[nperez]

Reminds me a lot of the boat I'm in - based on his CV it looks like he's self-taught and started around the same time I did. This market right now is killing us, and I've got to wonder if AI tools are filtering out self-taught devs more aggressively than they used to. In the worst case scenario, I have family I can move in with, but I don't know how to function in any other role after dedicating myself to this since childhood. Just going to keep refining skills and hope things turn around soon.

[mrweasel]

> I've got to wonder if AI tools are filtering out self-taught devs more aggressively than they used to.

I hope not. I have a CS degree, but some of the best and most prolific developers I've had the pleasure to work with have all be self-taught. One of the most talented .Net developers I've ever worked with had a masters degree in philosophy and was a trained furniture maker, when those things failed to pay the bills he taught himself C# and was easily the most talented and creative developer on our team.

Selecting developers based on education is moronic, the self-taught people are often really talented and I can easily find CS majors who can't program at all. Education has almost zero reflection on your ability as a developer.

[glimshe]

This is not true. There is a fairly strong correlation between formal education and ability as a developer, and I say this as someone with close to 2 decades of experience in the problem space. A CS/STEM degree, as degree quality (where the degree was obtained), makes an enormous difference in the average case.

People who say the opposite are thinking of developers, often themselves, who were able to become skilled without a CS degree. That is indeed quite possible, and I've met many individuals in this category. I'm not going to say the best developers I've met had no degree, but I've met great developers without a degree. But I wouldn't say it is common; most developers without a CS/STEM degree whom I've met were, indeed, mediocre engineers that often had no business being there.

I've also met many poor developers from great schools and great developers from schools with poor reputation. But, as a thought experiment, if I was to pick a developer based solely on whether they have a degree and where they got this degree, lacking any other piece of information, I'd always pick the ones with a degree from a reputable school.

[thelastparadise]

Agree with the general idea if your post but...

> Education has almost zero reflection on your ability as a developer.

Can we stop using the word "education" as a propaganda word like this?

When people use the word like this, what they really mean is "institutionalized education and/or indoctrination."

[sgu999]

I've come across so many devs with "good" CVs who were full of themselves and couldn't do a single pragmatic thing. CVs, degrees, titles seem completely inflated and mostly meaningless in North America and in tech in particular. Sometimes I'm wondering whether people like you – assuming you are good at your job – shouldn't simply lie on their CV to get their foot in the door.

Regardless, you should have better chances of not being filtered out with small, profitable, companies.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

A billion of these stories never prepared me for the utter shitshow that laid itself bare to me when I first became a hiring manager. I’m self-taught, am strongly philosophically opposed to educational or past employer ‘prestige’ like working for FAANG or whatever. Still, I learned pretty quickly to not trust a bunch of naive ‘intuitive’ signals.