I'm self-taught in the sense that I learned Javascript before I graduated high school and got a chance to learn to program in a formal setting. Also, I got a de

I'm self-taught in the sense that I learned Javascript before I graduated high school and got a chance to learn to program in a formal setting. Also, I got a degree in Electrical Engineering, even though I use exactly none of that in my current position as... wait for it... a web developer. I think self-taught or not is not the question. The real question is, are you passionate about programming, or at least about creating things via programming. There are a lot of people who have taught themselves to program as a means to an end, and I think that makes them "better", in some sense, than someone who started their CS degree in search of a paying job without ever writing a line of code. Of course, the above is very binary, and as comfortable as we programmers might be with that, (and if I may issue a blanket cop-out at the last second), I think "self-taught" is a small facet of the whole that makes a "good" or "bad" programmer.