A university degree has multiple purposes.
As a student, you want to learn stuff and network with fellow students and get a paper.
As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field.
However, a university degree in computer science is not and should not be expected to be a developer training course.
It's very feasible to become a developer in a self-taught way and work productively in industry, building websites, CRUD apps, mobile apps etc. No need for a degree here.
It's much less feasible to self-teach computer science and math and so on. A university program will force you to do it even when it's not pleasurable. But it won't teach you practical web design skills etc. because that isn't its purpose.
What we have today is definitely a bad arrangement. Many students study a field they are ultimately aren't interested in and won't use, just to fulfill employers' requirements.
I'd wager that computing science autodidacts find study pleasurable for it's own sake. Advanced graduate and post-graduate work notwithstanding, the most advanced math you need to master CS fundamentals (and then some) is the predicate calculus and some analysis. These are nontrivial, but certainly much easier than what one would deal with in a typical pure math undergrad program. They are well within the abilities of an enthusiastic hacker with a solid high school education (up to calc 1) to master from textbooks without coercion.
> As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field.
As an employer, an autodidact who has mastered the subject has demonstrated to me the ability to be passionate and act on his own initiative. I personally value that higher than a proven track record of conformity and trained obedience. That said, organizations differ, and for many large companies where 90% of the work is busywork, the autodidacts will get bored and leave in short order. So don't hire them if the work is fundamentally pointless salary justification.
Let's ignore for the moment whether it's even needed, whether devs will just code stuff that doesn't need much math anyway etc. as that's a different topic. I want to focus on whether autodidacts get the same level of CS knowledge as university graduates (with good grades).
My CS education did have a lot of difficult math that I enjoyed but in a running-a-marathon way, not in an eat-a-piece-of-cake way. Having regular lectures, homework and topics given to you by experts in a logical order is very important for many people like myself, so they have no gaps and get a well-rounded overview of CS fundamentals. Designing your own curriculum is often how you end up being a crank as well (e.g. see "autodidact physicists").
And it's not just calculus and analysis, but also graph theory, complexity theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, complex numbers, formal languages and automata, information theory, theory of compression and encryption algorithms, signal processing like Fourier theory, control theory, optimization and machine learning, and various other things you learn here and there, such as Petri nets, quaternions etc.
And also, outside of extraordinary life circumstances, why not get admitted to a university anyway, if you're so enthusiastic about all this theory stuff that you'd learn it to good-grade level just by your own motivation anyway? For example in Germany, university is free and if you prefer you can even skip all the lectures if you don't think they give you value and just take the exams, while studying in your preferred autodidactic fashion.
My default assumption, unless convinced otherwise by evidence, is that self-taught devs can put together functioning code and have familiarity with CS terminology but only a vague folk understanding of the details.
Most people who argue that university is superfluous are usually those who could not pass the exams due to a lack of interest and/or talent (or live in a country with tuition fees they cannot afford, such as the US).
