My point is you don't know what you don't know. There is really only so far you can get by just noodling around on your own, at some point we have to learn from more experienced people to get to the next level

School is a much more consistent path to gain that knowledge than just diving in

It's not the only path, but it turns out that people like consistency

But you have to know this knowledge exists in the first place. That's part of the appeal of university teaching: it makes you aware of many different paradigms. So the day you stumble on one of them you know where to look for a solution. And usually you learn how to read (and not to fear) reading scientific papers which can be useful. And statistics.

>People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed

My experience is that "self taught" people are passionate about solving the parts they consider fun but do not have the breadth to be as effective as most people who have formal training but less passion. The previous poster also called out real issues with this kind of developer (not understanding time complexity or how to fix things) that I have repeatedly seen in practice.

I have not learned CS at university (maths & stats graduate who shifted to programming, because I can't help myself loving it). I work with engineers with CS degrees from pretty good universities. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I write better code then a lot of them (and some of them write code that it so clean and tight that I wish I could match it). Purely based on my fairly considerable experience, there is basically little correlation between degree and quality of code. There is non-trivial correlation between raw intelligence and the output. And there is a massive correlation between how much one cares about the quality of the work and the output.