Like most engineering disciplines, there are two aspects to a successful career: theoretical knowledge, and practical knowledge. If you go the self-taught route

Like most engineering disciplines, there are two aspects to a successful career: theoretical knowledge, and practical knowledge. If you go the self-taught route you will have practical knowledge, but lack theoretical. If you go university it will be the inverse. The secret in both cases is that you _must fill in the gaps that you lack_. Too many "self-taught" dont actually hit the books and fill in the theory gap. Also as another poster mentioned, starting off at a startup was basically steroids from a "practical knowledge" perspective. I got my first job as a self-taught rails dev with 1 personal site in my portfolio, and left 4 years later with experience in: - native mobile dev (both ios and android) - infrastructure management (chef, ansible, vagrant) - server administration on both AWS and colo setups - debugging + fixing performance/scaling issues in production apps - Miscellaneous knowledge in PHP, React, sinatra, ruby in general Most of those things I was introduced to in some capacity in the first 2 years honestly. Now that I've had the opportunity to go to several other companies, its clear that my willingness to get into unknown technology and figure things out the same way I was forced to at the startup is probably the biggest "super power" I have now. People in general really prefer to stay in their own lane tech wise I've found.