I'm a Systems Engineer (in the DevOps/automation space) but I want to move towards development more and more. I never did attend university and my maths is poor. I'm in agreement with you that there are a lot of people running around doing perfectly fine at integrating into the industry and solving problems.

Recently I've been getting more and more eager to move into development, however. Now perhaps it's just a personality thing, but I'm very keen to learn CS basics and get a good grasp of maths whilst I make this transition. I think this is important for me simply because I want to be able to utilise CS level maths to solve certain CS problems. As I never went to university, I'm losing out on some efficient solutions.

All this being said, I could stumble around without this knowledge and do just fine ($200k a year, in fact) as a contractor. I just personally feel the CS level knowledge is important to become good at what I want to do.