1. There's heavy survivorship bias. Many, many self-taught folks are ineffective. The only ones you see in the wild are also talented--talented enough for management to ignore their lack of a credentials which is a little more talented than most.
2. There's even more selection bias: people who self-teach may have more self-confidence and drive. I will say, however, that today salaries seem to be a larger motivating factor. Do you really think the finance bros who switch careers care about the craft?
3. Self-taught != experience. Having "the intuition needed when the recipe breaks at 3 a.m. on prod", is not imparted until you actually deploy something to prod. 99% of self-taught folks haven't deployed anything to give them that exposure.
4. Self-taught does not often give exposure to "hard problems." Most self-taught folks can't do fundamental work on databases, operating systems, file systems, machine learning, or compilers: you know the hard math and CS they teach in schools. Most get trapped doing easy things, and in turn, most get trapped in full-stack roles.
5. Is self-taught really even self-taught anymore? Does Coursera count?
1. There's heavy survivorship bias. Many, many self-taught folks are ineffective. The only ones you see in the wild are also talented--talented enough for management to ignore their lack of a credentials which is a little more talented than most.
2. There's even more selection bias: people who self-teach may have more self-confidence and drive. I will say, however, that today salaries seem to be a larger motivating factor. Do you really think the finance bros who switch careers care about the craft?
3. Self-taught != experience. Having "the intuition needed when the recipe breaks at 3 a.m. on prod", is not imparted until you actually deploy something to prod. 99% of self-taught folks haven't deployed anything to give them that exposure.
4. Self-taught does not often give exposure to "hard problems." Most self-taught folks can't do fundamental work on databases, operating systems, file systems, machine learning, or compilers: you know the hard math and CS they teach in schools. Most get trapped doing easy things, and in turn, most get trapped in full-stack roles.
5. Is self-taught really even self-taught anymore? Does Coursera count?