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. |
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.
People say you don't need a degree but in France that's not true
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.
Thing is, I was always a tech nerd, too. I put up websites for every project I worked on - and plenty for friends, too - going back to the late nineties. I programmed (and sometimes physically repaired) lighting and sound systems. I built plug-ins for lighting and sound software, to solve problems various shows had. I set up networking stacks for a couple of theatres. In 2004 or so I built what was basically Brown Paper Tickets (before Brown Paper Tickets existed) for a theatre company I was working for at the time - backed by an Access database, of all things, running on an old box in the office because that's all we had to work with without paying for it. Later I built effectively MailChimp, to promote my own show. Arguably I should have monetized one or another of those tech projects, and done theatre later, but that was never the point. I enjoyed messing with tech, but didn't want to do any of it, except insofar as it made possible something else I really wanted to do.
At 40 I lost my teaching job (enrollment dropped, and arts are always the first to go), and my wife and I didn't want to move, and were thinking of having a family, so I finally sold out. A restauranteur I'd worked a fair bit for in my twenties needed an IT Director for his growing company, and figured I could do it, which it turns out I can. I make three times what I did as a teacher, five or six times what I did in my best year as a working actor, and... Eh. I like my job. I'm pretty good at it, but it's what I'm doing in order to do what I really want to do, which these days is to support my family.
I don't recommend my career path to anyone as a way into tech (lol!), and I think our world would be a better place if there were less money in tech, and more in arts and education.
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.
AI layoffs, and AI ghost jobs came along late 2022 early 2023, and I haven't been able to find a single opportunity for work since. Application to callback conversion changed from around 2-3 in 100 to the same in 1200.
Roughly two years of daily applications submitted, only about 12 callbacks, 5 for pre-interview questioning, the rest were low-ball offers beneath livable wages (i.e. <34k/yr). Total, somewhere around 10,000-12,000 positions submitted to.
Around 2023, 80% of my professional network was out of work, many took jobs that were beneath their capabilities (architects/SA at helpdesk) and also locked themselves into anti-competitive agreements which have made their lives harder. Today roughly 50% is still out of work, the other 30% is underemployed.
The ghost job/AI fiasco also doesn't just apply to IT, it has affected every single place with an online application process. Even the local jobs for simple things like retail, grocery cashiering, etc. I've talked with a few hiring managers at local places to get the scoop, and they say they are overwhelmed with hiring because of the amount of spam which they cannot differentiate between a true applicant, has reached epic proportions; it translates into extreme cost on their side (just as it does on the applicant side).
So I fell back to other skills I have, and have been self-employed ever since, albeit barely getting by between the odd jobs and welfare to pay for food with the help of family. Inflation, and constant draw without work destroyed the savings I had saved up so far for retirements; that's gone. Inflation isn't keeping pace with welfare benefits/prices so end of the month is always extremely rough where you may go a few days without food if you didn't have a means to buy and preserve ahead of time (at your own expense).
I'm going back to school to retrain, because as it stands, there is no future in IT/White Collar work.
I held on for two years, hoping to see some iota of a recovery, and there has been no recovery, which means it has a long way further to fall. What's worse online platforms are censoring and de-amplifying real stories like mine, which is just absolutely vile.
While I don't hold a STEM degree, I have completed classwork that would meet most of the requirements to get one (i.e. Completed Multivariable Calculus, and have working knowledge of most concepts in Differential Equations/Linear Algebra/Discrete Mathematics).
The world today has become completely disconnected from reality, and when that kind of distortion occurs, you get chaotic whipsaws that continue growing until the positive feedback system ends catastrophically.
The profession has drilled in enough such that I know a thing or two about systems, system properties, and where it all leads.
There are plenty of people who have the skills, competency, and experience to do these types of work but they can't be found because of tortious/vexatious interference of bad actors who have jammed communications beyond the Shannon Limit. At that stage of communications jamming, you get the same behavior as happens in cellular networks with RNA interference. The bad jobs block good jobs from matching up.
Money-printing through debt or money-substitutes has also decoupled the need for business to act to correct destructive behaviors and cyclical dynamics they create. Its all a problem for next quarter, and by the time they realize it needs to be taken care of now and that next quarter was 4 quarters ago, its far too late. Hysteresis trap.
Given the sequential nature of career development pipelines, the progression of AI, I fully expect a complete collapse in white-collar/IT sector to be visible, losing industry knowledge in the next 3 years, and 7 years out possibly becoming lost/inaccessible knowledge/expertise (where you can't find these people no matter how much you pay).
All I wanted to do for retirement was buy a small farm/homestead. That's looking pretty out of reach now given the entire lack of employment opportunity despite overwhelming effort, utilizing every possible option out there.
My experience, competency isn't rewarded at all, in most cases its punished because it doesn't follow the cult of qualification. Sometimes things seem good, but you always wait for the other shoe to drop. There are plenty of STARs out there wanting work who can't find work.
Many would simply go out and start their own business if they could, but financial engineering has ensured most industry have these huge cost moats, where you need to be scaled up to a certain point before you can compete, or there is regulatory preventing entry. The base-costs unscaled are operating at a loss, so its barren ground where nothing can grow.
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
The first couple years were easy. It was before the dot-com bubble burst and I lived in the bay area, so finding jobs was trivial. I worked at Adobe for a while, then Ask Jeeves (a household name from that era, for you young'uns).
After the bubble burst it was a bit harder. I moved cross-country to a rural area and took tech-related jobs to make ends meet. Eventually I started working remotely for a bottom-scraping company on Long Island.
There I started dating a coworker. Her father was the facilities manager for a major financial institution in Manhattan and got me an interview. I was 100% a nepotistic hire, but I worked hard and did skunkswork projects for the CTO. This was circa 2006, and once you've worked at one finance company it's easy to find related jobs. So I bounced around finance for a bit. Banks, hedge funds, etc. I worked right across the street from Lehman Brothers and watched their crash from the windows.
Eventually I got married and decided I didn't want NYC kids. We decided to move back to the bay area around 2010. I found a small company I could work for while I looked for something else. I was referred into Google and started at L4. Promo'd to L5 and stayed there for a bit.
In 2022 I left and did a bunch of odd stuff. The timing was really bad, and I got laid off twice, but I was lucky enough to be working again before severance ran out both times. On the whole it was probably better for me in terms of TC, but who knows. I just returned to Google last month. We'll see how this run does.
Not having a degree probably hurt me in the beginning. I had to tune and A/B test my resume to get past hiring managers. I list the years I went to colleges and what I studied. I had gone to a separate university for summer extension classes while in high school, so on paper it looks like I went for 4 years, but I'm cautious to say I don't have a degree. I'm honest about it, but not forthcoming.
I've had managers tell me that if they had realized, they wouldn't have hired me, but they're glad they did. I've had interviewers ask for transcripts and then take me over the coals about why I failed Intro to Viticulture and Enology 20 years ago. I've had hiring managers who needed to get creative about my title, because they didn't allow a title with "Engineer" in it without a degree. I've had managers throw it in my face and use it as a reason to cut me. But most of my managers never knew.
I'm 25 years into my career at this point, and nobody cares. I bring it up occasionally, but with many years at multiple FAANGs, it's just not a concern.
My kids know the full history and are in high school. I'm advocating for them to take a better path, but I'm aware it's their choice. The elder has severe ADHD, and my suggestion for him is to do a two year stint in the military between high school and college. I know he'll test high on the ASVAB, which means he probably won't be in a combat MOS. And I think the service will be good for him, and give him a leg up in a variety of areas. He's considering it, leaning towards air force.
My younger wants to be a teacher, but isn't certain and wants to do something more creative. She's good at STEM, so we're exploring alternatives like architecture, civil engineering.
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
After 6+ years at Meta, left to pursue entrepreneurship. Hired a mentor to teach me how to build with no-code/low-code (I still think traditional code is superior, but it isn't always needed).
Now I'm about to launch my web app in August.
We'll see if sacrificing the ~$300K in TC was worth it.
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 started working for a banking software company that had a college grad intake program. Their theory was that great programmers have characteristics that are often found in disciplines like business, music, philosophy, etc. They’d teach new hires COBOL in an OJT setting.
It worked out very well. I feel very lucky to have had this path.
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...
* Hypercard/Director/Photoshop based Multimedia
* AppleScript/Filemaker
* Web Development Prograph CPX / SQL Web Development
* Python/Zope/SQL/PHP Web Development
* Processing(Java)/P5js/GDevelop Edu/Games Development
* Python/AppleScript/Sheets/AI/Python
It was a bit difficult to learn what I needed to learn as very few people estimate or run electrical work as a hobby, unlike programming.
I had some training from my employer but mostly I just asked thousands of questions and eventually figured it out.
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. :)
Spend 10 years as a sw dev, then went into VFX and design. Working in automotive design at a major OEM now.
I needed my career shifts really badly and wish the younger generation would have similar opportunities.
In my case I was already better than my professors, already taught my own university courses, so there was no need to get a degree. Work was better than uni.
The course quality was on par with a brick and mortar college I attended prior.
Nobody has cared about my degree so far.
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.
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.
Loads of such not strictly TECH folks end up in Big Tech as data scientists, as well as programmers.
I only have ~25 years of "work" experience. I finished electrical engineering/electronics highschool (in parts of Europe you're 18 y/o by the time you finish highschool). And then just as I started with (computers focused) EE College - I also started freelancing. I started making websites/scripts/etc in the early 2000s.
It turned into full time contracting, and then even moving countries for "Software Engineering" job - all before I finished college.
Anyway - although in the last 2-5 years (Covid/Wars/etc) it became less common for companies to accept "graduates".
My impression is that it's more about hiring freeze in general, than the more recent "AI makes 100x developers possible" hype.
And by "graduates" I've seen both young folks with tech education but 0 work experience, as well as no (complete or at all official) tech education yet self taught and much more "work experience" from personal projects, competitions, hackathons.
And of course there's also other tech stuff - UX/design, db/net/sys admins and such.
I found that when I talked to my old roommate (he has a philosophy bachelor + master degree) that my programming experience helped a lot in talking about philosphy.
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.
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.
Later on I got back into programming because of electronic juggling equipment. The pro stuff is so expensive despite being just LEDs with batteries and microcontrollers! So anyway I went down the path of learning embedded, making my own equipment including hardware.
It turns out that compared to low level c++, programming for web isn't that different. In some ways it's easier. That's good because during COVID I had to take a break from live entertainment, and managed to make a living doing data science type web stuff (working for my sister, who finished her degree and had a research grant).
Right now I'm back on the embedded scene but combining with web to make IoT juggling equipment (in partnership with a hardware company because I suck at hardware). Product coming soon!
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.
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.
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 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.
Three semesters into college, not yet having taken any CS classes, this little consulting business had grown so much that I was turning away more work than I had time to accept. Why should I bother finishing a degree, I had to ask, when I already have a career throwing itself at me?
It's worked out fine; I've been writing code for a living ever since. I've worked for a few of the bigcos, but I prefer smaller companies. Some applications work, from time to time, but mostly dev tools, or system software. I like compilers; currently working on a tensor compiler for an ML system.
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.
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.
After I got that job I decided to take a break from trying and failing to force myself through a degree and focus on doing well at work.
Over five or so years I worked up at the same company from frontline support to corporate/government support (mostly configuring/troubleshooting Cisco stuff) before finally landing in a speciality gov support sys admin role.
Spent a couple of years doIng that before I was recruited into a FAANG, did some cloud operations work for a while, started working on some away team dev work which eventually turned into a full time SDE role. Been doing that for a few years now.
Still haven't found any reason to go back and finish my degree.
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'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 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 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 work, or have worked, with people who have no degrees and went right into the workforce, have their experience through the military, or have completely unrelated degrees, like geology.
I often feel like I’m in the minority as someone with a degree. Though I think that may have shifted somewhat, but no one ever talks about it. College and degrees almost never come up. Of the people currently on my team, I only know the background of a couple, who I’ve worked with for almost 20 years. The others, I have no clue.
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.