I don't have a single college credit, but theory is important for a lot of non trivial shit, for example cassandra, dynamo, project voldemort all use chord+ gossip protocols , i. What about concurrency and parallelism CSP, and the actor model are from where academia. What about Zookeeper, Chubby, Etcd where do Raft and Paxos come from academia.
You don't need a degree yes but theory is relevant however yes a CS degree is not a good indicator of any skill and too many CS educated people can't code worth a damn. Theory is not useless as long as you can implement it.
I kind of agree and disagree I work a lot with distributed systems so I have to read a lot of papers, and I have to implement a lot of data structures myself, however I am severely lacking in formal education. While initially my lack of education was a difficult barrier I overcame it pretty quickly. I also have been writing nontrivial code in haskell just to improve my use of scala so that's more of academia I have to deal with.
But I still stand by the fact that unless you're going to stanford, CMU, or MIT, or a professor who is not strictly a theorist at an above average school takes a liking to you.
If not and you really enjoy the field you're better off teaching yourself.
If it's motivation to the point of obsessiveness you're more effective than most disciplined people, however that is also harmful. However if someone is extremely disciplined they can match the former, and use it for many many other things.
I am the former not the latter. Ideally one should have both.
You don't need a degree yes but theory is relevant however yes a CS degree is not a good indicator of any skill and too many CS educated people can't code worth a damn. Theory is not useless as long as you can implement it.