Comment by jpc0

I think honestly the meme that non-CS degree engineers are most capable is selection bias.

If they had taken a CS degree they would likely be just as, of not more capable.

To self-learn the topics you need to make good software takes an immense amount of effort and although the data and material is out there, takes a lot of work to figure out.

I'm only recently starting to pick up on "magic" patterns that are actually extremely simple to understand given the right base knowledge... I can gain tons of insights from talks givem in the early 2010s but if I watched them without the correct practical experience and foundational knowledge it is the same as the title to a HN post this week[1], gibberish.

With the correct time playing with the foundational patterns and learning some of the backing knowledge it unlocks amazing patterns in my mind and makes the magic seem simple. A great example, CSP[2]. I've known about and used the actor model before, which I first discovered when I found Erlang, but now with CSP I could ask the question "Why should actors be heavy?", you can put an actor into a light-weight task and spawn tons of them and build a tree of connections. Stuff like oneTBB flow graph[3]now makes sense and looks like a beautiful pattern with some really interesting ideas that can be implemented in more general computing than the high performance computing it was designed for. It seems niche but golang is built on those foundations, and the true power of concurrency in golang comes from embracing that. It fundamentally changes the way I want to structure and layout code and I feel like a good CS course can get you there quicker...

Unfortunately a good CS course probably wouldn't accelerate the average CS grads understanding of that but can get someone dedicated and hungry there much much quicker. Someone fresh out of a JS bootcamp is maybe a decade away from that if they ever even want to search for that knowledge.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42711751

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_pro...

3. https://oneapi-spec.uxlfoundation.org/specifications/oneapi/...