I kind of agree and disagree I work a lot with distributed systems so I have to read a lot of papers, and I have to implement a lot of data structures myself, h

I kind of agree and disagree I work a lot with distributed systems so I have to read a lot of papers, and I have to implement a lot of data structures myself, however I am severely lacking in formal education. While initially my lack of education was a difficult barrier I overcame it pretty quickly. I also have been writing nontrivial code in haskell just to improve my use of scala so that's more of academia I have to deal with. But I still stand by the fact that unless you're going to stanford, CMU, or MIT, or a professor who is not strictly a theorist at an above average school takes a liking to you. If not and you really enjoy the field you're better off teaching yourself.