Maybe those who are downvoting haven't been in the industry long enough?
I started in software development when I was 18. Fresh outta high school. I have never been unemployed for more than a couple of months between gigs. I don't have a degree in compsci, either.
What I do have is all self-learned compsci knowledge. Maybe not perfect knowledge, but anything I am missing I can look up and learn. I am always willing to learn - always.
That's really the key, too - to not be unwilling to learn. Too many fall in the trap of stagnation. But the compsci basics, as noted in the above post, are crucial and always relevant. I first got the inkling of some of them when as a kid I did translation from Fortran, Pascal and C to BASIC (where I started in the 1980s).
Today - to keep up my skills - I am continuously working and improving my knowledge of ML and ANN techniques, as that is what is becoming more in-demand.
