To fill in all these gaps you'd need the equivalent of a 4 year CS degree. I say this as someone who worked as a software engineer for about 5 years before going back for my degree.
You spend most of a CS degree studying the theory and techniques developed over the last 60+ years. These techniques are incredibly useful time and again.
It's the difference between spending a month trying to solve a problem or realizing the problem is actually just a version of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.
There are many positions in the field that can be filled by people without degrees. But there are also many that need someone who knows the theory and history. That's not to say that there aren't rare individuals who learn all this through self study, but they are rare.
You spend most of a CS degree studying the theory and techniques developed over the last 60+ years. These techniques are incredibly useful time and again.
It's the difference between spending a month trying to solve a problem or realizing the problem is actually just a version of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.
There are many positions in the field that can be filled by people without degrees. But there are also many that need someone who knows the theory and history. That's not to say that there aren't rare individuals who learn all this through self study, but they are rare.