>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience.
That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right.
If you spend those 4 years making CRUD apps, then there will still be a large gap.
I speak from experience by the way. I was a professional programmer for 5 years before I went back to get my CS degree. There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
It's the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall or spending 20 minutes realizing your problem is just a variant of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.
> There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
I think that puts it very well. It's not just what people know they don't know, it's what they don't know they don't know. That's where it really hits them.
That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right.
If you spend those 4 years making CRUD apps, then there will still be a large gap.
I speak from experience by the way. I was a professional programmer for 5 years before I went back to get my CS degree. There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
It's the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall or spending 20 minutes realizing your problem is just a variant of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.