No, you need to somehow invest more time to build more features than another sucker out there. That's almost entirely it. Period. Shit is just fast enough these days, and if your industry cares about performance, well then maybe understanding something about caching that can be learned in less than a day from a blog article will help you with 80% of your problems.
There's plenty of work out there that craves better solutions, and a degree is absolutely not even a nice to have at this point. Let me repeat: there are fundamentally basic applications and software solutions that various industries are dying to have exist, millions of dollars on the line if you know what industries in question, that simply just take a damn long time to implement but every individual piece is so far removed from so much as a basic comp sci 101 algo class, that you're literally just talking about business logic at that point.