[Quekid5]

> There’s a lot of things wrong with software engineering - harboring this attitude that self-taught learning is bad or shameful makes it unnecessarily worse

This is an interesting question.

There's nothing wrong with being an autodidact, per se, but in my experience in hiring people and working with autodidacts: Autodidacts are not very good at recognizing their own limitations[0] and they usually do not have a lot of breadth of knowledge outside their area of interest. This can even go so far as not knowing that there is such a thing as "Entire Field of Study Foo". (Let's say Foo is Discrete Mathematics.)

Will they be bad hires? It depends on what you need -- and they can absolutely perform as well or better than any "more educated" person. It very much depends on the actual person... as almost all work does.

[0] This explicitly ties into the second point about breadth of knowledge. It's about knowing what you don't know and are willing to research further. The problem with autodidacts is often that there's such an insane leap from "oh, i know this" to a seemingly totally unrelated field which has deep connections to what you're doing. That's what a "broad" education in CS is there to teach you. Are you going to use all of that? Hell no! But just maybe that 5% you do end up using makes up for the 95% you don't.