I am asking you how will you tell the HR person overseeing your application that you have "mastered" Knuth's TAOCP. On paper, you have candidate A with university degree and 2 internships and B that sat in his basement and did TAOCP.
Which would you think they'd choose?
>He was an "undergrad" whose first math class was graduate real analysis.
This is unlikely, he'd still have to pass undergrad Math exams. I'd wager there are plenty of those for a 4 year degree.
> but can be extremely valuable, and open a lot more doors than graduating with a class of 10,000 other CS students.
You need to convince the hiring manager that the skills are extremely valuable. No one is going to take the word for it. Deep theoretical CS doesn't always translate to industry success. The flaw in your reasoning is that you'd try to impress some hardcore CS guy from super-duper company with TAOCP. But they already get 10s of thousands of applications. It won't even get the resume read without a BsC. All the companies which talk like broken records that they don't care about degrees, actually do care about them a *lot* and in your first intro call they'd ask about it if you even get that far.
Keep in mind during interview you have to implement the algorithm fast in a common language Java, C++ or Python. Just being theoretical about it isn't enough.
Which would you think they'd choose?
>He was an "undergrad" whose first math class was graduate real analysis.
This is unlikely, he'd still have to pass undergrad Math exams. I'd wager there are plenty of those for a 4 year degree.
> but can be extremely valuable, and open a lot more doors than graduating with a class of 10,000 other CS students.
You need to convince the hiring manager that the skills are extremely valuable. No one is going to take the word for it. Deep theoretical CS doesn't always translate to industry success. The flaw in your reasoning is that you'd try to impress some hardcore CS guy from super-duper company with TAOCP. But they already get 10s of thousands of applications. It won't even get the resume read without a BsC. All the companies which talk like broken records that they don't care about degrees, actually do care about them a *lot* and in your first intro call they'd ask about it if you even get that far.
Keep in mind during interview you have to implement the algorithm fast in a common language Java, C++ or Python. Just being theoretical about it isn't enough.