My degree's not in computer science/software engineering, but I got into the industry 25yrs ago. At this point, I have enough experience that it doesn't really matter.

But the market is a lot more crowded these days. You'll be up against a lot of people with degrees, and all other things being equal, that's going to give them the edge. Plus, a lot of places use screening software to automatically filter resumes by certain criteria, and looking for a degree is sometimes one of them. There's a chance you could apply to a job and get rejected before your resume is ever seen by a human.

Yes, it's still an industry you can get into without a degree, but it's harder to do.

I don't even have grade 10 much less a college or university degree, and I'm doing just fine as a software engineer. Others will probably disagree with me, but I can very confidently say a degree isn't going to help you much in getting a job. What's going to help you the most is a solid Github account and a quality personal / portfolio site.

I've been at this software thing over 20 years now, and can confidently say a four year Comp Sci degree would have been totally useless to me. Most of the technologies I use nowadays weren't even around 10 - 15 years ago. Hell, git itself is only 15 years old, and loads of other technologies are way newer than that such as Docker, redis, TypeScript, NodeJS, Rust, Golang, Kuberneetz, and even just cloud computing in general, and the list goes on. Hell, dependency injection as a methodology was only first introduced about 18 years ago and didn't pick up steam until quite a few years later. That's nothing to say of the leapds and bounds made in ML / AI over the past decade.

If you enter into the tech space, you're just kind of permanently in university. No getting around that.

Make some friends that may be more and much more important than your degree. I am getting a internship and it literally fell out of the sky. Okay it really didn’t but……


I have a lot of friends in the tech field IT and coding, and made this one recently. He enjoyed my enthusiasm and way of things with accessibility. And helping people out. Later he offered me an internship.

I have learnt a few things the last few years. Make friends a lot of them and maybe something.

in the last 3 years 2 of my jobs another one was a summer job, and probably could have been longer if I enjoyed it and school didn’t interfere. I got that job also because I made a friend who advocated for me to get a job. Two people was very instrumental and said I would be a great teacher. I don’t have the patience but pretty good at getting people to competency. Taught assistive tech for a few months, between that and helping blind people in a computer lab at a community college.

I've done some programming on my own, not even taken any classes, but not a real job... just customs tuff here and there.

First regarding my vision I have always been visually impaired, at the top-end of the legal blindness spectrum as defined in the US, having been born with just 10% of acuity which I lost 8 years ago. I must also warn you that I started a long time ago and left the job market once my vision deteriorated to the point that I could no longer read comfortably from the screen, so things might be different now, and my experience might not even be relevant to you because I wasn't totally blind back then.

I'm fully self-taught, and neither being a high school drop-out nor being visually impaired caused me trouble finding my first job as a programmer. However it took me 8 years between writing my first line of code and feeling comfortable enough to apply to a programmer position, but I got in at the first attempt.

I think that what got me hired to my first programming position was my pro-activity and problem solving skills, as I had already used them in the previous job to write automation tools that improved my productivity and the productivity of my coworkers, meaning I was already unofficially working as a programmer even though that was not my job title.

Before getting my first programming job I also had a sponsored personal project involving the Linux kernel that resulted in contacts by several recruiters in the US to work on embedded software, but unfortunately all the job offerings required me to move, which was actually a dream of mine that I couldn't realize because the H-1B visa demandss a bachelor's degree, and I never had any luck with the Diversity Visa Program either, so I had to turn them down.