If you read my reply to &quot;brodawg&quot; I agree, I say &quot;I don&#x27;t mean you can understand the full depth of each topic in an afternoon or two, I mean at a working level you could get an understanding of the topic&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to imply that someone should be teaching courses after an afternoon of flipping through a textbook.<p>That being said, do you need to have a PhD to be a good computer scientist? Most of the skills needed are basic analytical abilities. Sure, someone might not know all the terms that we use and might even think some of the ways we talk about problems are flat out wrong, but it is those individuals who truly leave a mark.<p>I&#x27;d argue that the best in our field have just been random people who have stumbled in and said &quot;This looks cool, let me see what I can do with this&quot;.<p>Here is a list of people who, in my opinion, fit this category.<p>* Donald Knuth - Do I even need to describe him? (Is a PhD in Mathematics, not CS)<p>* Brian Wilson Kernighan - The Practice of Programming, The C Programming language, The Unix Programming Environment (All books), and first Hello World<p>* John Carmack - Or even him (Dropped out after the 2nd year)<p>* Douglas Crockford - JSON<p>* Carl Sassenrath - REBOL<p>* Bram Cohen - BitTorrent<p>* Michael Widenius - MySQL AB and MariaDB<p>* Larry Wall - Perl<p>I&#x27;d love to see you sarcastically mock these people for not having the correct pedigree to even approach understanding our field.<p>I know for certain that since he dropped out of college and does not have a degree in CS John Carmack has no valuable input to give when discussing optimization or algorithms.<p>I don&#x27;t know honestly. All I can say is that someone can definitely succeed as a computer scientist if they do not have a degree in computer science, and I don&#x27;t think publishing papers has anything to do with professing your knowledge (mainly my gripe is with how corrupt and obtuse that entire system is). What I do know is that it is extremely unlikely that I will get a job if I don&#x27;t get a piece of paper from a place that promises it will teach me something.