Discussion on: The Downside To Being Self-Taught.

Thanks for your post. I totally agree on your first point about clean code.
Almost all of my skills I learned in a self-taught manner, the rest is based on experience. So as a self-taught developer you tend to search for problem in the web, and thats completely fine since you learn to search and describe your current challenge which helps you to unterstand it better and break it down to the most important facts.

What you find then is often code-snippets that match your need, that some just copy-paste, which doesn't help you to understand the solution and be prepared for it when faced the next time.
Additionally, those code-snippets contain something like "var x = ...". And thats why code of many developers look cluttery because they give the impression that it's OK when variables or functions are named like this.
In stack-overflow's most-rated answer it's written like that because they don't know your real use-case and that naming is fine in that context.
But stuff should be renamed after implementing it to establish readability.
It is fine when stack-overflow's answers does contain snippets that are not "Clean Code", but it's not ok if your project does.

So after teaching yourself multiple technologies and languages, every developer should start and reflect why they can't read and understand their own code the next day anymore.
Learning the most basic rules of how to write clean code makes totally sense there.
I did it and digged deeper into clean code rules and I would assert that my code-style improved within 2 months, which results into more win that learning a whole new language in that time (because rules are applicable to every language).