They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program.
For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by getting a CS degree.
I worked for years as a self taught professional developer before going back btw, and I've hired/interviewed many boot camp graduates, self taught programmers, and degree holders.
I have a friend who does webdev (mostly Wordpress, some Drupal) who did not have go through a CS program, though he took a few web dev classes in college. He goes good work, but he has a very loose grasp on fundamentals. He showed me a side project he was doing (a web based clicker game) and after looking at the code, I suggested he try adding some classes to reduce his code reuse. After explaining the basics (and some quick research on how classes work in Javascript), it kind of blew his mind. He never used classes before in his code because he just had no reference point.
CS majors who cannot program applying academic theory without understanding.
I'm old enough to remember graduates rolling their own sorting algos, or building classes 6 levels of inheritance deep. While simultaneously creating massive if/else nesting, with tons of duplicated code, unable to understand how to use basic ideas like functions and recursion, even though I'm sure they probably had a whole one lecture on the subject, mixed in with whole modules on pointless compiler lectures.
Because that's what their CS degree taught them.
How both CS graduates and non-graduates really learn is by seeing what other programmers do in the industry, or by making their own mistakes.
I went way beyond what any CS grad does, and it cost me nothing in money and less time than a CS degree. If you're motivated you can beat a university CS education - it's actually really not that high a bar.
I agree with you that most people won't do that. I was home schooled so I have a different attitude about learning than most people - and that's made all the difference. But is fundamentally a problem of motivation and goals, you don't need university for either.
You can probably imagine why many people wouldn't believe you. "My work is amazing but I am too lazy to publish it" is a peak stereotype for self-educated people. My prior on this being ignorance rather than genius is super high. And if it is true that you are a once in a generation genius who could outpace the research community then your experience is completely useless for others, given that you'd be so much smarter than a typical person who is doing self-education and trying to get a job.
I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those. It's true I'm well above average though, so perhaps my experiences don't generalize. I don't believe that though. I still think it's motivation and goals that count.
> I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those
You do sound smart though. Just... one of the benefits of a challenging formal education is a large dose of humility.
Honestly, if you think writing a two to three page paper is "a lot of effort", I doubt you've done what you've claimed.
He’s not claiming he invented cold fusion, just something that would be an iterative step in improving the state of the art, probably worth one paper in a decent but not super prestigious journal. Where do you get the idea that it’s worth a free Ph.D, fame and fortune, and all that?
When you have to learn all that stuff to get your degree, then you just have to learn it. Period. Also people who are full time students have more time to spend on these topics, but when you are actually working 8h+ per day and your career is mostly around JS frameworks it becomes much harder to invest time into these things.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd say it applies for most.
The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research.
Both of those are excellent training for at least some aspects of being developer.
But that doesn't mean the details are inherently useful. There are very few situations where you will be expected to write a compiler. So in that sense compiler theory itself is optional - far less useful than the experience of having to handle a complex set of data structures and relationships, which could in theory come from other kinds of projects.
Academic CS also tends to miss out a lot of useful practical skills. It won't teach you much about management (from either side), salary negotiations, office politics and co-worker relationships, or business theory.
It may not even teach you how to write good clean code that's easy to read and maintain.
So IMO the ideal CS degree doesn't exist. The ideal degree would be a good mix of theory with plenty of industry practice - possibly with some standardised requirements that would lead to a Chartered Developer qualification that was better at guaranteeing a working blend of practical skill, theoretical understanding, and analytical talent than current degrees seem to be.
I agree that should be the case, and sadly enough, I've seen a number of people graduate college with degrees in CS and not have that. There have been a number of times when I'd mention some non-esoteric concept that should have been covered and the response is something like "huh"? I'm not talking about things like "Oh you don't understand how to implement Redux?", it's more things like "Ok, you need to compute the intersection of these two arrays." You are right, they probably have been exposed to these concepts, but they have no idea how to actually do it. More importantly, they grasp so little, they didn't even know where to start. The saddest one I saw was a student that was wicked smart, and the school didn't challenge him enough to struggle through any projects. When he came to intern, he was lost, because he'd never been actually challenged. (He was from a major public university too.)
Don't get me wrong, I disagree, there are a number of great CS programs from both public and private universities, and actually the good ones are exactly like you mention (both theoretical and practical application), but there are a lot that aren't.
Or you could just do the bare minimum that your class’s TA will let you get away with, which usually means not much at all…