Well, I agree with both of you a bit. I'm mostly self-taught with a backing of a technical diploma and half a CS degree. The part I'd pull from the parent here

Well, I agree with both of you a bit. I'm mostly self-taught with a backing of a technical diploma and half a CS degree. The part I'd pull from the parent here is that I could not reconcile my level of curiosity and so on with the corporate world at all. I tried, it did not work, I just burnt out and resented programming for a while because what they actually valued was the thing other people were really good at, but what they thought they wanted were the qualities that make a scrappy startup great; namely showing up on time for the standup, wearing the right clothes, being tremendously dull with predictable ideas, endless meetings and low level risk mitigation, little agency over work. I've since realized that it might have been the easiest job ever if I didn't have any curiosity, and didn't overcomplicate things or care about quality, because nobody did. I don't think that's the difference between a CS grad and a self-taught person, but it might be what drives a self-taught person to pursue it at all, whereas I've met many in CS who are just there because they were capable at math or made the call to do that degree instead of something else, and some of them really panic when faced with ambiguity. For me, if there's no ambiguity or no aspect of creativity, I just get bored and zone out (yes adhd). Just different alignments in some cases.