The premise that self-taught programmers necessarily have core holes in their knowledge and skills that would have been filled if they had a CS degree is entirely false.
Start with the example you gave of messaging middleware. There are many BS CS curricula that do not address this at all. Also he mentioned that he had already learned about named pipes on his own. For many applications, named pipes could be a perfectly valid alternative to some external message queue system.
Looking at the items submitted, the vast majority are core skills that would necessarily be picked up by people who need to work with them. The idea that someone would not know about Makefiles or debugging or profiling or SQL just because they were a hobbyist or self-taught is ludicrous. If you are serious about C programming, whether it's a job or your hobby, you are going to learn about Makefiles. Likewise anyone seriously working on a data-centric application is likely to become well-versed in some database technology, up until a few years ago that would have automatically been relational.
And one other thing. Some of the most important skills in programming are in the domain of software engineering. Software engineering is very poorly addressed by many BS CS programs. So again, whether they have good SE skills is often not going to be determined by whether they have a BS degree or not. It's not even necessarily determined by whether they are working in a professional environment. It's mainly going to be a factor of their motivation to self learn and above all practical experience.
My experience has been quite different. True that some of the most technically skilled programmers I know of had no degree, but the polished ones, the ones I find easier to work with, tend to have one. Further it's pretty easy for me to tell if a person's degree was a CS degree or not just by talking to someone about the problems they have and how such problems might be solved with code.
That's not to say it's required; some of the best professionals I know have non-CS degrees (one in fine art -- painting) or no degree. But if you're still young, I submit that a CS degree is totally worth your time.
The argument that I was making was clearly stated at the beginning of my comment. It is significantly different from the supposed argument that you seem to be refuting.
Notice how I did not say that "the developers that certain degree holders find to be most 'polished' and easiest to work with will on average not have a degree".
Notice how I also did not say that a CS degree was not worth people's time.
We all, generally, specialize. I have never worked with 'big data', implemented any part of a commercial web site, or worked on HPC(just to give a few examples). What may be useful to one may be useless to another.
Definitely think about Software Engineering. Maintainability, debuggability, extensibility. Don't get lost in stupid details. Don't nitpick the coding style or try to optimize code that isn't currently meeting the requirements(if there are requirements, and if there aren't you should try to define them).
Start with the example you gave of messaging middleware. There are many BS CS curricula that do not address this at all. Also he mentioned that he had already learned about named pipes on his own. For many applications, named pipes could be a perfectly valid alternative to some external message queue system.
Looking at the items submitted, the vast majority are core skills that would necessarily be picked up by people who need to work with them. The idea that someone would not know about Makefiles or debugging or profiling or SQL just because they were a hobbyist or self-taught is ludicrous. If you are serious about C programming, whether it's a job or your hobby, you are going to learn about Makefiles. Likewise anyone seriously working on a data-centric application is likely to become well-versed in some database technology, up until a few years ago that would have automatically been relational.
And one other thing. Some of the most important skills in programming are in the domain of software engineering. Software engineering is very poorly addressed by many BS CS programs. So again, whether they have good SE skills is often not going to be determined by whether they have a BS degree or not. It's not even necessarily determined by whether they are working in a professional environment. It's mainly going to be a factor of their motivation to self learn and above all practical experience.