I'm a mostly self-taught programmer (I took a class on QBasic and a class on Visual Basic in community college).
At the risk of generalizing, self-taught programmers tend to learn things as we need them, since our primary focus seems to be on making features or making products.
I will say that I greatly appreciate the academic programmers though, as without them I wouldn't have any tools to work with. I have no drive to create a new database storage engine, a more efficient bloom filter, or an experimental programming language, but I'm grateful that someone gave me those things to play with.
At the risk of generalizing, self-taught programmers tend to learn things as we need them, since our primary focus seems to be on making features or making products.
I will say that I greatly appreciate the academic programmers though, as without them I wouldn't have any tools to work with. I have no drive to create a new database storage engine, a more efficient bloom filter, or an experimental programming language, but I'm grateful that someone gave me those things to play with.