> ...it doesn't matter how much formal education / training you get, you're still going to have to do a massive amount of self-learning before you can hope to a

> ...it doesn't matter how much formal education / training you get, you're still going to have to do a massive amount of self-learning before you can hope to achieve excellence. So I'm a self-taught programmer, and this attitude annoys the hell out of me. 1. EVERYTHING requires self-learning to be more than mediocre. In fact, the more I learn about other fields -- engineering, medicine, law -- the more I realize those fields probably actually require MUCH MORE self-directed learning than programming. It's just that this self-learning is much harder to do in isolation without at least a college education. E.g., try teaching yourself any of the traditional fields of engineering with only what you learned before 10th grade. You'll find it's much harder than teaching yourself programming. Whereas you can easily land a developer position with things that the average pre-calculus 11th grader can pretty easily teach themselves. 2. College-educated people who didn't start programming until 18+ ALSO do a lot of self-learning. The difference between them and me (or anyone else who self-taught as a kid) is that they could learn in 1-2 years during their 20s what it took me 4+ years to learn in my pre-teens/teens. Which there's absolutely nothing wrong with. I called it reading tutorials and messing around at night while they called it reading a textbook and doing course projects/homework assignments. I called them high school friends and IRC budddies while they called them TAs. But the actual content of the work and the amount of external direction provided is about equivalent. Just because programming is simple enough that you can learn how to do enough to get a well-paying job before hitting 16 doesn't mean that people who go through a college degree aren't also doing a ton of self-learning alongside lectures.