Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
As someone without a STEM degree and who is largely self-taught, I'm interested in hearing about similar experiences. What is your story? What are you doing now? How long have you been doing it? etc, etc.
I have worked in software dev for over 40 years with no degree at all. Mostly self-taught, but I got quite a bit of employer-provided training and mentoring especially early in my career. I got recruited by a big company while in school, put university on hold and never got around to finishing. I'd have a history degree if I had gone back to school -- programming started as an interest and hobby for me, one that took over all of my spare time in high school and college.
My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.
Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.
Dropped out of college in 1988 after one semester. Never touched a computer there; they were still VAX systems reserved for certain programs at that point. Got my first computer (Commodore 128) soon after that, and started learning BASIC and 6502/Z80 assembly language. Got my first Internet account about 1993, and it came with a shell account, so I started learning Unix tools and a little C. In 1994-ish, a friend asked if I wanted to get in on a new ISP he was starting in my hometown, so I moved back and got a crash course in more Unix/Linux, networking, Perl, and more. Just been doing what comes along and learning enough to keep up ever since.
Majored in Philosophy. Started programming in 1973 on mainframes. Became a full time developer, systems analyst. 72 years old now, with 50 years experience in IT. Co-founded a couple of start ups, made a little bit of money. Went back to corporate life for a while. Ended up as a Program Architect at Salesforce. Resigned to start a company which develops and delivers commercial LLM/RAG solutions. Going reasonably well. Simple principles: keep learning, do what you want to do, not just what the man tells you. I saw a note from another Philosophy grad saying that Philosophy is actually useful in that it gives you a framework and a perspective to look at things a little differently. I agree with that.
Majored in philosophy, now running AI infrastructure at a mid-sized startup. Been coding professionally for 6 years after teaching myself through building random tools - including an AI photo enhancer that eventually became https://flux-kontext.io. Tech's beautiful because what matters is what you can ship, though you'll need a killer portfolio to get that first break. The non-STEM background actually helps sometimes - gives you different perspectives when everyone else is stuck in engineer brain. Just be ready to constantly learn and prove yourself through work, not credentials.
I was always into programming, and am a self taught dev. I used to write Runescape macros in Pascal and then Java, had an internship at a CD & DVD driver company (used by iTunes and many others) and got to work on automation of burner testing.
But 2008 hit, job market was terrible and I ended up working at a computer repair store chain while trying to pay my way through college until 2011, where I got a LAMP dev job for a large travel website. I dropped out of college at that point and haven't looked back.
I got to program for a bit over 10 years before moving into leadership, selling two startups along the way.
I work at Google as a SWE working on the Cloud. I'm a little 'behind' level wise for the straight years of experience I have, but I also feel like I'm doing pretty darn well for my level as well.
For the first ~ten years of my career I worked shit jobs for pretty mediocre pay at small companies that overworked and under appreciated me. I did Open Source to stay sane, to learn, for fun, and I leveled up every few years, learning CS, hardware, algorithms, FP, type systems, and more.
Eventually I worked at larger companies, smaller companies with big scale, and eventually FAANG.
I started working at eighteen, tbh I had lost my way schoolwise, but i had always been interested in computer graphics, CAD and was savvy enough to get my hands on software i perhaps could not have afforded that gave me some base skills that led from one job to another,
Sometimes i feel like working with CS people, and i’ve worked with some really good ones, so please don’t get me wrong, but sometimes i feel some have just done it because it’s a good career, and show zero interest or curiosity past their immediate positions.
No STEM here - but I'm not an engineer, I'm a tech interested product guy who has worked for online companies all my career (2002 onwards)
I did a Media Studies (theory) degree, but all the way through university I was making websites for fun and for profit (badly), and managed to get into web 'producer' roles before moving to 'Product Owner' type roles. Though I am non-technical, I took the time to learn about the technologies we use, likely more than my peers.
These days I work in IT strategy and support the CIO - though most of the leadership team I work with do have engineering backgrounds, many of people my level do not.
I took visual basic in high school (I'm old now lol) then 100 level C++ and Java, but dropped out of college after one year. Most of my self teaching was Linux/homelab/server stuff, very little programming, though some web dev (jekyll/html/css)
I did an apprenticeship in 2020. 6 months of class, 6 months interning at a Fortune 500. Paid the whole time. That company hired me after the 6 months, i worked there another year after that, moved companies and cities in 2022 and been in the same spot ever since.
I was technically full stack at first but I've been front end exclusive for three years now. I've dabbled in angular and vue, been full time svelte at this job, plus a little bit of JavaFX, and took my classes in React and Express.
The job placement that accompanied the apprenticeship was clutch, and i couldn't have done it if i hadn't been getting paid (barely living wage, but still) during the class portion.
Mostly self-taught, been very lucky with the people I've encountered. Regularly accused of STEM/CS because I read far too many manuals. Actually not as 'classically trained' as I'd prefer... but also don't care; servile nonsense all the way down.
Have done almost every job, found system administration/DevOps/SRE stuff the most interesting. Security stuff is cool but also too product-oriented for my tastes.
Graduated with a B.A. in History from Cal in 2011. Struggled for 6+ months to land a job. Took any miscellaneous writing job on oDesk (now Upwork) that I could get. Saw a lot of contracts for something called "technical writing" and they often paid much better than other writing work. Figured out that it was basically "instruction manuals for computer professionals". Realized it was a good fit. Took a bunch of basic C.S. courses at community college. Family friend got my foot in the door at an IoT startup, but it was really those C.S. classes that persuaded them to give me a try. And the fact that I would work for peanuts. Turned out that I was competent in the work and I really enjoyed programming. A few years later, Google recruited me, and I've been at Google ever since.
I technically have an A.S. in C.S. from that community college, but I think my circuitous path fits the "non-traditional STEM background" criteria.
Computers have been great to me! Very thankful that I stumbled into this path.
History major. First job was managing inter-modal shipping in a giant Excel spreadsheet and emailing it to our India office every night. At the time, I thought Excel was so cool because it seemed like I could do anything with it. I didn't know anyone who wrote code. I had no no idea what was out there.
11 years with R/Python/SQL in a very small team. The last 5 years over 1500 web scrapes running everyday, and then aggregating, categorizing, and analyzing that data.
I've only interviewed a handful of times since starting. It's not come up in any of them, but I've often thought a good response to a "what's one of your weaknesses" question, would be to say that I'm self taught. Nobody has ever reviewed any of my code. I have no pretense of it being elegant or the best way to solve a problem, but it's simple, it works, and I'm determined to solve the problem in front of me.
I have no degree at all. I’ve been doing software development professionally for around seven years now. Like many, I’ve started programming as a hobby as a child, around 11 or 12.
I got pigeonholed quickly into enterprise development, mostly at non tech companies of various sizes.
I knew I never wanted to work as a software dev professionally. I had other plans initially that fell through. However I found myself in a situation where my choices were to struggle off of a low skill job or try and break into the industry have a reasonably comfortable life.
Of course, even that didn’t work out as expected. I was significantly underpaid (even with local COL/salary data in mind), still at least it was a foot in the door and a full time job. My salary came more in line with what someone would expect in a small city around the time, but still barely at the bottom of that range.
Around the time of the COVID glut, I finally landed a six figure job, as well as the closest thing I’ve had to a job ”in tech”. It was pretty decent, but half the company was dumped a year or two later.
I didn’t expect to have much of an issue in the market, ignorant of how bad it really was and with the understanding that with my experience I couldn’t be a total pariah. Instead it took over a year to find a new job and that was solely due to nepotism.
A little bit into my current job, I realized my career was dead. I don’t keep up with the industry outside my day to day anymore, I’m certainly not keeping up with newer fresher people and to some extend miss that enthusiasm. But it really does not interest me anymore. Rarely the tech and never the product.
I’ve thought about leaving before that happens, but I have yet to see a path to something else that I wouldn’t hate just as much.
I figure I’ll either die of from stagnation or AI will replace me or lower that value of my work to the point where the money is no longer worth staying
I started learning how to code from trying to make game mods around age 10. This was mostly UnrealScript + Lua for SecondLife.
Got an internship at a web dev shop when I was 18. They primarily did SaaS startup launches. There was a lot of trial-by-fire. Picked up frontend + backend + DevOps skills there.
I majored in Philosophy and went directly into industry after my undergraduate. I got into programming, specifically open source, as a hobby.
I've been in industry for 7 years, and have done a few different things: DARPA-funded program analysis research, open source security engineering, running an open source engineering team, and now doing security engineering once more.
In my experience, not having a STEM degree is not a significant barrier to success (and as others have said, can be an advantage in specific contexts). My experience is that virtually nobody has cared, apart from some very funny compliance/procedural contexts where people assume that "Philosophy" means "PhD in Computer Science."
While I do now have a CS degree, I was hired into a big tech company prior to having that degree based on my work in open-source. I'd been (and still am) an active contributor to some large web projects for a few years, prior to this company reaching out to hire me (projects were unrelated to what they do, FWIW).
I did then get my degree in my spare time while at that job, with my salary covering the costs of tuition, which was very nice. I see my degree as a backup, if for any reason an employer has a strict requirement for it or if I leave this field -- I expect my experience to be what gets me jobs as it stands today.
I dropped out of uni after it kept holding me back. I think I have around 50% of credits left to finish. I was already working as a developer and I had many things to learn career wise. I had to choose between going ahead or staying on place while finishing a degree.
I don't regret my choice but I wish I had a degree. While I have superior studies in the field (2 years instead of the 4 of a degree) it doesn't feel the same.
After 10 years working and with many more years ahead (I hope) I don't think I'll ever find the motivation to finish it. And most recruiters that contact me are more interested in the experience I have than anything else.
15 years and counting. I studied painting and sculpture. There used to be a consistant interest in folks without STEM degrees applying to jobs in tech as it was seen that they might have more desirable soft skills.
I feel like recently the pendulum has swung the other way and I've been considering getting a STEM masters now for this reason.
This is purely anecdotal but i've been seeing more degree requirements in job descriptions lately.
I've been doing tech for 20 years. No degree. I was pretty lost in my late teens and early twenties and college did not work out for me. I got into the web on my own and built from there.
Not even sure what the "Letters" part meant. I was helping with IT services at my college and started my LLC the same year I graduated, doing mostly IT support and web dev services. That turned into backend development, then infrastructure, now YouTube and getting into hardware dev. Strange progression but common to have completely unrelated major, especially among my open source friends.
I did my thirty years and, between SRE and AI, have seen the writing on the wall for the future of tech ops and have retired to go get a degree in accounting. The lack of degree was never so much an obstacle as my willingness to speak unspoken truths to leaders. There’s no way someone younger than me could reproduce my path, as it hinged on ten years of unpaid career development as a teenager. Get a degree so that you aren’t closed-minded and inflexible.
No degree, pretty much self taught. Lots of right place right time type referrals. Been the family tech support since I was 8 until I started charging them my hourly rate.
But yeah... This is mostly because I had ADHD and depression which caused me to drop out of mechanical engineering school. Probably making a comparable or better wage than I would have. Wish I would have learned to code sooner though...
about ~30 years experience. devops/architect now at a major university.
dropped out after almost 7 years w/4 degrees (math, cs, photography, archaeology). yes, i have adhd lol.
i've been programming/building computers since the early 80s, and worked at my unis computer lab help desk starting in the early 90s. after dropping out, got a lame sysadmin job and then somehow got a job at nasa ames in the late 90s (and moved to the bay area). after a short stint there, i was super lucky and hit the job marked right as the dot-com bubble 1.0 ramped up!
it was tough for the first few years as my lack of degree (and general jack-of-all-trades skillset) was definitely a barrier.
but with lots of luck, perseverance and track record of learning quick on the job, i was able to get a solid career rolling. i quit tech about 12 years ago, and have been working in higher ed tech since. now i get to sit in meetings and explain to CS/data science profs how the cloud actually works. :)
No degree. I've been working the full stack for almost 15 years full time, including recently learning to train various types of gen AI models. There are still orgs that are rigid about their requirements, but I'm a mid-30s guy at an experience level where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to overthink what I was learning 2 decades ago.
I worked as a software engineer for well over a decade before I got my degree. You can learn everything you need to know without a formal education. However, if I was hiring, all else being equal, I'd choose the candidate with a degree in a heartbeat. Mainly because it demonstrates excellent self-management skills. Especially thesis writing is extremely challenging for most.
Went to Drexel for CS, but dropped out in my Sophmore year back in 2004. Did PHP webdev in my home state of CT until 2011. Moved to the SF Bay Area and transitioned to doing Erlang and C++ for some F2P games for a while. I'm currently a Staff Engineer at Discord focused on AV and other "native" stuff.
I was working without a degree for 15 years, but got a BSCS from WGU a few years ago. Took 2.5 years and cost $20k, but I finished what was once a life goal.
The course quality was on par with a brick and mortar college I attended prior.
Got a music degree, decided the career wasn't for me, went to a programming incubator, really struggled with interviewing for a while, got a job at a startup, got a job at FAANG, here I am a decade after the career switch
No issues with hiring so far 16+ years into my career. That said, any company that required a college degree is probably not somewhere I'd enjoy working (for other reasons) so YMMV.
Another interesting question will be: are recent STEM grads/people in STEM courses right now going to be able to enjoy a fruitful career in the following decades?
Dropped out in the eighth grade, taught myself, and I've been working as a SRE for the past decade or so. Have been working in tech for a little over 20 years.
I have been working in front-end development for seven years, teaching myself the skills, but now that I have moved to another country, I am no longer continuing with this work.
I might be an interesting case study here in that I started working in tech when I was 14, didn't start college until I was 22, and ended up with a STEM degree afterwards (Northwestern, electrical engineering).
While it was always possible for me to find work before the degree, I have to admit that the work offered was vastly incommensurate with both my actual skill level and my desired compensation. This is much less the case post-degree. In fact I now regularly have to turn down work I frankly feel like I couldn't do as good a job on because I have a language to learn and a citizenship to clinch.
I do think this effect would have faded out gradually either way, markets are going to reach equilibrium. But the degree made it happen much faster for me even despite relocating to an entirely foreign job market. I would say get the degree in almost all cases.
almost 10y experience , Master degree in Financial Markets. Always worked as a developer , so much so that now when back in financial field, i am struggling with simplest instruments ..
I'm a self-taught programmer, been coding since I was 12. Went to university for a science degree, but it was my programming skills that ended up being way more useful and lucrative. Worked in various technical roles since I was 18, from data engineering at major research hospital, technical due-diligence for venture capital, startups, ML research, etc. Basically, my degree didn't seem to matter.
At the moment, I'm running a program for self-directed CS education[1] and end up talking to a lot of people who were self-taught. Part of the motivation for the program was that we found that people we hired who had a lot of self-directed experiences were much better engineers. It wasn't that degrees were necessarily bad, but it seemed like the thing that made them good was not the degree.
From my experience talking to people who were also mostly self-taught, the outcomes are a mixed bag. In retrospect, I think I was quite lucky in that I had the right support structures (mentors, etc) in place throughout my life. Some I worked towards, others kinda fell in my lap. In addition, some of my earlier career/life decisions based on hunches have worked out so far (pivoting from medicine to ML in 2012). Not everyone I talked to had the same experience. Some really languished because they really had no support / positive influences. Others think it's one of the best decisions they've made, in both time/money saved and agency.
If I had to summarize, one of the major negatives is that self-directed education frontloads a lot of the problems early on. You're in total control, but also exposed to all your mistakes. If you don't have the right environment, you can flounder in the sense that you don't even know what you're missing. This is compounded by our terrible K-12 education system, which does not prepare you for self-direction. If you don't have other sources of support, it could lead you to a vicious cycle of failure begetting failure. You'll also be "marked" [2] and mistakes/setbacks will be attributed to your lack of degree, whether justified or not. From a career perspective, some hiring managers are not incentivized to take risks on non-degree holders. Ie. it could blow back on them if you don't work out. You'll have to work harder on signaling and networking, etc. You're not going "fit", esp in a degree-heavy culture, and that could lead to social isolation.
The positives is that, at the moment, there's never been a better time to self-direct your education. You end up learning things that interest you, at your pace at the right time, so the problems/work is always relevant. You can go really deep really fast. The people that you want to work for/with don't care about your degree. Self-directed education is inevitable, esp in tech. Every one of us eventually have to take control of our education. The problems you have to work through early on are also inevitable (ex. signaling to others that you are competent). The agency and sense of control is great for your mental well-being and developing accountability. Your team can count on you to take the initiative, figure things out, and learn the things you need to learn. Uncertainty is not paralyzing. You've dealt with it your whole life.
Overall, it's not an easy path. I think a lot of it depends on early support and the mental attitude/personality of the individual.
working almost 30 years. no stem degree or high school certificate. bought first computer with money earned at summer at carpentry shop.
started working in dial up isp. going to the clients home to install trumpet winsock and netscape navigator. from there moved to do some web development (php/fi, ajax).delphi. perl. over time gravitated into network/security software development and telecoms.
now oversee a few hundreds of developers that work on rather big system deployed in multiple locations arounds world.
> How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
Many tech big names got by without a degree. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison.
After a short, successful career in aerospace engineering, I bought an Apple II in 1977. Wrote a best-selling word processor (Apple Writer). Retired at the age of 30. Seventh-grade dropout.
In fact, apart from Elon Musk, I am at pains to find anyone influential who has a degree.
Some may insist that a degree is more common than this narrative suggests, but granted that, it seems there is a weak to nonexistent correlation between technical career success and an advanced degree.
Young people should learn this, before preparing for a career that might not rely on the degree. Or before signing up for a course of instruction that teaches skills no longer in demand -- like computer programming.
My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.
Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.
But 2008 hit, job market was terrible and I ended up working at a computer repair store chain while trying to pay my way through college until 2011, where I got a LAMP dev job for a large travel website. I dropped out of college at that point and haven't looked back.
I got to program for a bit over 10 years before moving into leadership, selling two startups along the way.
For the first ~ten years of my career I worked shit jobs for pretty mediocre pay at small companies that overworked and under appreciated me. I did Open Source to stay sane, to learn, for fun, and I leveled up every few years, learning CS, hardware, algorithms, FP, type systems, and more.
Eventually I worked at larger companies, smaller companies with big scale, and eventually FAANG.
Sometimes i feel like working with CS people, and i’ve worked with some really good ones, so please don’t get me wrong, but sometimes i feel some have just done it because it’s a good career, and show zero interest or curiosity past their immediate positions.
I did a Media Studies (theory) degree, but all the way through university I was making websites for fun and for profit (badly), and managed to get into web 'producer' roles before moving to 'Product Owner' type roles. Though I am non-technical, I took the time to learn about the technologies we use, likely more than my peers.
These days I work in IT strategy and support the CIO - though most of the leadership team I work with do have engineering backgrounds, many of people my level do not.
I did an apprenticeship in 2020. 6 months of class, 6 months interning at a Fortune 500. Paid the whole time. That company hired me after the 6 months, i worked there another year after that, moved companies and cities in 2022 and been in the same spot ever since.
I was technically full stack at first but I've been front end exclusive for three years now. I've dabbled in angular and vue, been full time svelte at this job, plus a little bit of JavaFX, and took my classes in React and Express.
The job placement that accompanied the apprenticeship was clutch, and i couldn't have done it if i hadn't been getting paid (barely living wage, but still) during the class portion.
Have done almost every job, found system administration/DevOps/SRE stuff the most interesting. Security stuff is cool but also too product-oriented for my tastes.
I technically have an A.S. in C.S. from that community college, but I think my circuitous path fits the "non-traditional STEM background" criteria.
Computers have been great to me! Very thankful that I stumbled into this path.
11 years with R/Python/SQL in a very small team. The last 5 years over 1500 web scrapes running everyday, and then aggregating, categorizing, and analyzing that data.
I've only interviewed a handful of times since starting. It's not come up in any of them, but I've often thought a good response to a "what's one of your weaknesses" question, would be to say that I'm self taught. Nobody has ever reviewed any of my code. I have no pretense of it being elegant or the best way to solve a problem, but it's simple, it works, and I'm determined to solve the problem in front of me.
I got pigeonholed quickly into enterprise development, mostly at non tech companies of various sizes.
I knew I never wanted to work as a software dev professionally. I had other plans initially that fell through. However I found myself in a situation where my choices were to struggle off of a low skill job or try and break into the industry have a reasonably comfortable life.
Of course, even that didn’t work out as expected. I was significantly underpaid (even with local COL/salary data in mind), still at least it was a foot in the door and a full time job. My salary came more in line with what someone would expect in a small city around the time, but still barely at the bottom of that range.
Around the time of the COVID glut, I finally landed a six figure job, as well as the closest thing I’ve had to a job ”in tech”. It was pretty decent, but half the company was dumped a year or two later.
I didn’t expect to have much of an issue in the market, ignorant of how bad it really was and with the understanding that with my experience I couldn’t be a total pariah. Instead it took over a year to find a new job and that was solely due to nepotism.
A little bit into my current job, I realized my career was dead. I don’t keep up with the industry outside my day to day anymore, I’m certainly not keeping up with newer fresher people and to some extend miss that enthusiasm. But it really does not interest me anymore. Rarely the tech and never the product.
I’ve thought about leaving before that happens, but I have yet to see a path to something else that I wouldn’t hate just as much.
I figure I’ll either die of from stagnation or AI will replace me or lower that value of my work to the point where the money is no longer worth staying
I started learning how to code from trying to make game mods around age 10. This was mostly UnrealScript + Lua for SecondLife.
Got an internship at a web dev shop when I was 18. They primarily did SaaS startup launches. There was a lot of trial-by-fire. Picked up frontend + backend + DevOps skills there.
I've been in industry for 7 years, and have done a few different things: DARPA-funded program analysis research, open source security engineering, running an open source engineering team, and now doing security engineering once more.
In my experience, not having a STEM degree is not a significant barrier to success (and as others have said, can be an advantage in specific contexts). My experience is that virtually nobody has cared, apart from some very funny compliance/procedural contexts where people assume that "Philosophy" means "PhD in Computer Science."
I did then get my degree in my spare time while at that job, with my salary covering the costs of tuition, which was very nice. I see my degree as a backup, if for any reason an employer has a strict requirement for it or if I leave this field -- I expect my experience to be what gets me jobs as it stands today.
I dropped out of uni after it kept holding me back. I think I have around 50% of credits left to finish. I was already working as a developer and I had many things to learn career wise. I had to choose between going ahead or staying on place while finishing a degree.
I don't regret my choice but I wish I had a degree. While I have superior studies in the field (2 years instead of the 4 of a degree) it doesn't feel the same.
After 10 years working and with many more years ahead (I hope) I don't think I'll ever find the motivation to finish it. And most recruiters that contact me are more interested in the experience I have than anything else.
I feel like recently the pendulum has swung the other way and I've been considering getting a STEM masters now for this reason.
This is purely anecdotal but i've been seeing more degree requirements in job descriptions lately.
To answer your question: I got into computers and programming when I was 8 years old in the 1970s, and haven't stopped.
During interviews my lack of degree is often brought up - usually asking if I accidentally forgot to add it to my CV.
At first it was tough but now I'm two decades deep into a career in Ops.
Not even sure what the "Letters" part meant. I was helping with IT services at my college and started my LLC the same year I graduated, doing mostly IT support and web dev services. That turned into backend development, then infrastructure, now YouTube and getting into hardware dev. Strange progression but common to have completely unrelated major, especially among my open source friends.
But yeah... This is mostly because I had ADHD and depression which caused me to drop out of mechanical engineering school. Probably making a comparable or better wage than I would have. Wish I would have learned to code sooner though...
dropped out after almost 7 years w/4 degrees (math, cs, photography, archaeology). yes, i have adhd lol.
i've been programming/building computers since the early 80s, and worked at my unis computer lab help desk starting in the early 90s. after dropping out, got a lame sysadmin job and then somehow got a job at nasa ames in the late 90s (and moved to the bay area). after a short stint there, i was super lucky and hit the job marked right as the dot-com bubble 1.0 ramped up!
it was tough for the first few years as my lack of degree (and general jack-of-all-trades skillset) was definitely a barrier.
but with lots of luck, perseverance and track record of learning quick on the job, i was able to get a solid career rolling. i quit tech about 12 years ago, and have been working in higher ed tech since. now i get to sit in meetings and explain to CS/data science profs how the cloud actually works. :)
The course quality was on par with a brick and mortar college I attended prior.
Nobody has cared about my degree so far.
While it was always possible for me to find work before the degree, I have to admit that the work offered was vastly incommensurate with both my actual skill level and my desired compensation. This is much less the case post-degree. In fact I now regularly have to turn down work I frankly feel like I couldn't do as good a job on because I have a language to learn and a citizenship to clinch.
I do think this effect would have faded out gradually either way, markets are going to reach equilibrium. But the degree made it happen much faster for me even despite relocating to an entirely foreign job market. I would say get the degree in almost all cases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599228
Here is almost the exact same comment but specifically in the context of WASM and tree structures receiving the maximum number of downvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657549
It’s weird but apparently insecurity among software developers is super common. It’s why I left a career writing JavaScript and refuse to go back.
At the moment, I'm running a program for self-directed CS education[1] and end up talking to a lot of people who were self-taught. Part of the motivation for the program was that we found that people we hired who had a lot of self-directed experiences were much better engineers. It wasn't that degrees were necessarily bad, but it seemed like the thing that made them good was not the degree.
From my experience talking to people who were also mostly self-taught, the outcomes are a mixed bag. In retrospect, I think I was quite lucky in that I had the right support structures (mentors, etc) in place throughout my life. Some I worked towards, others kinda fell in my lap. In addition, some of my earlier career/life decisions based on hunches have worked out so far (pivoting from medicine to ML in 2012). Not everyone I talked to had the same experience. Some really languished because they really had no support / positive influences. Others think it's one of the best decisions they've made, in both time/money saved and agency.
If I had to summarize, one of the major negatives is that self-directed education frontloads a lot of the problems early on. You're in total control, but also exposed to all your mistakes. If you don't have the right environment, you can flounder in the sense that you don't even know what you're missing. This is compounded by our terrible K-12 education system, which does not prepare you for self-direction. If you don't have other sources of support, it could lead you to a vicious cycle of failure begetting failure. You'll also be "marked" [2] and mistakes/setbacks will be attributed to your lack of degree, whether justified or not. From a career perspective, some hiring managers are not incentivized to take risks on non-degree holders. Ie. it could blow back on them if you don't work out. You'll have to work harder on signaling and networking, etc. You're not going "fit", esp in a degree-heavy culture, and that could lead to social isolation.
The positives is that, at the moment, there's never been a better time to self-direct your education. You end up learning things that interest you, at your pace at the right time, so the problems/work is always relevant. You can go really deep really fast. The people that you want to work for/with don't care about your degree. Self-directed education is inevitable, esp in tech. Every one of us eventually have to take control of our education. The problems you have to work through early on are also inevitable (ex. signaling to others that you are competent). The agency and sense of control is great for your mental well-being and developing accountability. Your team can count on you to take the initiative, figure things out, and learn the things you need to learn. Uncertainty is not paralyzing. You've dealt with it your whole life.
Overall, it's not an easy path. I think a lot of it depends on early support and the mental attitude/personality of the individual.
[1]https://www.divepod.to [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness
started working in dial up isp. going to the clients home to install trumpet winsock and netscape navigator. from there moved to do some web development (php/fi, ajax).delphi. perl. over time gravitated into network/security software development and telecoms.
now oversee a few hundreds of developers that work on rather big system deployed in multiple locations arounds world.
Many tech big names got by without a degree. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison.
After a short, successful career in aerospace engineering, I bought an Apple II in 1977. Wrote a best-selling word processor (Apple Writer). Retired at the age of 30. Seventh-grade dropout.
In fact, apart from Elon Musk, I am at pains to find anyone influential who has a degree.
Some may insist that a degree is more common than this narrative suggests, but granted that, it seems there is a weak to nonexistent correlation between technical career success and an advanced degree.
Young people should learn this, before preparing for a career that might not rely on the degree. Or before signing up for a course of instruction that teaches skills no longer in demand -- like computer programming.