As a self-taught engineer who made it pretty far as a career, getting to work at CSIRO (Australia's Science and Technology Research Centre), I can say I definit

As a self-taught engineer who made it pretty far as a career, getting to work at CSIRO (Australia's Science and Technology Research Centre), I can say I definitely did not outperform my peers there. However, engineers at CSIRO felt I outperformed the average engineer. I was occasionally brought in to interview new potential hires, and I don't think there was a significant difference between the self-taught or the classically trained (either software engineering or computer science). I think the difference was first of all, did they just love building, and secondly, did they ask the right questions as they went through the development process. I think I struggled in the 2nd half of that, and I could run off on some far-flung direction not because I didn't know what needed to be done, or the "right-way", but sometimes because I wanted to try to prove that I was as capable as my peers. But the plain fact is, I just wasn't, and I'm ok with that. It's kinda how I ended up as a CEO, I can understand and direct the product/technology from a high level, and particularly now that we're in neurotech, I'm not the right person to be writing C. So if you want to be self-taught, you can go far. But when you get to the top, you're probably going to want a great mentor who won't necessarily be teaching details about coding, but more about the approaches to engineering.