Like whatshisface said above, quality self-study is rare. As you point out, people will learn what is fun/interesting, but I will also add that they will just learn what they need to get whatever job done.

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.

We've all seen the utter messes that recent CS graduates have made with classes, unnecessary inheritance and over complicating problems, while being unable to do fundamentally basic logic, you must know the opposite problem is equally true.

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 agree on difficulty of self study by remembering my student days, simply I was asking the lecturer about why we have to study some of uninteresting CS topics. They were quite boring but really got their benefit in the long run.

No, you don't need a degree. All you need is a resolution to learn the things that you're missing. I covered C++ in all its hairy glory, assembly, SIMD, data structures and algorithms (implementing them, not just using them) and concurrent and lock free algorithms and data structures. Some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers. I might do them as an in depth blog post one day.

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.

> some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers.

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.

It's not really that hard. For example I made a queue that outperforms the lynx queue. My fundamental instinct after reading that paper was that there's no way faults out perform bounds checks in a modern, speculating out of order CPU. I ran some tests and yes my instinct is correct. Maybe the result wouldn't hold under peer review for some reason, I just tested a few more ideas / criticisms with a colleague and moved on. I don't personally benefit from trying to publish the result and I have enough demands on my time.

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.

The person you replied to is wrong. This is peak stereotype:

> 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.

Haha, well I'm not sure I can honestly deny an accusation of being a genius, at the same time I'm not sure I can affirm it either - and just to talk about it seems to imply a lack of humility. Irrespective, there are lots of kinds of intelligence and I'm blessed with some of the less useful forms of it that happen to test well.

So, in reality, you have no idea if your idea is truly better and it looks like you just ran some specific test cases and assumed it applied. Still paper worthy, but far from thinking that you made anything better than published literature. And the goal isn't to "personally benefit" it's to know that your ideas survive scrutiny and contribute something meaningful to the world.

You're making a lot of assumptions there about which your mistaken. I don't need to defend myself here. If that's what you want to believe, that's fine.

The only assumptions I'm making is what you explicitly stated. And the cardinal rule is, what's stated without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Either way, if you don't want to defend yourself. That's fine.

I find it odd that you did all this extra work, yet couldn't even be bothered to write a paper about it and still haven't.

I'm not an academic. How do I gain by putting in all that effort?

Because you've claimed that you made substantial strides in algorithms that nobody else has supposedly done. Why not get a free PhD out of the deal? If anything, you can show it to a professor and they should be able to recognize it. After all, you could be advancing the field directly.

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.

You overestimate the value of a paper. It's worth approximately $0. But would cost maybe a week of time or about $6000 if you only count what I can sell my time for. Terrible deal.

Yet your ideas could get you millions in publicity, fame, etc. to spend literally one week to advance the field. The fact that you actually argue against this is laughable, not to mention incredibly selfish.

What makes you think the idea is significant enough to get “millions in publicity”, etc.?

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?

What makes you think that they wouldn't? That's why I used the operative word "could".

Because I’m aware enough of the CS world that I just know that an iterative improvement in an obscure data structure is not enough to become rich and famous.

This. It's an iterative improvement on a data structure that in reality isn't useful as used on benchmarks and the benchmark performance is a totally artificial environment with little practical significance. It warrants a blog post more than a paper. Nobody is going to get rich or famous off of it. If someone wants to write it up as a blog post, I'll give them the code.

Why do you assume it is an iterative improvement? You can get a free PhD for a lot less. You can get rich and famous for a lot less. You don't have to make cold fusion viable.