FWIW I live in Utah, work remote, and am self taught (dropout from engineering program) and my base is higher than that. It's in the 240s.
I'm the first one to tell someone to go to school instead. It's not actually the fundamentals I missed out on, it was the network of peers in computer science as well as potential options in academia. It slowed my career growth down a bit. I'm not complaining though since I'm set to retire in my 30s and I wasn't forced to compromise on where I want to live (I really like snowboarding and mountain biking).
I like to think I took the scenic and unpaved route. Maybe harder overall, but it was a fun journey and I ended up in a good place.
Can you share which company you're working remotely for? I figured most people in Utah who are at > $200k base are working remotely for bigger SF-based companies, but I haven't really heard of many companies doing that. (I understand if you can't, though)
I noticed that as well. I have always thought there might be a correlation between self-taught and self selection for success in a topic.
Anecdotally, I was self-taught, and many of the highest performing engineers I know where also. Most of the average performing engineers I know were traditionally educated in CS.
I'm self-taught and that salary is within a couple $K of my own. Regarding your own experience though, I have noticed the inverse wherever I go. I moved from Charlotte (NC) two years ago, and there nearly everyone was self-taught and the skill level, generally, was much lower. The ones with degree educations were still stronger. When I got to SoCal, way more engineers were college-educated and still stronger than the self-taught ones, myself included.
I think it is hard to infer much from some of these data points.
There may be some correlation between "high performance" and "self-taught", since it takes a decent amount of motivation and talent to even get your first few jobs as someone without the educational background, but I don't know how long that is significant for.
I'm self-taught, and while it has worked out well for me so far, I do wish I'd gotten a CS degree. I've spent a ton of time studying stuff you'd learn in a CS degree, but I do feel like - especially for the first 5 years of my career - I made a lot of mistakes I probably wouldn't have, spent more time "inventing" things that had already been invented, and designed things in less optimal ways than I could have.
Plus, it took me about 10 years to understand just how fascinating and fun some of this stuff is. Although, who knows if I would have appreciated it in college?
Agreed, it's kinda hard to qualify, particularly as a side-effect rather than the central focus. Most of this boils down to personality.
I also sometimes wish I had gotten my degree for similar reasons, and still do plan to, though perhaps not in CS. Definitely math, and maybe something else. That isn't to say I wasn't boosted in my own ways, unencumbered by not trying to design things to fit a preconceived model, and learning what was practically useful. "Inventing" those things yourself can give you more insight and appreciation for the way they are or should be built. Unfortunately it seems to come full circle, and eventually you need those models and that less-practical knowledge.
Regarding the bias, I think it's the same way here, to be honest. My sample size for California (employer) is n = 1, and we do work that is both technically challenging and fun, so we attract and can only realistically take on those kinds of people.
More interesting is that the “self-taught” group as a whole has the highest average salary of all the education levels. That is one of the two big surprises for me in this survey. The other is the leadership roles having a narrower range and lower top end than dev positions.
Personally I don't think that is at all surprising. A college education doesn't mean you know what you are doing. The self taught group learned by doing something. My guess is they had a problem to solve and found out to solve it. That's a better education than the towers of Hanoi, some useless sorting algorithm that will never be relevant or the misc crap that is taught in CS.
IME, self-taught people tend to have solid business acumen too. The getting that first job with no credentials forces you to 1) figure out a good idea for a product, 2) build it, 3) sell it. Even if it's a small/toy example, like a website or app, and "selling it" amounts to showing it off in interviews.
In contrast, most CS grads can get a good job after a whiteboard session and a quiz.
I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but there's absolutely some self-selection going on among self-taught engineers.
I'm the first one to tell someone to go to school instead. It's not actually the fundamentals I missed out on, it was the network of peers in computer science as well as potential options in academia. It slowed my career growth down a bit. I'm not complaining though since I'm set to retire in my 30s and I wasn't forced to compromise on where I want to live (I really like snowboarding and mountain biking).
I like to think I took the scenic and unpaved route. Maybe harder overall, but it was a fun journey and I ended up in a good place.