Self Taught

"I'm a self taught developer."

I've probably said this myself a few times. However, I've been hovering around this term because it bothers me a bit. In some sense of the term, we are all "self taught developers". Even if you went to school and got a CS degree, you still had to go out and put in the work to fully internalize the process of how to make software. You had to write code on your own. There are no real training wheels for this. You had to make mistakes and through idioms or feedback from others, you corrected. Is that "self taught" though?

You may hear this proudly stated by many out in the wild. We wear it as a badge of honor to communicate the weight of our endeavors and accomplishments. Good! It's hard to learn to code.

Looking back at my journey, I consumed tons of content and I relied on several friends and colleagues to help me along the way. Is that "self taught"?

Perhaps the only self taught programmer was Ada Lovelace (the first programmer) or the other giants, whose shoulders we stand on, that paved the way.

Another problem with the term "self taught" is that it might imply that you're done.

"Empty Your Cup" -- Zen Proverb

or

"Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality." -- Bruce Lee

Positioning yourself as if you already know everything can seriously impact your ability to learn.

Along these lines, I like Dan Abromov's assertion that we should all be junior developers.

So in some ways, none of us are "self taught". In fact, if you rigorously isolated yourself and attempted to teach yourself how to code, you probably wouldn't be all that good.

By doing the hard thing of sharing your code and asking for feedback, you can massively accelerate your growth as a developer and learn from the insights of those that came before you.

I think the notion of "self taught developer" goes against one of the core fundamentals of software development. i.e. software development is a team sport.

Don't go it alone.