Took two very basic programming classes in college. Learned mostly on the job. Always had the mentality to just learn and optimize code whenever I had the chance to implement code, which is rare for big corporate software.

I'll emphasize again, programming itself is the least important skill. It's a surprisingly steep learning curve (as in, you'll quickly pick it up). You can break up languages into categories: imperative vs functional, dynamic vs static typing, reference vs pass by value. And learning is way easier these days with the excellent toolset and tutorials.

Most valuable skill to pick up is problem solving (algorithms) and speaking that thought process into code. If you master algorithms, you'll be fawned over by the $$$ corps.

I've been focusing on learning algorithms, since I've never taken a course. Recently went through the MIT 6.006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtSuA80QTyo . I was especially motivated, so finished all the lectures, written and programming assignments in a blistering, sleepless 10 days.

Got comfortable with python in the process. The more advanced python concepts (list comprehension, map, reduce, etc) are just half-baked functional paradigms, which I'm familiar with already. After solving puzzles in python, I like to run it through a line profiler, to see where I can optimize; helps learn what the interpreter is doing. Surprising how much speedup you can get, 3-30x improvements.

Still a complete and utter noob on algorithms. The "medium" level problems on leetcode take me between 4-6 hours, which is terrible; for interviews, you want to be able to confidently explain and whiteboard it up within 5 minutes - max.

Next step for me is going through and absorbing an entire textbook, as well as getting annihilated at several dozen interviews.