I think most of the comparisons are not relevant for the fact of having degree or not: Some people love their jobs, some not, some love formal education, some are autodidacts.

My take is that education is not about knowledge as much as about networking, seeing and hearing people, which are more knowledgeable so they can teach you. This is something online courses or books will never give you.

Universities are part of the culture. They guarantee that you will find common language and acquire correct pronunciation for the body of knowledge, which belongs to the foundation of the area you are in. This is still something you can learn yourself as well, but it may well be you will be lazy enough not to touch because you think it belongs only to some “harder than coding” things you dislike. In other words, proper education enlarges your horizon (scientific, social, cultural), which may come handy at some future moment-and most likely will. So I can agree with the main point of this article only if the self-learning effort includes not only what is currently part of the practice, and not even so-called new technologies (really new technologies are very rare — not big deal to learn if they are worth it), but also more theoretical, fundamental and general topics.

In my opinion it’s a common misconception to think that programmers do not need (applied) math, computer science or statistics. Yes, they will be able to do 95% of what they do without (98% on front-end perhaps), but then will produce crap, spend a lot of time or will try to find someone to do those 5% of features clients sometimes want. Easy, routine programming tasks become automated: It’s that hard part, which remains valuable. And not necessarily operating system or compiler.