i am autodidact and I clicked no.

this question is to binary for my taste ;)

am I better in applied programming than a lot of students from university -> obviously yes. a decade worth of programming, if you do it right, is a decade worth of programming.

I was very lucky too, not many devs in my country could start in an international company that, 10 years ago, already had 100+ servers and used distributed architecture on that scale. I had to work my way up.

Still I worked with a lot of academics from different countries over the years and they all knew more than me and I always learned from them and I hope at least one or two took something valuable out of our conversations as well.

I think the question should be about attitude, because I had to work a lot harder got the same chances like a university student does.

Still ..... better ? that's something I cannot say! As soon as I do, I generalize the same way that others might generalize about me, as I don't hold a degree.

In the end we're all autodidact, the only difference is the head start that some devs just throw away.

most of the PhD. I worked with were very humble, my observation was the lower the degree the bigger the ego. As well as the more you had to fight to be taken serious the more defensive you are about comparisons.

To quote Einstein:

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”

I think that autodidact developers are better than trained ones in the sense that they are more motivated. They made efforts of their own to learn the ropes, while trained ones just received input.

More motivation learning also means that those people don't only read one source, but often have to read several different sources to understand a certain something, which means they read a variety of opinions, standards and best practices. It's not only one "source of truth".

After putting all that effort into learning, such people probably also tend to be more motivated using the technologies they learned (if not for usage, why else did they learn it?). And while using it, evolving further is very natural for them. Because it's something they like doing, they will try to become better at it. It's fun to improve, actually!

Of course, there are downsides, too. But imho, in the long run, autodidact developers are more motivates which leads to a lot of bonus side-effects, so yeah, I would describe them as the better ones (and the ones I would prefer to hire)