The programming guy at my work, someone who is educated, told me that the best programmers are self taught.. Is that true?

No. Self thought programmers often write code that is a pain in the ass for anyone but themselves to maintain. Because they do not know any better.

I think he just means that someone who can learn on their own is better than someone who needs it to be taught to them explicitly.

@anon81 it depends on how willing they are to dig into a subject when learning. If they just teach themselves to code yeah, but if they learn software design, patterns, testing, etc they can be really good.

Not really. When I learned programming by myself it was much harder to know what to learn next, and often I didn't have a good overview.

While learning about the important algorithms, data structures and refactoring helped me to improve drastically. I now write much cleaner and efficient code.

I think the comments so far emphasize the fact that some self-taught programmers are "the best" and that some self-taught programmers are shit. It seems there's no real correlation here and it's more down to attitude.