self-taughts

There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.

Only constant learning - and this is a supoerpower at least some self-taughts have.

Many many self-taughts (ST?) aren't joining coding for passion, they are joining because they want to change careers and think coding is easy.

It's a double-whammy: not only are they looking at self-taughts harder, self-taughts are naturally going to be less comfortable with best practices, lingo and other general experience they'd pick up in a month's time on the job.

Additional background; I'm the local Admin for a Free Code Camp (FCC) group so I meet lots of aspiring self-taughts btw.

The self-taughts don't know what it is they don't know.

I'd say it's still torture for us self-taughts who work in a warehouse 9-5 filling orders for computer fans at a median wage.

There are brilliant self-taughts and educated morons, that's obvious.

I personally think a strong mathematics background is under-rated, and it is uncommon for self-taughts to have one (speaking as one with that background).

This route might be your safest/easiest option, mostly because it gives you a definite edge on those other self-taughts (plus you might be able to test out of some classes based on experience/knowledge).

Now, after years of self-taughts piling into the boat, not only has the boat left the dock, it's so full, they're throwing people overboard as we speak.

Not a counter to what you said, but just adding a point that might be worth thinking: This way of telling may give impression you are inplying that CS graduates know patterns and self-taughts don't.

These both lead to lacking a "get it done" attitude that I've seen in the self-taughts.