I think the most valuable thing you get from studying “computer science” either formally or informally is the shape of the literature and how you use it. There’s a rare interview question that can’t be answered with “look it up in the hashtable” or “look it up in the literature.”
One of my regrets is life is I never took a compiler class, I work at a university and can take a free class once a semester so I may rectify it this fall.
Still I taught myself a lot of that in the school of hard knocks.
I learned to read at three and got crazy well read checking out ten books a week from the public library as a kid. (Started my heavy backpack training!)
A lot of people fall for charlatans like L. Ron Hubbard and Eliezer Yudkowsky because they aren’t well read and don’t have anything to compare Dianetics and Sequences to.
