I&#x27;m also a self-taught developer and contributing full-stack and with devops, and I&#x27;ve got a year to go to that 5 years XP mark. I&#x27;d say I&#x27;m pretty productive on a day to day basis, but I do lack certain skillsets that are &quot;required&quot; in some interviews but don&#x27;t effect my day-to-day (I learn things as a need arises):<p>Low level considerations: Its extremely rare with todays tools and libraries especially to have to dive super deep into compilers or engines. I have to do it once or twice a year to fix some terrible bug, so spending years learning about the intricacies of building my own compiler isn&#x27;t that useful for me to actually get work done. Granted I&quot;m not doing groundbreaking computer science work but I AM getting a full stack of performant secure and load-balanced services and servers up and running to perform core business work.<p>You can hire Jr. people absolutely - just make sure that whatever they have grown in first is something that you use a lot, while they grow into other areas. If you don&#x27;t have the budget for super senior do it all people, or if you are on a large team or company where a super senior do it all person would be slowed down there&#x27;s no issue with hiring B-level or Jr. people - in fact, you&#x27;ll probably get a lot of good work done out of them. If nobody took a chance on me then I&#x27;d be nowhere now.