree is essentially a theoretical survey course. It tells you these domains exist and gives a little bit of high level context, but if you want to become an expert in those theory areas then you are still learning almost entirely on your own and/or from other experts on the job.

i agree with the title, but not with the article. All the things listed in the article can be learned outside of a CS degree. What a CS degree does is force you to learn the academic which gives you the foundation to work at FAANG or some other company that has high [principal] engineering levels, or even just the awareness of knowing what you don't know to round out your skillset post school.

Having said that, a CS degree isn't necessary, just better under the premise that knowing more is better than not knowing more.

Most programs aren't going to 'teach' you these things, either (counter to the point of the linked post). You are likely to be put in situations where you have to work with other people on a project (short in-class assignments or longer term projects). I had some of these in various classes (writing, ethics, political science, etc). None of these projects ever involved any directed learning on the soft skills themselves - you just had to 'do it'. "Improving" by whatever metric you want to use was a byproduct of the exercise, not the goal.