In my experience, university is one of the least efficient ways to learn CS. The actually useful classes are few and far between, dwarfed by useless outdated courses, courses that aren’t very relevant to the job, and classes that are sadly lead by incompetent burnouts who don’t know that they’re teaching, come terribly unprepared, and in general seem to hate their job. Most of the people there have theoretical experience in writing software. But maybe that’s just my shitty university. I dunno. Supposedly one of the better ones.
On the other hand, as an Engish Lit major who taught himself programming from zero, and worked as a programmer for over a decade, all my experience writing software was practical, and I don't think that's the right way to go either. I wish I'd had any level of theoretical education that might have exposed me to fundamental concepts you (with yer fancy book-learnin') probably take for granted. If someone just learns on the job, or just learns as they go, they don't learn stuff until they need to. They learn it in a hurry, and on a deadline. That's not the best way to get a firm handle on tricky subjects, and maybe as a consequence, I always felt a couple steps behind my peers.
As someone in a similar position, may I take a tangent? I'm curious what you transitioned into out of programming. The stress of feeling "always behind" is taking its toll on me, and I wonder about another career change often.
I joined the software industry at a small consultancy that needed me to do a lot of different things, including both programming and design. So I got experience doing both of those. When I left the consultancy world in 2016, I had to decide whether to sell myself to employers as either a programmer or a designer—normal companies want you to pick a single lane—so I just focused on my design experience, and started doing that as a day job. I went from a fancy title to a much less fancy title for my first job as a designer, but more or less worked back up from there. I think for most programmers, their fork in the road would be to stay as an individual contributor or become a manager, but I don't want to be a manager, and was lucky to have a different path to fall back on.
A computer science degree is for the science of computing, not whatever is the latest in the workplace. You learn that on the job or a boot camp. Computer science is much more than the current popular framework and tools. It's the principles for how software works.
