Very much a self taught hack. My degrees are in psychology & history - I got into the IT field as a syadmin long ago, then as a hardware engineer, then as a lan/wan troubleshooter. I've only really started spending a significant amount of time coding in perl in the last 2 or 3 years.

Since I've been a regular visitor here my coding has, I think, improved immeasurably - just reading posts & being able to ask quick questions of much more experienced programmers in the CB has taught me an awful lot. Very often a subject (PUGS/coding methodologies/functional programming/etc etc etc) will come up on a post or in the CB that will send me off on a little voyage of discovery, finding new and interesting things along the way.

Which sort of leads to the point: many of the people posting here may be self taught, but through experience they have been exposed to a wide range of different methodologies, programming languages and ideas. All these things may be taught formally, and that might give someone a head start, but the combination of formal structured knowledge, rather than necessarily training, with experience, is IMO what makes the difference.