I came across a Tweet saying "You don't need a degree to become a hireable programmer", which made me think deeper about that old discussion. So, do you need a degree to become a good (or as the author of that Tweet puts it "hireable") developer?

Let me tell you my take on that topic.

I did my degree (B.Sc. Computer Science) back in 2014 after I failed being an apprentice at a company after school.

That alone might mean I am a bit biased on the topic. I really enjoyed my time studying and I learned a lot of useful skills besides the subject along the way, mastering studying independently and efficiently , as well as organizing time and meeting deadlines proved useful countless times since then.

There's also the in general overlooked fact that many fundamentals in computer science are ignored in bootcamps or by self-taught programmers. And yes it is indeed not necessary to know exactly how a computer works or to be able to program a CPU on an FPGA-Board. Higher Mathematics are also frowned upon by a big part of the community and a lot of real-life software especially in web development doesn't need it. But it definitely helps.

Those basic little (and bigger) things can help to understand what's really going on under the hood of pretty much everything and ultimately might even be the reason why you finally find the solution to a really hard to figure out problem.

At my job there were countless opportunities to use that kind of knowledge for example to optimize performance of a service.

A lot of people mentioned that you can learn all of this online. Of course you can. But you're on your own trying to build up a curriculum that's relevant and helpful. In a degree that structure is given to you, building necessary skills in an order that makes sense. I see a lot of lost people trying to learn everything at once. The lifes of these people would probably be much easier if they can just concentrate on learning and not on finding out a structure and what to learn.

There are sites that help with that of course. And not everyone has that kind of struggles. And not everyone can be a good programmer/engineer without a degree, also.

Conclusion

So I can't support the people that think a degree is useless or not needed after all. If your goal is solely to be "hireable" (a very strange goal in my opinion) than of course, that is possible without a degree and even without a deeper understanding of how computers or software in general works. But it'll never hurt to be educated and for some people, like myself, it might even be the better way to do a degree if possible.