I taught myself HTML and CSS as a youngster for a personal hobby to build things. I joined Travelocity as a designer. Competent front end developers were hard t

I taught myself HTML and CSS as a youngster for a personal hobby to build things. I joined Travelocity as a designer. Competent front end developers were hard to find before frameworks and JQuery did your job for you, so they involuntarily reclassified me to a developer shortly after I joined. I taught myself programming to avoid unemployment. My recommendation is to build something marvelous to solve a personal problem. My observations of the self taught path is that it’s harder to get a job but you will become a superior developer. That frustration continues well past you achieving employment. CS school seems to teach programming in a very OOP Java kind of way. The results are extremely predictable and not open to much deviation. Big companies want that because it’s highly predictable. As a self taught developer you might learn to write code with a bit of nuance that learns towards less code and higher execution performance because you aren’t wasting time with the ceremonial bullshit that CS graduates cannot live without. This is deeply frustrating because when you go to work you have to knowingly write highly inefficient bloated code far more slowly in order to achieve compatibility.