[CyberFonic]

I would recommend going to university and doing that Masters in CS. Mind you, it could be a pretty steep learning curve not having done any undergraduate work.

My rationale is simply that as a self-taught coder, you are unlikely to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals. It is the fundamentals that will support your work in the long term. As you hare discovered coding is only a small part of the total knowledge required to be a competent software engineer (and I use that term deliberately).

The complex stuff that you would like to work on will, sooner or later, require more than programming knowledge. In the long term your additional education will make you far better prepared to handle the intricacies of your intended work.

In closing, it is rather like the distinction between a pharmacist and a general practitioner. They both know the names hundreds of pharmaceutical products. But only the GP is qualified to correctly diagnose the patient's condition and thus optimal prescription(s). In simple cases the pharmacist could probably make a diagnosis and supply the correct drug, but it might not be based on the same thorough examination and diagnosis that the GP would make. In complex cases the latter approach could have adverse effects. Fortunately in medicine there is a protocol that avoids such problems. In programming there are no such protections.

[drhectapus]

Yes I am thinking along the same lines too. Thanks for your answer!