Wow, I had a very similar early years to Dan. I also did the "learning to code as a teen" thing that didn't really work out, other than to establish an interest

Wow, I had a very similar early years to Dan. I also did the "learning to code as a teen" thing that didn't really work out, other than to establish an interest. I also did EE, which was nice in that for the first time I had an overview the whole way down to the silicon. The big revelation for me though was that you can learn anything yourself. You also don't need to be able to do exam questions to understand something, although you need some maturity to know whether you get it or not. I can almost pinpoint when it happened: I went to a tutorial with a grad student who nonchalantly explained that he was going to read the whole syllabus on biomedical engineering in the next few weeks, by himself. Armed with that, I started my first job in finance. I read a lot of books those first few years, textbooks, biographies, histories, everything. The econ/mgt part of my course didn't really say anything about bonds and derivative pricing, but I found the relevant texts. It helped a lot to have done math heavy courses, but I still ran into new things like stochastic calculus. Concurrently I discovered that a lot of things were getting automated, so I'd better learn how to actually code (my degree actually did go through DS&A, but I had no idea I'd need it). This was more gradual, as the prestige job in finance is trading, not coding. But as time went by it became increasingly clear that if you couldn't code, you narrowed your future opportunities by a lot. These days I'm coding every single day, and most of my issues are coding issues, not trading issues.