Agreed - my CS degree exposed me to a bunch of low level 'algorithms & data structures' type stuff + a bit of assembly, prolog etc + some math stuff all of which I likely wouldn't have gone out of my way to learn on my own unless it came up in a very obvious way in a problem I was trying to solve. But like 95% of the actual large scale software engineering type work (read: actually building useful software) I learned on my own by building unnecessarily over engineered side projects, or by building stuff while working.
(as an aside: "don't overengineer things" is great advice when your goal is to actually finish creating something useful, but imo if you're coding to learn then horrendously overengineering everything is super valuable to the learning process - you should totally set up a full custom CI pipeline, design your own networking protocol, write a parser for a DSL etc etc in service of your dumb little tic tac toe game or whatever you're making - you will learn things)
I haven't dared even looking at any other Civilization game after the first one. I kept deleting it and it somehow found a way to sneak back when I wasn't looking through some sort of sentient magic undelete function.
Even a degree is self taught. The assessment is typically pretty decoupled from the content. You could say "people that have taught themselves a degree course have a better understanding than those that learnt just enough to pass the assessment".
Agreed. The effective difference between a degree and learning on your own comes down to structure, really. A college course gives you a decent enough structure to know that you do addition, then subtraction before you go trying to learn multiplication. I often find trying to learn things on my own I start from differential calculus in this example and try to work backwards.
> I often find trying to learn things on my own I start from differential calculus in this example and try to work backwards.
Doesn't everyone who has learned how to learn? Learning is way more efficient when you already have forward context for why you are learning something. Nebulously studying addition and subtraction without being able to see that it leads to multiplication (to stay with your example) is an absolutely horrid situation to find yourself in.
In fact, I suspect that's exactly what the article is really trying to get at: Those who "learn backwards", which happens to be a trait commonly associated with self-teaching, outperform.
