Same here. Started as junior (with 7 years programming experience from school) with a few other juniors at a company working on a new product without any senior developers anymore. It sure was a little rough sometimes and we sure made our fair share of errors and technical debt, but it was an amazing experience. And the product still works fine today.
So with a motivated team and some autodidactic learning you can still get very far! Especially since Google and Stackoverflow.com are at your disposal.
So you basically sat on your ass and said "somebody teach me"? No wonder that
your colleagues from university got so much better.
I never got much help from other people. In the beginning, I didn't have
anybody interested in computers around me at all, yet I managed to learn
programming. Then, when I started studying IT and switched to Linux, and
I didn't have anybody to systematically learn working with unix from. This
happened when I didn't have an access to the internet, and we had very little
learning material published (first half of '00 decade), so it wasn't even
possible for me to ask a question on StackOverflow or something.
And then the pattern repeats a number of times.
It's not mentoring that helps people grow. It's learning. It can be done
with a teacher/mentor (and in fact it's easier in a number of fields), but it
doesn't require one. Don't blame others for your own idleness.
Are you saying it took you 9 years of seeing other people know and learn things you weren't taught at the Uni before you realized you could look things up with Google?
No, I looked many things up and I learned, but it wasn't much and really unstructured.
I just came to work and did what had to be done. After years I learned that there is much more and I don't have to fear things that are outside of my comfort zone.
So with a motivated team and some autodidactic learning you can still get very far! Especially since Google and Stackoverflow.com are at your disposal.