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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Getting a BS in Computer Science was huge towards my success. I had to work while in college due to lack of funds. My job as a programmer paid very little before I got my degree. Even with years of experience, I had a hard time getting a dev job with an employer that paid better without my degree. With the degree, it was significantly easier.
I've heard of stories of folks that "made it" in dev without a degree. I did not have the charisma or whatever other skill they had to do it...
I will say I have quite a few student loans because my scholarships weren't enough (I was an average student at best) and my family made a lot of money but didn't help me so I didn't get other aid I would have normally qualified for. For me, my very well paying job outweighs the student loan payment. My gamble paid off. (It was a fairly safe gamble, but one can never really know in the uncertainty of life.)
However, even in the last few years school has gone up in price A LOT so that may change the calculations for future folks.
I've made a career out of website development, despite not having my degree, but it was a very hard path in the beginning. Things have changed a lot, and it's easier than ever to get an engineering job without a degree, but I used to strongly advise people to get their degree if they want to enter this field. The amount of work I had to put in to build a good enough portfolio to land a corporate job was ridiculous. There were times when I was working 15-17 hours per day, 7 days per week, for months on end, and still broke as fuck. That was after spending years acquiring the skills, and building the connections required to land that work in the first place. The way I see it, you can either go have fun in school for a few years, and then land a bad-ass job at some fortune 500 company, or you can bust your ass for years on end, starving and being broke, while never knowing if it's actually going to pay off or not. In my case it paid off, in many cases it doesn't. Of the two paths, school is the far easier one.
I managed to get into web-dev without a CS degree, but I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones.
I got a bachelor's in Chemistry, but realized very quickly after graduating that there are precisely zero decent paying jobs for a bachelor's in general chemistry. Literally the only place that even called me back was offering $14/hr to do urinalysis... working the graveyard shift.
I ended up getting a job doing content review as a contractor for the largest video sharing platform (you know the one). A lot of the work was really monotonous, mostly just copying and pasting stuff. We had a quota that once we hit, we could stop working (and still be paid a full day). I could already hit the quota in around 3-4 hours, but I realized if I didn't have to copy/paste, I could cut that down to only 1-2 hours.
So, in my spare time at work I ended up learning JavaScript and making a chrome extension to do just that. I showed my bosses and they ended up putting me in a full time programming position.
I don't use my chemistry degree at all, but my math minor definitely comes in handy.