Here in Germany it wouldn't get you flack, there's several vocational tracks for programmers and I've worked with a lot of people who didn't go through academia and they were just as good at writing software, sometimes better than peers simply because they did it for longer professionally.
Academic CS programs make sense for people who want to go into research, the sciences, or theory heavy application, but I never understood the inflated college programs across the pond.
Germany pulled off a vocational school miracle that North America still can’t figure out. Here (in Canada and the U.S.), skilled trades workers are heavily looked down upon as low status.
Indeed, if you actually talk to people working in a lot of them you’ll hear stories about alcoholics and drug addicts who barely manage to show up to work. You’ll have 1-2 highly experienced, highly skilled trades workers who can get all the work done, and the rest are useless trouble-makers.
This perception bleeds over into the public eye and the entire field is treated with disdain. Even higher level trades like electricians are caught in it, and so it’s seen that going to vocational school is low status so there must be something wrong with you. The problem is entirely cultural!
In Germany it depends on how you look at it, at the more conservative / "traditional" companies (which is still a lot of them, including almost everything I hear about outside Berlin/Hamburg) programmers without degrees aren't looked down on relative to programmers with degrees, but programmers as a whole are looked down on compared to even the lowest managers (who probably have a postgraduate degree), and aren't trusted to do anything themselves. It's more that degrees aren't valued at all for programmers, than a widespread belief that someone without a degree can still make good decisions.
Academic CS programs make sense for people who want to go into research, the sciences, or theory heavy application, but I never understood the inflated college programs across the pond.