I'm a self taught guitarist (for the last 2+ years). I know a fair bit of music theory. I know different scales. I know how chords are constructed over scales. Major chords, minor chords, 7th chords, add/sus, power chords... Chord progressions... Different chord voicings ... inversions... Time signatures... I play classical pieces and I play rock/pop. I put a lot of time into this and I realize getting somewhere is going to take a lot more time, I don't suck any more but I'm still a beginner.
There are endless online resources for learning music theory, Coursera, YouTube, Wikipedia and more.
Point is the self-taught vs. theory is orthogonal. Some people are formally taught and don't get the theory and some people are self taught and spend the time getting a deep theoretical understanding. I took some lessons with a recent music graduate who didn't really know that much music theory, he wasn't that interested and it went in one ear and out the other apparently. Technically he was at a much higher level but he didn't care much for theory...
It is unfortunately true that a lot of "self taught" developers are just not that. I.e. they didn't really invest time in learning much. But there's no fundamental reason why you can't learn just as much CS on your own. I read Knuth's AOCP when I was 14. I do have a CS degree but I still took two online machine learning courses to keep my knowledge up to date and I learn new things all the time. A friend was telling me about their friend who spent a month learning "HTML" and now has a job as a "web developer"...
There are endless online resources for learning music theory, Coursera, YouTube, Wikipedia and more.
Point is the self-taught vs. theory is orthogonal. Some people are formally taught and don't get the theory and some people are self taught and spend the time getting a deep theoretical understanding. I took some lessons with a recent music graduate who didn't really know that much music theory, he wasn't that interested and it went in one ear and out the other apparently. Technically he was at a much higher level but he didn't care much for theory...
It is unfortunately true that a lot of "self taught" developers are just not that. I.e. they didn't really invest time in learning much. But there's no fundamental reason why you can't learn just as much CS on your own. I read Knuth's AOCP when I was 14. I do have a CS degree but I still took two online machine learning courses to keep my knowledge up to date and I learn new things all the time. A friend was telling me about their friend who spent a month learning "HTML" and now has a job as a "web developer"...