Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

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.

There's a lot of us everywhere.

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 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.

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 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 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

Highschool dropout w/ GED here.

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 would venture to say that most people working in tech do not have a STEM degree.

To answer your question: I got into computers and programming when I was 8 years old in the 1970s, and haven't stopped.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@codevark - just an FYI that you've been shadow banned since 2017 - you might want to ping Dang if you want get your account back in full.

I wrote about it in this comment which was up voted to triple digits. My story is buried in a sub comment.

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.

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.

[1]https://www.divepod.to [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness

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.