University is not just "bigger school". It gives you the time and resources to dedicate yourself to study. If you just want to write programs then of course you don't need uni. I could write programs before I went. In fact, I earnt money from it before I graduated, making me a self-taught professional programmer too.
What I came out with was a far broader picture of what's been done in computing and, more importantly, how to find and read information about it. The biggest difference between me and my colleagues who haven't been to uni is when they run across something they haven't done before they are completely lost, whereas I'm usually able to say "hmm, that sounds like a graph problem, I think there's an algorithm for that".
Having said that, what I didn't come out with was how to do testing, version control, CI etc. Luckily that stuff is easy to learn on your first job.
The vast majority of software development that I've learned has been outside of school, but there are a couple of core CS (and data science) concepts that I never would've learned if not for uni.
Strong disagree. University is not overrated for computer science, maybe it is overrated for vocational training. Because what we are discussing here is not computer science, but craft.
Anyway, the students grokking computer science are usually the better craftsmen, too.
It really depends on what you're doing. Many graduates I worked with and people from academia always wrote code so convoluted and abstracted it was impossible to follow. In the end it had the same bugs and their code was replaced with something a tenth of the size within months of them leaving.
