I'm self-taught as well. Dunno if I'm the one to say, but I'd consider myself in the upper-quartile of programming breadth as a result. There are lots of tale

I'm self-taught as well. Dunno if I'm the one to say, but I'd consider myself in the upper-quartile of programming breadth as a result. There are lots of talented programmers though from a host of different backgrounds. I've mostly learned from books, man pages and a string of interesting problems[1]. I think in general you tend to learn in a different way if you learn through self-directed problem solving. Like you get much deeper understanding of the theory, because that's the only way to get anything done. It's a much harsher standard than having to pass a test. Though I think there's a lot of survivorship bias involved in making self-taught programmers competent. The ones who didn't have a knack for it are doing something else now. [1] e.g. 15 years ago I built a 6502 emulator with a weird fantasy base 3 architecture, which eventually included a C compiler for this weird architecture. (I guess I was Terry Davis before it was cool.) More recently I'm working on an internet search engine I've built from scratch in vanilla Java bespoke index, bespoke crawling, bespoke everything.