Python allows the overriding of just about every operator. For Pathlib they overrode the division operator to instead perform path addition in a platform agnostic manner.
It may seem that way at first, but quite honestly, some voices they do CAN damage your ability to speak/sing/etc. Under those circumstances it seems completely reasonable to pay someone more for taking a risk with their primary method of generating income.
Not very helpful but personally I'm in a very similar situation - I've always worked on programming since I was a kid but never had the opportunity to get a degree and every single programming job in my area requires at minimum a 2 year CS degree, so I took a job as an industrial electrician which unfortunately means throwing out almost all of the knowledge that I've worked my entire life for.
I'd be very interested to see what others have to say about this, I doubt if it is a very uncommon problem at the moment.
A lot of the stuff I see on the front page tends to be simply what is "popular" at the time, not necessarily what is relevant to my interests, I find that the new tab has a more balanced view, in general.
I believe that the reason that many government sites have gone dark is because most of them have a large amount of dynamic content that relies on some amount of human oversight which cannot be provided currently. Switching to a static page is much easier and cheaper than providing warnings/removing links to content that will not work during the shutdown.
My generally rule of thumb is to pick a project that is far beyond what I could hope to do in the language in a reasonable amount of time, then work as hard as I can, get as far as I can with copious amounts of googling and docs reading. By the end of it I have a good idea of how to work on the language. (And sometimes even a finished project)