The rockstar developer is kind of a myth. If you compile 100 applicants into the 5-8 best ones, then the truth is that you could probably hire any of them and get good results.
That doesn’t mean self-educated people should give up. Especially because very few countries have as easy access to education as we do.
Anyone can get a CS degree without knowing how to program, you can make up the credits with all the irrelevant, purely academic, formal CS stuff.
But no-one can be a self-taught programmer, actually create a whole app, and lack the fundamental ability of being able to write a basic program.
On the flip side, I’ve never personally met anyone who went through 5 years of university and came out knowing nothing.
The thing with CS is that it’s not the programming itself that’s actually valuable. It’s being able to create efficient, safe and maintainable code. If you can’t tell me the bigO of your program, if you don’t know how to remove the top node of a binary search tree or if you think using NPM packages to do simple computation is a good idea, then I just can’t use you, because it’ll be way too expensive to teach you.
If you suck at our specific tooling, but have already proven you can obtain a university degree, then I know that I can re-school you relatively cheap by sending you on a few courses.
I’m sorry this is rubbing non-educated programmers wrong, but an education is actually valuable, and it will be increasingly so as the younger generations are all getting them.
2. You're pointing out that self-educated people aren't worth the risk and then you go on to advise him that he should self-educate.
3. A point that I think you're kind of making and that I agree with, is that a degree is a signal that you've gone through a certain process of education. If you don't have it, then you'd better signal the same thing in a different manner and demonstrate that you're familiar with theory, best practices, design patterns and so on; and that you can stick with something for a continuous period of time (showing up and doing at least the minimum amount of work for 4 years isn't a signal that all candidates have).