Person A spends four years getting a BS in CS at a top-tier school, learning about programming at least for a few hours a day on average, with the benefit of a well-considered curriculum and instruction by wizards.
Person B spends four years working full-time on something interesting at Google, which probably gives her more total hands-on-keyboard time, and also access to some minor wizards, although they may not care so much about teaching her.
Let's say that both of them also spend a bit of time on the side learning programming things not school- or work-related.
If both of them have an equal thirst for knowledge, I just don't see why person A is likely to become a better programmer, or why B would fail to pick up the style of thinking you described (which is common, in my experience, among good programmers.) I honestly think that you're mixing up the consequences of {smart, curious, motivated, spends a lot of time programming} and {took a CS degree}.
> Person A spends four years getting a BS in CS at a top-tier school, learning about programming at least for a few hours a day on average,
Real world might be different, but I don't think a CS degree should be teaching programming at least for a few hours a day. IMO that would be a total waste. There are bazillion of things to learn - database concepts, discrete maths, networks, ai&ml, digital electronics, some basic circuit theory, operating systems...There is programming involved in almost all of the courses, but the purpose isn't to learn about programming. When I am learning about MVCC, I am least concerned about learning programming, but the MVCC concept itself.
It would be pretty tough, although you can replace "Google" with "any roughly Google-quality set of coworkers and projects." But the original question was whether it's really "very difficult to obtain on your own" the sort of perspective and knowledge you get from taking a CS degree. I doubt that, and I think that most people who are similarly smart and spend a few years working hard with other smart people will pick up many of the same skills.
Person A spends four years getting a BS in CS at a top-tier school, learning about programming at least for a few hours a day on average, with the benefit of a well-considered curriculum and instruction by wizards.
Person B spends four years working full-time on something interesting at Google, which probably gives her more total hands-on-keyboard time, and also access to some minor wizards, although they may not care so much about teaching her.
Let's say that both of them also spend a bit of time on the side learning programming things not school- or work-related.
If both of them have an equal thirst for knowledge, I just don't see why person A is likely to become a better programmer, or why B would fail to pick up the style of thinking you described (which is common, in my experience, among good programmers.) I honestly think that you're mixing up the consequences of {smart, curious, motivated, spends a lot of time programming} and {took a CS degree}.