I saw this idea a lot in other various threads. As the average HN poster is probably well educated, I wonder if it’s a biais coming from software engineering where most of the skill set is learnt by experience.
Anyway, I have a long list of university degree, and I can tell there are indeed differences with autodidacts that learnt the same general fields. The fundamental difference is that university forces one to learn the unfunny parts. For computer science it means for example functional programming, database normal forms, language theory, anything with mathematics inside, etc. Of course, university classes alone are not enough and much like an autodidact much study have to be done alone, which might lead one to conclude that university is not required. But I don’t think it the case.