Jesse Anderson, a big data consultant and teacher, writes about Kafka, Apache Beam, Hadoop and data engineering.
HN commenters describe him as a respected, self-taught big data expert and former Cloudera employee who teaches data engineering.
I teach data engineering and data science. I've taught at hundreds of companies. Yes, there are self-taught people doing data science in the real world. They're few and far between, but they are out there.
If you're coming from a programming background, I'd suggest becoming a Data Engineer with the goal of becoming a Data Scientist. I've had several students do that. They were general programmers who learned Big Data/data engineering and eventually became more technical Data Scientists. You can start to learn more about the whys here: http://www.jesse-anderson.com/2017/03/what-happens-when-you-hire-a-data-scientist-without-a-data-engineer/.
anecdotal, but Jesse Anderson is a world class big data expert, former Cloudera, etc. and my understanding is he is entirely self taught: http://www.jesse-anderson.com/