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I'm totally on board with learning a lot of deeper technical material by myself but I feel that it's because my background isn't in a technical field from a top university so I've been putting in extra work to compensate even after I got my first job in the industry. Knowing that you're somehow second-class is not a great position to be in even in an industry as open as software.

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Of the _best_ engineers I've ever worked with, at least 50% of them had music degrees.

Don't let the focus on credentialism make you feel second class. Most of the high honors CS grads I've worked with just prefer work assigned to them in sprints and to crank out achievements endlessly. That's great that it works for them.

What's harder to find is people who pursue an interest in advanced topics that aren't dealt with in CS programs. I can count on one hand the number of engineers I've worked with who didn't need an explanation of CRDTs or CQRS or who've looked into things like TLA+...I'd say most I've worked with are light on the "how X protocol works" side of things as well. Implementation details are our wheelhouse.

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