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> … the advent of self taught engineers?

This makes it sound like a recent phenomenon. Self-taught software engineers have been around quite some time. When I attempted to attend post-secondary school (early to mid 1990s), the idea of “computer science” was still too new to academia in general - the course offerings taught little to nothing outside of what one could pick up on their own.

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Self taught programmers come in different flavors but people tend to think of one type when talking about them so it is hard to have good discussion. There are classic self taughts, like George Hotz who had an interest that naturally developed into a career. There is also the newer self taught, like the 40 year old fry cook who realized one day they needed a career and saw a bootcamp ad or a story of someone in their position brute forcing leetcode for 3 months and landing a 200k job at google. In some way even people with CS degrees are self taught programmers. You learn programming by spending hours in front of a computer just like you learn to drive a car by driving not just by sitting in a classroom.

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