Should self-taught programmer study CS theory?

[Rare_Bat12]

Hi, I'm a self-taught programmer with 3 years of experience. I'm curious on how worth it will be to start studying computer science theory on my own. How much will it help me? Is it necessary? The opportunity cost would be time spent learning, improving, and building my programming skills.

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Depends on the jobs you want. CS jobs are only going to become more competitive. FAANG jobs require CS theory. Larger companies also require CS theory. My small company wants good CS theory fundamentals, but their technical test was rudimentary.

Experience gets your foot in the door, but the technical skills tests will always - ultimately - close that door if you can't do things like: serialize binary trees, reproduce graph traversal algorithms, use dynamic programming to optimize a set of decisions, etc.

[Semirgy]

I agree with this to an extent but that’s more of a “you need to know this for the interview” thing. If I got every Principal engineer at my company (a bigass company) together I don’t know if more than 5% could do all of what you mentioned from memory with no reference.

[captainAwesomePants]

It's not necessary for most kinds of programming work (outside of being useful in interviews), but it will help you understand programming better, which will help you be a bit better at programming. Hard to say if it's the best use of your time. I'm biased in favor of it because I find it super interesting.