I would say my own experience actually comports with what both of you are saying. Anyone I've worked who self-taught over 20 years ago is damn near universally

I would say my own experience actually comports with what both of you are saying. Anyone I've worked who self-taught over 20 years ago is damn near universally talented, dedicated, and good at what they do, both because they stuck with it and gained decades worth of experience, and because they loved computing enough before it was trendy to actually care and teach themselves something like this over 20 years ago. On the other hand, if you're talking about people who decided in the last decade, as tech salaries exploded and other industries dried up, that they could just learn to code without a formal education because everything is on the Internet anyway, they seem to largely be bare-minimum "I understand roughly how a browser works and damn near nothing else about computers and networks and distributed systems" types. And the quality of a brand-new college grad is almost always lower than a multi-decade veteran, regardless of where they went to school, but that doesn't mean the education was valueless. That doesn't seem like a revelation.