[czbond]

I self taught myself before college and then used a CS degree to force me to study things I never would have. It tended to round me out better in areas where a self taught might avoid. For example, optimization, refactoring, underlying OS implementation, architectures, etc. No way on earth would I have diligently taught myself those for months on end.

[louthy]

I think this just shows how 'fluffy' the advice here is. As a self taught programmer starting with a computer that had a clock speed of 2MHz and 32k of RAM, I learned very early how to optimise, how to refactor and how OSs worked under the hood (as well as the underlying hardware). When I look at Big O notation, I always see the efficiency description of any algorithm as 'well, durr', because I just have a strong sense of whether something is going to run in fixed, linear, or exponential time.

So I feel the exact opposite of you: I would only have learned "optimization, refactoring, underlying OS implementation, architectures, etc." if I had the 'infinite' personal self-tuition time. I couldn't imagine learning any of that stuff in a class-room.

I'm not saying you're wrong, you're not. But clearly there's cognitive biases on both sides, which might not be very helpful to the OP.