This makes me wonder... The idea of studying for the sake of making it a certain company, for some reason, turns me off. Never had the personality to do things

This makes me wonder... The idea of studying for the sake of making it a certain company, for some reason, turns me off. Never had the personality to do things only because a parent/teacher/company wanted me to do it. But, if there was something more fundamental to study for, like a certificate, or a project, or a competition (something more advanced than a hackaton), that'd actually be really interesting. The relative success or failure with it could, then, provide feedback. I guess Project Euler is kind of close, but it's a bit too much of a one-person affair, and only the right answer matters. In other areas, there are often communities where more experienced people help out the less experienced while collectively getting better, and there are tangible goals at every step. Video games come to mind. Unfortunately, all I've seen is always around data structures, small scripts and hacks, time-gated, overly simple, and promote what I would call bad code or shallow understanding. It makes you good at the events in question, and you can get some certificate, but whether or not it's actually making you a better developer is suspect and the correlation is often backwards, if anything. So the only solid goal a lot of people see is getting hired by X company, and, by extension, getting better at interviews. Because that's something you can measure and get good feedback from and it's a lot simpler than trying to figure out what being a good software developer means.