I don't know if i count since no one knows me (which is one of my goals), but i consider myself to be applicable since I've basically hit all my life goals (well, aside from being a writer which I'll start on now), and my explicit strategy was to focus on learning/upskilling over formal paths.

My degrees were in economics and arts, which I swapped to from CS explicitly because i wanted to learn things I didn't know, not get good grades on things I did. I worked security night shift during uni which let me read and study whatever I wanted while being paid for it.

From there I took an relatively unskilled level job doing order processing with a legal publishing firm. What i consider my first 'real' program was written there. We did all our processing through this crappy slow manual interface with manual data entry, menu selection, and second long pauses between menus and pages. I hypothesized you could map out each menu and form in the entire application via unique pixel patterns grabbed from each screen and wrote a program that could get from any place in the software to any other and knew where in the menu system it was. Then I wrote a simple spreadsheet interface with some simple memory (since I observed huge portions of our entry was the same data/orders from the same customers, so why do we re-enter the same details multiple times?). I hooked it all together and could thus spend the first hour or two of the day filling out the data spreadsheet: the program could then read the spreadsheet and essentially do my job for me. It new how to interface with my workstation, knew where it was, where to go for every order type, didn't get bored or make mistakes and entered everything infinitely faster than a human typist. I have a real soft spot for that program, watching it zoom the mouse around the screen and do everything automatically still makes me feel proud.

From there I moved to a performance manager job where I implemented algorithms to try to back-engineer government rating systems and use our sample of the market to offer predictions before government sources were published.

Then I moved into a research/policy position.

I used this to get work at the national stats bureau: where I volunteered to work on the hard programming problems no one else wanted. I then transferred into the analytics specialist section therein where I started my work and research on data linking.

Then I used that to move cities and got employed by a bank as an analytics specialist.

Then I left there and am now with my current employer.

I'm just over 35, live where I want to live, never stopped learning either programming or my other fields, haven't had to work for any job I consider unethical, have almost paid off my home, started a young family, and am gainfully employed with experience in philosophy, economics, stats, analytics, computer science, security, and publishing :p

I had failed grades and often barely handed in assignments for uni, and now I'm relatively confident I could run circles around most academics.

Anyone who says your best work happens in your 20s is an ignorant fool. Knowledge compounds. I was relatively smart during my 20s, but I was nothing compared to what I am now in my 30s.

I expect my 40s will be even better...