The biggest thing you will miss is how much better some of your peers (and elders) are, who they are and where you can find their stuff. This has gotten a lot b

The biggest thing you will miss is how much better some of your peers (and elders) are, who they are and where you can find their stuff. This has gotten a lot better since the web came around so you have an easier time of it than some old hand autodidact. Self taught programmer here, it took reading a pile of source code and a bunch of links posted on HN for me to realize that I wasn't half as sharp as I thought I was. Pretty humbling, the upside is that now there is more to learn. CS courses as such are not the main differentiating factor between self-taught and not when it comes to quality, it is who you learn from, what and how. If you teach yourself there are problems with perspective and breadth of knowledge about the field as a whole where a mentor could probably make you move much faster.