Programming doesn't need you to have a college degree to be successful. If you have great skills, there will be a wonderful amount of opportunities waiting for you. It doesn't matter how young or old you are. The most important factors for your success is how smart and how hard you work.

Are you a recruiter? 😄

Alright, you bought me with this post. How do I become one? 🤔

For comparison:
"Aerospace engineering doesn't need you to have a college degree to be successful."
"Architecture doesn't need you to have a college degree to be successful."
"Surgery doesn't need you to have a college degree to be successful."

Stop treating our profession like it's garbageman work.

you forget "connections"

I have seen a good programmer making less than he should since he don't have "connections"

@PonySlaystation No I'm not. 😄

@VaderNT Are you saying that self-taught developers are necessarily worse? Can't they succeed in our profession? There are good and bad developers with a college degree, as well as good and bad self-taught developers. A lot of self-taught developers I had the opportunity to work with were talented.

If by "programmer" you mean web / ui developer, then sure...

@iamcryptoki I think we need your definition of "success" here.

@VaderNT I don’t have a degree, and a embedded software engineer for 15 years... doing robotics, and AI stuff too.

Also I am in many interviews with candidates for recruitment... I will say when there is a toss up between two candidates, the one without the degree gets hired as I view their road they took, and what they had todo to learn the skills was much harder, and that proves they are hard workers. And btw my interviews are no easy. I know every well in the interview if the person is bullshiting what they know.

ALSO... my father was a garbage man, before he passed away...they make very good money, no degree, and are very hard working people. No degree and make 60-70k a year. Plus over time and union benefits. That’s more than first responders and police. Please don’t knock a career you view as lower than you, or knock career paths that don’t obtain degrees...

30-50years ago the normal was not having a degree and having a degree put you apart from the rest of job market... made you different...

Today ... the normal is degrees... thus I want the people with the skills without the degree.. I’m not discrediting the degree folks.. I’m just saying .. your a dime a dozen there’s thousands of you, easily replaceable..

Also I have found the folks without the degree approach problems and come up with solutions outside of the box.. they tend to lead better than degrees and they approach problems based on experience rather than theory.

@cryptoki thanks for asking, let me add more nuance.

In my experience devs without a degree aren't necessarily less talented, but almost certainly less educated.
What I'm saying is our profession has a quality problem, in large part because of that. "Witch doctors" are way more successful than they should be. Software is way more shitty than it should be.

We're in desperate need for binding standards and meaningful certifications. I don't really care how you meet these. If self-taughts get these hypothetical certificates, be my guest. Though I have to add, I'm looking at other professions and I don't see that. I don't see self-taught engineers build cars, planes or buildings. I don't see self-taught lawyers in court. In comparison I don't think we are in any way special. Quite the contrary, actually.

I quit university 🎓

@QuanticoCEO

I genuinely enjoy your "hero stories" (meant in the best way). Though I don't see these being the norm or degrees as probematic. Actually, I don't get the latter point at all. The normal is degrees for many professions. Being a doctor without a medical degree or a lawyer without a law degree certainly sets you apart, and not in a good way.

However. The actual issue is we have too many shoddy devs, degree or not, and no meaningful standards to weed them out. We're trying, through interviews and heuristics that make sense to us. And they're quite obviously biased, e.g. towards people similar to us. This is not enough.

> Please don’t knock a career you view as lower than you, or knock career paths that don’t obtain degrees
Red herring. Do garbagemen fill an important role in our society? Yes. Is it a respectable job? Yes! Can more people do it because it doesn't need a degree? Yes. If pointing that out is "knocking", then so be it. 🤷‍♂️

@VaderNT regarding standards and quality, I 100% agree with you the number across the board of shitty devs and code is too damn high.

I have found tho devs who know more lower level code / understand the hardware later, right better code .. degree and especially no degree I think the reason for this is shitty code is exposed in hardware quickly, bad memory management is exposed.. and bloated hacked up code won’t fit.

It seems in my experience somehow the higher level language devs get further knowing less because the SDKs, APIs and IDES kinda Shield their flaws as they code via what pops up in intelsense.. ya don’t get that In the lower level. AND there is far more high level folks in general which is a problem of its own but whatever

I know we in the automotive sphere have MISRA and AutoSAR software compliance .. A-SPICE.. CMMI .. and ISO26262 .. many things the OEMs won’t accept product without certain compliance verification.