Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team? tldr: it's been a few years since I've run into anyone in the pool without a degree. quixotic history aside, how rare is it to get contract work as sendev, devops(sysop ftw) or mid-pm at some F50 houses? My offers are usually about 60% of CS holders... but I'd rather do than don't. Could just be the market in Vancouver, probably a skill issue. |
When it became evident how much developers were in demand and could earn, there was a flood of late millennials and zoomers into CS programs, so the percentage of self-taught dropped to nearly zero. For a while when demand for SWEs still exceeded supply, that was augmented by bootcamp grads because getting the entry level job had become the hardest part and a bootcamp was a signal of legitimacy.
Bigger companies without tech DNA are more likely than small companies or tech giants to insist on degrees. When hiring was tight, they might ignore that signal; but right now HMs are overwhelmed with applicants and filtering by degrees is just one way to whittle the field down to a size they can hope to wrangle.
And it’s common for people over 40 to get out of the field for one reason or another — or shift to consulting, typically as “fCTOs” rather than contract developers — so that older self-taught pool is shrinking.
I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.
Just last night an analyst came into my little startup/store. Asked him to take a look at my latest scratch build. Told me to just get a degree from a cert-farm and go for Bay-Area-level work. But, maybe I need therapy instead, because I just don't know a single colleague at the F50s in this city that say the same thing.