I'm 50/50 on this. Part of me really agrees with you -- you need time and practice and mistakes to learn this stuff. But also, I'm not sure it has to be wall clock time.
Four years at university gets you breadth that is probably good for you as a human, and probably important for contextualizing your work as an engineer (oh hey, history might be a valuable lesson for your understanding of ethics. Art and literature might combine with your computer science degree to inspire projects natural language processing or generative art.)
I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven. And honestly, I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.
Four years at university gets you breadth that is probably good for you as a human, and probably important for contextualizing your work as an engineer (oh hey, history might be a valuable lesson for your understanding of ethics. Art and literature might combine with your computer science degree to inspire projects natural language processing or generative art.)
I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven. And honestly, I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.