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Comment by bmcleod | Hacker News Reader

The list they've put together it long enough that I would expect nearly everyone to be missing a few.

Compilers and Machine learning are probably the two that you don't see in self-taught people much. The ones you do see it in generally go to university shortly after having been self-taught anyway.

Most of the other things on the list you learn if you deal with particular programming languages. And a university degree doesn't really supply breadth much more than being self-taught does. But someone who was self-taught and then did a degree will be much broader in skill, which is why those people seem to have such diverse skills.

The actual answer is that the self-taught programmer needs to keep learning and broadening into other languages etc. Which is exactly the same thing any other programmer needs to do.

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Maybe I'm an outlier, but the self-taught people I know fare particularly well on compilers and machine-learning among my peers. Maybe it's the circles I travel in, though. :)

FWIW, I'm a self-taught information-retrieval / compiler / linguistics geek, currently studying machine learning. I've been programming since I was 5, and I always wanted to be a super-librarian, whatever that meant.

The majority of people I've come across started by doing web stuff or Basic way back in the day. I think in general that's the largest population. The best self-taught people I know have by now read everything that would be in a university reading list anyway.

I think it reinforces the point that self-taught people become very knowledgeable about the things they're interested in. The average self-taught programmer is likely to be more motivated than the average new CS grad. Although this may be becoming less true as more of the less purely interested people move to the more "practical" software related degrees that exist.

I'm self-taught and after a few years in industry, decided to go back to school so I could really accelerate my learning.

I know more than most of my fellow students, due to the few extra years of experience and personal effort, but I definitely had blind spots. It isn't even entire categories of things, but rather little pockets here and there in individual classes.

I have learned a lot, but deciding to get a math BS alongside it has helped the most. I've taken this experience in school as one to soak up as much hard information as possible, so if my personal efforts are any indication, I can see why the combo ends up with a better skills list than either alone.

I've come to really value the stuff that is taught in universities (at a decent enough school anyway). I suspect the longest lived impact of all of this is an ability to read and consume a higher level of information (journals, etc) on a broader variety of topics. It beats blogs, more often than not.

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