Yet a lifelong computer nerd with that structured learning foundation will leave a non-passionate CS degree holder and a degreeless lifelong computer nerd in the dust.

People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.

A CS degree program worth its salt will dip you into enough low level OS programming that you can bring with you to any language. It also should expose you to multiple programming languages so you can quickly separate universal ideas (pointers, references, pass-by-value, pass-by-reference, various models of multithreading) from syntax.

Meanwhile, degreeless bootcamp people just think Ruby Symbols are nifty immutable strings and have no idea why symbolizing dynamic string keys in hashes results in a memory leak.

I'm not against bootcamps, but polyglot is still my primary requirement for hiring for this exact reason. Bootcamps need to at least integrate a week of Computer Org and a week of doing what they just did in another language into the curriculum to really be a valid way to bypass CS degree programs.

> People want to scream about CS degrees being trash and yet all the passion in the world doesn't seem to convey an understanding of memory leaks, garbage collection, and VM/bytecode/etc. hijinks (like JVM, MRI, etc.) to the degreeless people in my team.

Meanwhile the degreeless people on my team wrote their own operating system that's older than your degree and still used in production today. We're not all the same.

I was going to comment on that exact exerpt. To explain and expand further, all university gives you is a breadth of general purpose knowledge. It merely provides a guarantee of a minimum of passion, time invested, and skill. If a degreeless individual can fulfill these minimum breadth and time investments on their own, they've attained the peak of what most college folks will ever. What's more: their motivation and discipline, their curiosity and self-sufficiency will continue accelerating them well beyond the typical college kid in whatever it is they do.

And if their resume points that out they get an interview. As I said in another comment, if you show up with a junior position, no degree, and shit to show for it on Github or somewhere else...I don't have time to interview you in a pool of 500 applicants.

As a degreeless completely self-taught programmer with a strong interest in vm implementations and garbage collection (eg I found the MLKit paper to be super exciting and at the time an incredible innovation (and then rust came along shortly after that)), I feel obligated to inform you that since ruby 2.2 (which is required by Rails 5+), symbols are in fact garbage collected, and are thus now effectively the same as string interning with #freeze.

And how many companies are only know posting blogs about their upgrades to Rails 5+ and how difficult that was?

It's still relevant knowledge.

Sure, degreeless self-taught programmers who know their way around this knowledge exist. I never said they didn't. But when you've got 500 applicants and your resume says you were flipping burgers two years before you got your junior position...I don't have time to interview you.