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.
I came here to ask OP if they mean "without STEM degree", "without STEM education" ... Would physics degree (while STEM, it's supposedly not as close to Software/Tech as math or other types of engineering studies).
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.
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.
Could you give an example of how it helps you look at things a little differently?
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've spent a lot of my career doing various types of solution design. One of the insights I gained from thinking a lot about representation, intentionality and the philosophy of language is that the way you represent a problem has a big influence on how easy you will find it to solve the problem. I've found that helps with solution design. Don't just think about the problem. Think about what is the best way to represent the problem.
Also a philosophy grad. Good philosophy programs force you to practice aggressively thinking logically, to the point of teaching symbolic logic which is basically coding.
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, 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.
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 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.
My dad was a computer programmer, so we were doing basic on apple2 from a young age. I did actually do one year of a cs degree but dropped out to focus on juggling. Yes.
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!
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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.
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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!