[achenet]

what about open-source projects? Much as how aspiring authors can learn to write fiction from reading the fiction of others and then imitating that, getting feedback on their work, and iterating, it seems like aspiring programmers could learn by reading/contributing to the open-source projects of others and then writing their own.

Example- Linus Torvalds, never worked for a company, made the original Linux while a grad student, and seems to be doing fine (I'm writing this message on a ThinkPad running Linux Mint). Or Bill Joy with BSD at Berkley, before his time at Sun. Or heck, why not go all the way back to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie building Unix and C?