[raddan]

These are absolutely spot on. I worked as a programmer having been a self taught coder. There were important things I just did not understand. A good example is how to gauge the runtime complexity of a program. I did not know what I did not know. Looking back at the code I wrote then—eek!

I hit another wall later in my career and that drove me to go to grad school. I met some folks there who clearly leveraged their CS knowledge (eg, people who were solving niche compiler problems “for fun”) and I realized that there was a lot more to CS than the stuff I had learned on my own. So I stuck with CS and never went back.