This is my opinion based on my experience. Some fields genuinely require formal education — medicine, law, civil engineering. But in software development and computer science, I believe the degree system is broken.
University CS programs teach you to pass exams, not to build software. You spend semesters on theory that's decades old, memorising algorithms you'll never implement by hand, while the industry sprints ahead. By the time you graduate, half of what you learned is outdated.
Meanwhile, the curriculum almost never covers: version control workflows, deployment pipelines, how to read other people's code, debugging in production, performance profiling, or writing code that other humans can maintain.
A university degree costs years of your life and tens of thousands in tuition. That same time could be spent building real projects, contributing to open source, learning from actual codebases, and developing a portfolio that proves your skills.
Employers say they want degrees. But ask any senior engineer what they look at when hiring: it's your code, your projects, your ability to think. Not your GPA.
Everything I know — C/C++, WebGL, Vulkan, Three.js, systems programming, color science — I learned by doing. By reading documentation. By breaking things and fixing them. By building LEACB from scratch without a framework.
The internet has made knowledge free. MIT OpenCourseWare, documentation, open-source code, developer blogs, forums — all the information exists. What you need is discipline, curiosity, and the willingness to struggle through problems without a professor telling you the answer.
I'm not saying education is worthless. I'm saying the degree format is an inefficient vehicle for it. Structured learning, mentorship, and peer collaboration are valuable. But you don't need a ₹10-lakh piece of paper to get them.
"A degree proves you can follow instructions for four years. A portfolio proves you can build things."
Build things. Ship them. Learn in public. Let your work speak louder than any certificate. The people who will matter in your career — the engineers, the founders, the collaborators — care about what you can do, not where you studied.