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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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

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.

@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 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.