How do self-taught developers get jobs? (2016)
I am both a self taught programmer, as well as a self taught guitarist (both for over 30 years now), and I don&#x27;t agree completely with that answer in the blog post.<p>Self learning is great, and it will give you experience and chops in both disciplines, but at the end of the day, you will hit many walls that only a formal education (or a good teacher) can give you.<p>I&#x27;ve written hundreds of (perhaps over a thousand now?) apps over the decades which are used in the real world to save&#x2F;make businesses time or money.  I would probably categorise myself as a &#x27;fairly decent&#x27; programmer, but I know I would fail most whiteboard tests which have basic CS knowledge patterns.  I often look at discussions right here on HN about machine learning or cryptographic patterns etc. and feel like a green newbie again because I find the technical conversations hard to follow.<p>To bring it back to guitar playing - I remember when I was in my first band in high school, I had no idea how to play a guitar solo, but a session musician visiting the school showed me the pentatonic scale, and how you could move it up and down the neck to suit different keys.  Mind blown.  Pick any standard 3 or 4 chord song and I could play a semi decent sounding solo over it.  Forget theory or all that Jazzy stuff - I was on a roll!<p>But after many years, I discovered that I was simply playing the <i>same</i> thing over and over again in different keys.  I wasn&#x27;t really moving forward.  I remember telling other guitarist that - &quot;The _best_ thing I ever learned was the pentatonic scale, and the _worst_ thing I ever learned was the pentatonic scale...&quot;.  I felt boxed in and felt that my skills had plateaued.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until a couple of years ago that I started taking lessons from an experienced guitarist, that I realised what I had been missing on by omitting basic music theory from my vocabulary.  I was astounded by the power of learning the differences in scales, and using modes, triads, augmented chords etc.  Stuff that I thought was too &#x27;intellectual&#x27; or that I believed would restrict my creative freedom actually proved to be the exact opposite.  It was the first time I experienced the concept of &quot;the more you learn, the more you realise there is out there for you to learn&quot;.  A kind of reverse Dunning-Kruger effect?<p>TLDR: Self learning is great, but formal education is a force multiplier.