Basically what I am saying is since I learned by basically trial and error, I can fix errors that other people are having easily because I have already been down that road.

I myself have never been a good classroom person. I learn so much better when driven by passion, not by someone shoving information down my throat.

Are college projects less than personal projects?

Also, a third option hasn’t been discussed: the one who has a college degree and real world experience.

Also, the rockstar developers I know did go to school for CS, though one or two didn’t actually finish their degrees. BTW, my viewpoint could be a little skewed by having gone to MIT. Many of the other developers I know went there too.

Hi Ben, I’m not saying you have to go to college to learn to write clean code, just that it helps. I can be pretty sure that Bob has learned these skills (though of course it depends greatly on the school and on Bob). There’s no telling with Jeff. He might have just learned enough to get things to work, without cleanly designing his code. Or he might be great, but you can’t tell just from these descriptions.

Justin, I think you may be right about the difficulty of keeping the teaching of web technologies in colleges up-to-date. But I still think the foundational concepts of software engineering are important to learn in a thorough way, such as how you learn in college. From there you can learn any new languages on your own, and I guess I kind of include HTML and CSS in that, even though they’re not quite the same.

Education is education, regardless if it’s self-taught or through other channels such as college. It’s not a matter of where the education came from, it’s the quality of what’s being learned, and the passion and motivation of the individual to pursue it further.

The two years I spent in college were the two years in which I learned the most horrid examples of web design and development ever. I’m not saying there isn’t good college curriculums available, but like other large-scale operations, a college itself, is an enterprise of education and the web changes faster than the curriculums can be updated.

While a student from a college might get more information sooner, it doesn’t mean that he or she will get better information. In the end, I would rather have someone who has taken apart and rebuilt a motors, than someone who has read a few books on how to do it. Certainly a generalization, but I think you get the point.

If what you’re getting at is that some people enrolled in CS classes are idiots, you’re probably right. But that’s life though, and I doubt that CS attracts or graduates any more chumps than any other discipline.

And you’re also right that you don’t need formal schooling to be talented at what you do. However, I doubt it hurts :)