How does a musician without any formal CS education and a admitted lack of understanding of some very fundamental software things, such as pointers and memory, land a San Francisco dev job? I thought those jobs were in very high demand
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It's a bit like learning a language. You can learn a foreign language without formally studying grammar, and most of the time you will instinctively get things right, and have an intuitive idea of how grammar works.
But formally studying the grammar of a new language makes learning much faster, and you have a deeper understanding.
But, finding niches of interest to focus on usually helps, as it does when crafting really good songs in a specific style, one that matches your musical abilities and understanding. You may not have the chops, but you can still create amazing work.
With programming, I have the issue of wanting to catch up on everything and do side-projects (eventually, I'll run through this class => http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay/courses/2012/fall/330/course/...), but I have found success in trying to pick-up things in conjunction with a task at hand. If I have to build a web service, I'll start that research simultaneously. Starting IOS work... then spend time with C, understand Objective-C's runtime, read about the history (and play around with Smalltalk). This piece-meal approach seems to make the jump more "doable" in my opinion.
I think that people without a CS degree can obtain a good, challenging gig if they have a good niche to school themselves in, and of course, pick-up the gaps from the people they work along with who have that background/knowledge.