I have been programming since I was 8 years old. In 1978 I touched my first computer, a Commodore Pet which had been added to the office of a friend of my fami

I have been programming since I was 8 years old. In 1978 I touched my first computer, a Commodore Pet which had been added to the office of a friend of my family, who had no idea what to do with it. I was immediately drawn into this world and that moment changed my life definitively. I've since been around the world twice, have written software in a diverse array of markets, including realtime/embedded/safety-critical, professional audio, and scientific instrumentation fields. I'm a highschool dropout, became a competent POSIX developer in the 80's, a competent cross-platform developer in the 90's, an embedded and safety critical developer in the 2000's, and for the past decade have been shipping products in the professional audio realm. I've also been involved in multiple startups - some huge and impactful, but most small and irrelevant. I dropped out of high school in 1987. Throughout this era I've been constantly challenged by academic-trained developers who say things are impossible/can't be done/etc., only to have my work demonstrate otherwise. The key to this is, I am full of self-doubt, and double-check myself, repeatedly, in order to not wreck myself. Whereas, academically-oriented devs have had to eat humble pie, time and again. This is not to toot my own horn - just an observation that over-confidence (or indeed, radical under-confidence) is often the product of a huge investment in ones' education, especially if there are large debts involved (I have no student debt, but I do have 40 years of computer history sitting in my living room, having kept every single platform for which I've done some form of development ...) For many years, I saw computer programmers graduate who could not program their way out of a sealed/wrapped box, and many, many times have had to teach them, myself, to get things done. That said, I've also been humbled by the brilliance of the DSP and machine learning engineers I've worked with, who could not have established their competencies without having had the time to study. I've done software dev projects in Japan, the USA, Australia, Germany, Serbia, Kosovo, Italy, the Netherlands .. with many of my projects still in use on a global scale. I think with software development there is a self-study discipline which must be maintained in order to stay relevant - I was lucky to learn that skill at an early age and to use that discipline to gain more skills. I don't think this discipline is taught well enough in the various markets in which I've worked: It's not what you know. Its that you know you don't know and know how to know. Project workflow, debugging techniques, separation of concerns, and most important of all: proper analysis (identifying similarities/identities/differences in ontology). All generations of software developers have issues with this, and all of us can improve.