I'm also a self taught programmer. I've been coding since I was a child, and professionally for just shy of 20 years. I took the Stanford Algorithms 1 & 2 cour

I'm also a self taught programmer. I've been coding since I was a child, and professionally for just shy of 20 years. I took the Stanford Algorithms 1 & 2 courses that used to be free on Coursera and certainly never regretted it. I've since worked at several large tech companies and ALMOST never needed them. From my memory I've needed to implement my own binary search and my own tree traversal (BFS) once each. Both were due to an odd data structure that made it hard to use a library. I probably could've shoe-horned it in somehow, but it was easier (or maybe more fun) in the moment to implement it myself. However, the thing that REALLY triggered my imposter syndrome wasn't algorithms, but design patterns. When I started at Microsoft I'd been programming for over 10 years and suddenly felt like people spoke an entirely different language. Luckily, it turned out most of the patterns they were referencing by name I had already been using, but just didn't know the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time studying design patterns largely just to have a shared vocabulary (and not feel dumb whenever someone said "maybe we should use a ___ pattern" in a meeting), but I also learned several new ones.