That's roughly how I broke in to technical work, modulo the patents. 25 years later I actually do feel at home in particular domains. But I was a young college dropout in the early 90s, and while I never outright misrepresented my experience, I did tell myself that nobody else had any idea how that stuff worked either. (Which I tend to believe more now than I did then, but for different reasons...)

As programming and systems engineering slowly formalizes, it seems to me that's getting harder to do. I see fewer self-taught folks in their early-mid 20s these days at least, although I could be observing my personal bias from aging. Anyone else have an idea?