I get that anyone with the skills can still make it in this industry, but getting your foot in the door without a degree at this point seems nigh impossible. I highly doubt I would ever get a shot today at the junior roles that I did 10 years ago, as a dropout with no experience. Competing with the hordes of CS grads getting churned out now would be futile.
I was self-taught, then went to Yale where I (almost begrudgingly) chose to major in CS. The Yale curriculum is more oriented toward "fundamentals" than at most schools, with introductory courses taught in C and a heavy emphasis on the more static aspects of CS that haven't changed since 1970. The professors insisted that you'd learn the practical skills like languages and tooling du juor at your internships, so not to worry about the heavy emphasis on theory during class. It actually became a big point of contention while I was there, and some students in the year ahead of me started HackYale as a sort of practical-skills bootcamp. After I left (2014), and the CS major exploded in popularity, they partnered with Harvard on that CS50 thing, which AFAIU is a more real-world oriented introduction to programming.
In retrospect, the professors were right. I've rarely used C in my work, but the theoretical underpinnings that I learned have been an invaluable foundation. But I could have also spent those four years learning "more practical" skills and I doubt it would have changed much. Like many students at the time, I already knew scripting languages when I started the CS major, anyway. And I expect that's much more common these days.
So, all that's to say - while I appreciate the theoretical foundation I got from CS, I don't think it was strictly a pre-requisite to becoming a software engineer. Besides, I still consider myself self-taught anyway, since I learned to "program" before I went to school for computer science, which - as my advisor was quick to point out - was a wholly separate different endeavor. And I have an easier time connecting and empathisizing with fellow self-taught engineers than I do with fellow alumni. Or at least, it's a different kind of connection - in a self-taught engineer I see a kindred intellectual spirit, whereas in a fellow alumnus I see inside jokes and a shared experience of college debauchery.
Now I'm a co-founder of a startup, and we've hired five other engineers, including one former aerospace engineer who graduated from bootcamp and whom we've molded into a junior engineer with an initial skillset perfectly tailored to our stack. We've built a really strong remote team. We actually avoided hiring people with brand name degrees, and looked instead for demonstrably practical skills and the ability to work independently. Based on those evaluation metrics, someone who is a self-taught programmer is actually our ideal candidate. So I wouldn't feel bad for them - on the contrary, I'd feel bad for the prestige chasers who need to compete with every intellectually curious hustler with a computer.
I was self-taught in both terms of computer science when programming books were the staples and DIY computers when they came in beige boxes. I would trek to a Computer Literacy Bookshop north of downtown San Jose to acquire DOS and interrupt call reference manuals. College prep over-achiever high school but avoided the heard intent on swarming Boston, Berkeley, and Palo Alto. Instead, did UC Davis where there was UNIX flavors and Linux. Was CS before transferring to CS&E (EE/CS equivalent). The intro networking course 3rd project was to write a forking caching forward HTTP/0.9 proxy. There was little-to-no grade inflation and it was sink or swim because they were itching to compete with Ivys and PacNN on fundamentals of rigorous undergrad program and vying for interesting research, especially in computer graphics and infosec.
Prior to this, I had a high school job as an assistant manager at a retail software store before going into sysadmin consulting.
Engineering systems thinking and discipline comes from practice and experience of doing difficult things. Brand Name degrees have a bad rep now in a post-Theranos world where there's the easy ramp to capital and support based on pedigree tick boxes, which doesn't necessarily translate into hack and hustle. There's another phenomenon where people who come from well-off backgrounds are often under pressure to go well beyond ordinary expectations of education and job performance to avoid the perception of riding pedigree and upbringing.
I look for engineers who mildly obsess over correctness, remove tech debt and net LoC, weigh the tradeoffs with discretion, express continuous curiosity, and bonus points if they're partially extroverted and easy-going. I've worked with engineers in title who fell into their positions via a transition from IT roles, but sometimes engineering ingenuity and curiosity are missing and that's a bit disappointing.
I'm pretty sure that you'd be more than fine competing against a bunch of folks with cs degrees if you have an actually interesting portfolio/OSS contributions/freelance experience etc. I have a degree but not a cs degree (entirely self taught there) and at least a couple years ago early in the pandemic (pre 2021 bubble) it wasn't that hard to break in. Right now it's probably harder for everyone, not just people without cs degrees
It’s sort of chilling when you go this route. Apple literally told me “great interviews, great record, but you didn’t go to a top 10 school or work at another big company yet. Call us in 5 years.” Thankfully Google felt differently, but man. There’s these little filter steps that are mostly luck and are unintuitive. Not lucky as in “oh I’m lucky I got into Yale” but “oh I’m lucky the Google recruiter read my confused earnestness as admirable”
Yeah thats faang sure, but I ran into no such resistance with midsize and startups. I was lucky in that I found those companies significantly more interesting and targeted them anyway, if you really want the faang stamp for whatever reason (at this point their comp probably isn't that competitive anymore with falling stock prices and those office perks matter less with work from home, and idk if they have the prestige they used to) then honestly it's probably always been much more unattainable
I am far from being a card-carrying member of the ethics police, but this is a terrible advice even on the most practical level.
You are just gonna get fired during your first week once the background check comes through. No matter how much brilliance you manage to demonstrate during that first week or how much your teammates like you, I do not foresee the person not getting fired instantly upon the background check detecting that lie and confirming it as such.
> There's time after the technical interviews and before the background check.
Yes, and? I said as much, you will get to work for about a week or two before the background check results come back, and then you get fired. Or was your plan to just hold an infinite chain of 2-week jobs?
I am genuinely confused, which part do you think I had misread that goes against what I said earlier?
> Do you think HR runs background checks before or after the team greenlights a candidate?
No idea how it is at all companies ever, but i can tell you about the ones I worked at.
At both, I was asked to do the background check after i already signed the offer and started work, so after the team greenlighted me (obviously). At the first one I got the results back during my 2nd week of work, at the second one i got it back during week 1.
HR definitely checked it after, because they requested certain documentation to prove my previous employment with my previous company. Because the previous company i worked for was merged into another one, so it technically didn't exist anymore, and they couldn't verify with them that I indeed used to be employed by them.
Ehhh 5 years ago it was still very difficult. I knew a large cohort that attempted this but failed and went to a Bootcamp (and got hired that way) instead.
There are people who get an entire regionally-accredited bachelors degree in computer science in a single 6 month semester at Western Governor's University for $4,000. They are rather rare, but it happens.
The university lets you take as many courses as you can pass (serially, one-at-a-time) per semester.
The exams are taken in person, in proctored testing centers such as Prometric or PSI Services where you have to present government ID and you are recorded on video during the exam. So roughly the same threat model as in-person classes where you could hire a smart body double who looked enough like you to attend exams for you at an in-person university.
