The reason you get stories like this (apart from the fact most programmers have superiority complexes) is the computing industry has no real body to encompass a standard in the way other engineering disciplines do. Google, Microsoft, IBM et al get around this by requiring a CS degree or masters as the minimum. There are some things you simply cannot learn through googling and Wrox books that you learn in a CS degree. Whether these things are useful or not for most programmers' careers - aside from back-patting interviews - is a different matter of course. My view is they are but not all programmers do it for fun.