There's a particular brand of imposter syndrome that hits self-taught engineers differently. It's not just "am I good enough?" — it's "did I learn it the right way?"
The Gatekeeping Myth
When I started in tech, there was an unspoken hierarchy. CS graduates at the top. Bootcamp grads in the middle. Self-taught developers at the bottom. Every code review felt like an exam where someone might discover I didn't learn about Big-O notation in a lecture hall.
Here's what I've learned after five years of shipping production code: nobody cares how you learned it. They care whether it works, whether it's maintainable, and whether you can explain your decisions.
The AI Tool Question
This dilemma has intensified with AI coding tools. Now the question isn't just "did you learn from a course or a university?" — it's "did you write this code or did an AI?"
My answer: I used every tool available to me. Just like I used Stack Overflow, documentation, open-source code, YouTube tutorials, and conversations with senior engineers. AI tools are another resource in a long history of resources that make developers more effective.
Resourcefulness Is the Skill
The real skill was never memorizing syntax or algorithms. It was knowing how to find answers, evaluate solutions, and integrate knowledge from multiple sources into working software.
Self-taught engineers have been doing this from day one. We didn't have a curriculum — we had curiosity and the internet. We learned to learn, which turns out to be the most valuable engineering skill of all.
Using every resource available doesn't make you a fraud. It makes you resourceful. And resourcefulness ships products.