Programmers, do not worry about illegal immigrants taking your jobs...

That's great to see some young people getting into the field by teaching themselves.

In my opinion, it really comes down to whether you want it badly enough to teach yourself, because no one can really teach you how to be a developer. So these kids are definitely on the right track. I'm sure they'll be able to out-compete overeducated and undermotivated big company devs with more classically-trained backgrounds... assuming they ever even try to go after the same kinds of jobs.

I'm personally more worried about there being too few developers -- regardless of tech stack, nationality, or age group. There are so many great ideas to be pursued, and the #1 thing holding us back from doing them is the lack of developers.

So at this point I don't feel like there's a lot of threat from the space being overcrowded -- if anything, I'm concerned that there just aren't enough devs to create more Silicon Valleys across the nation, and across the world.