> I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses.

Ding ding ding. I've gotten my share of flak on a couple occasions for working in IT without a degree.

These people looking down on me are probably right that they're smarter than me and more knowledgeable than me and could probably code circles around me. I know I ain't getting a FAANG job any time soon. I know full well that there are gaps in my knowledge that someday I'd be interested in filling once I've got enough saved up to try college again. Doesn't mean I can't be productive, too, nor does it mean I can't teach myself what I need to know to get the job done. Maybe duct-taping systems together with MSSQL sprocs and proprietary programming languages/runtimes and shell scripts and CSVs ain't the most glamorous work compared to playing around with blockchains and neural nets and Jupyter notebooks, but it's work that needs done regardless, and I ain't too proud to do it, even if it's putting grey hairs on my head decades before they've got any business being there.

"Top-down" v. "bottom-up" is definitely a good way of putting it. The code I write ain't pretty, but it's gonna do exactly what I need it to do to solve the user's problem, and chances are it's solving problems for which there are no elegant solutions. It ain't gonna run like a Lamborghini, but that's okay; I just need it to run like a Tacoma.