Yes, absolutely, but the advantage is far more social than technical. There exists a common knowledge and experience to computer science education that is completely absent from being self-taught. That results in superior compatibility for candidate hiring, especially for junior developers. That education establishes a common baseline of accepted practice.<p>Many self-taught developers tend to have a stronger technical understanding of the work and problem solving in general compared to formally educated developers but it’s hard to tell as an outside observer. The reason why self-taught developers may have a technical advantage comes down to theory of practice as opposed to theory in general, which means understanding of how things actually work as opposed to how they should work. That difference tends to frame perspectives in accordance to anchoring bias.<p>Note: I am a self-taught developer.
I have found that self-taught programmers are better at debugging as they frequently had no one to turn to when learning as compared to someone who started studying in university. They are frequently also more passionate about programming than someone who just studied at school to get good grades or to secure a job.<p>But agree with other comments that if you are completely self-taught you will likely miss some fundamental knowledge which is crucial when you go from working on small side-projects to building large systems.
I think self-taught is more likely to end up with holes in one's education.<p>- I doubt I would have figured out automata theory on my own.<p>Most programming tasks are just fine with those holes.<p>- Most programmers don't need to know automata theory<p>Classes assignments included some interesting topics I doubt I wouldn't have come up with on my own.<p>- I know some others are way more self-directed than I was.<p>I expect self-taught people are more likely to develop incorrect mental models of how computers work.<p>In short, it depends on the person and the type of programming.
There is significant benefit to learning "two levels up" how to perform a given task, though it need not be provided within a formal environment.