Will successful Self-Taught Programmers please stand up?

I'm sure John Carmack and a few other famous programmers are not the only cases of self-taught programmers that have been successful (whatever the degree). Please tell us how it is being a self-taught programmer. Do you have a startup? Do you work for Google / Facebook / Apple / ...? Do you work on your own, or in someone else's company, and are as successful and acknowledgeable than your CS colleagues?

Please tell us your story.

1. Define self-taught. By the time I got to college I had already been programing for five+ years. With respect to coding in general, college was mostly a waste of time, but it did forced me to look at things I would had never look at otherwise. (I got a Math/Comp Sci degree)

2. Define successful. If it is about money, most IT workers in the US are already on the top 90% money earners in the planet, plus (in my experience) the more boring and un-challenging the job, the most it paid.

Maybe you mean famous? Lots of open source rock stars are not to rich in money terms.. are they successful?

I started playing around with programming around the age of 13, but never anything too serious. After getting a degree in mechanical engineering, I applied for jobs in booth mechanical engineering and software development.

The software development jobs just seem like more fun and I went that direction.

I have been a software developer for 9 years now, the last 2 years as a successful freelancer and at the moment partial owner of a software consulting firm (couple of employees, but growing fast)

The lack of a CS degree never has been a problem. All the developers I work with value a person by knowledge and skill, degree is not that important.

I took one java class in college, but that was about it when I started learning javascript 3 years ago (along with html, and css). I carried around the OReilly javascript book for the summer - read it on the bus, on the beach, wherever.

For the last couple years, I have worked as a freelance web designer and front-end developer. Now I'm pleased to have just gotten a job with the title webmaster (for a section of a major news organization.)

I wouldn't call myself a JS ninja, but I'd say I can make a browser do some cool stuff with some pretty clean code. And I'm getting paid pretty well for it. And 3 years ago, I didn't know HTML. So, for anyone who wants to learn to code from scratch, Go for it! Go to your library's programming section, checkout something that looks 'elegant, yet friendly', and take it to the beach. Or if you want something right now, this should probably do nicely: http://jqfundamentals.com/book/index.html

Along the way: Listened to a couple podcast lectures, read a couple books, read hacker news every day (thank you!), fell in love with jQuery, picked up a little python, real a little about lisp, and found some start-up partners in New York to start hacking on some fun stuff.

Hello from a fellow self-taught, PHP-on-Windows developer. And I'm a girl, which automatically makes me special ;)