You have a fair point... however I never regretted that my early programming was mostly algorithms and data structures. I think that's a ceiling most self-taught programmers find hard to pass. Everything else can be learned with a google... but if you don't have an algorithmic mind relatively simple problem are show stoppers. Stuff like implementing a cache or understanding why sql subqueries suck so much cpu time are pretty straightforward - but I don't want to think how I would approach them without those first years of sorting and graphs.