Stevey's Tech Talk E42: Do I need a CS degree, and can I teach myself?

Stevey's Tech Talk

Hey folks,
A commenter asked if I could talk about whether you need a CS degree to be in Big Tech and make it as a software engineer. So that's the topic for today!
In this episode, I talk about what you would actually need to study in order to get the equivalent of a CS degree, and I also call our the most core fundamental stuff, which would be:
* discrete math, linear algebra, and statistics
* theory of computation, algorithms, data structures
* compilers, operating systems, networking
So basically 9 courses at the very core, plus a few nice-to-haves like programming languages, software engineering, distributed computing, databases, computer graphics, and machine learning.
If you don't know at least the core 9 courses, you're flying blind and don't really know how computers work, at least not as well as you need to in Big Tech. But the good news is, you can teach yourself that stuff by getting the books and muscling through them.
In this episode I offer some colorful stories of how algorithms matter, and give some tips on how to motivate yourself to learn quickly.
Let me know if I forgot anything major!