The other way of looking at it is that some love for the craft is pretty much a prerequisite for the self-taught, whilst many graduates are there for the career.
N=1. I remember showing an incredibly competent CS colleague something I'd knocked-up one evening for fun.
They were super-impressed that I did _any_ coding out of hours, and suggested I try and sell it. Totally different worlds.
Re:Self-Taught Engineers Often Outperform
by protocolture on Saturday July 19, 2025 @09:35PM
(#44621131)
I have maybe N=5 of these people, but the one that comes to mind is the gent who was in my game programming classes who had already written his own direct x based game engine and was there to just expand on that knowledge.
Self taught people are naturally filtered. The ones that arent able to come up with a solution in unfamiliar territory arent employed.
People who come up through regular education channels arent bad but arent great either.
People who worked everything out themselves, and then undertook tertiary study to ensure that not only are they doing things well, but are doing them correctly, are absolute power houses and cannot be stopped.