Programming, as I guess, is just like many other craftmanship work, needs abundant guidance and tutoring. In today’s world there is an enormous amount of excellent open source projects out there and you could download them in just a few clicks. Theoretically, there are no hidden secret recipes and you can learn everything by studying the code, but very people become experts in this way, probably just like no one becomes a surgeon by doing post mortems on his/her own, no matter how many corpses are available to him/her.
Programming, given its engineering nature, is finding the quickest, simplest and most efficient way to solve your problem. It is difficult to master some techniques if you don’t make mistakes and learn from failures, but more often than not, you would want somebody to tell you what is the correct way to do things, simply because life’s too short to repeat mistakes. It’s so much better when some engineering catastrophe happens, you are able to recall instantly that somebody ever told you a possible cause that can lead to it, than to guess and troubleshoot without any clue for days. This is why people are always emphasizing on “platform”, “team” and “projects” when advising for software engineering career selection. Work hours do not translate into work experience equally in different environments. In a reputable corporation, you see projects that prove themselves by sustaining market pressure, so you know the architecture and implementation, especially after years of iterative development, is well thought and well designed. You see systems that handle millions of queries per second and what special treatment and care such a system needs. When you are asked to improve it, you need to first figure out all the internal wiring, how components interact with one another, and what functionality that snippet of fancy-looking code brings. Achieving this level of proficiency is impossible by sitting at home and studying alone. If you don’t have smart and expert level team members answer your questions, you would be stuck forever – for real practical problems, chances are very slim that you could find answers on Stackoverflow.