[DanWeinreb]

There isn't any one "self-taught programmer" who can be characterized, so a lot of these comments are claiming to be more general than I think is fair.

I have close friends who are utterly top-notch software engineers who didn't learn any of their skills in a formal educational setting. Often they have been able to learn-as-they-go. After all, these days the field is so large that nobody can be an expert at everything. And we often change jobs enough that what we need to know changes over time. So we all need the ability to learn-on-demand.

I was fortunate to get a computer science undergrad degree from M.I.T., but at the time, they didn't have any courses whatsoever on database systems. I ended up in a position where I needed to write a DBMS, so I found the textbooks and papers and learned how. A lot of my career has been based on that. It's not necessarily all that hard to learn things yourself.