> For one, self-learning just damn hard. Staying motivated to put in self-guided 8+hours everyday without natural peers, external structure and good external evaluation is just hard. You can sustain it for spurts, like 1 summer or in my case 1 whole year, but it erodes your mental health.

Learning for learning's sake, or because you want to get a job as a dev: that I can see being a grind, with motivation being difficult to find.

But if you have a idea for a product, and you want to make it concrete - the motivation is easy. I think most of the self-taught developers I know (myself included) started that way: they wanted to make something, and so they learned how to make software on the fly, while building their thing.