I’d go further and say that writing code for a living requires a great deal of self-teaching regardless of your background. CS degrees typically don’t teach you

I’d go further and say that writing code for a living requires a great deal of self-teaching regardless of your background. CS degrees typically don’t teach you how to build software, and even if they did, the problem space is huge. There is a lifetime of self-teaching to do from the moment you take your first job. I think that my being self-taught helped my career quite a bit. It did make it harder to get in the door, but that was just a one-time problem to solve.