It is my belief that being a good programer is largelly... orthogonal ;--) to what your major was in college. Some CS majors will never be good coders and some autodidacts are really, really good. The fact that the vast majority of people do not major in CS ensures that the proportion of autodidacts amongst good coders will always remain quite high.

More over, as CS is still a young science, a curious mind can easily make up for years training in college through reading and onvolvement in the programing community.

So yes, I think taht for the elite coders a degree is not really useful, and autodidacts can do very well without it.

That said... I still think that a CS degree helps "regular folks". It forces students to know about subjects even though they might not have invested in reading about them if they were not directly relevant to their everyday work. It teaches (or it should teach!) good habits (specify and design before coding, test your code, use a configuration control system...). All things that a real good autodidact would do, but that your average non-CS major turned programer might not.

So yes, a good autodidact is just as good as a good CS graduate, but a bad-to-average autodidact will probably be much worse than a bad-to-average CS graduate.

Not that you can't find real pathetic CS majors who could not code they way out of a bubble sort... and the problem is that this people might hang around trying to be programers while real bad autodidacts usually find something else to do, for which they might be better suited.