[inductive_magic]

As someone who “made it” without a formal degree: oh come on. If nobody opens doors for you, it takes a lot more than just intellect and grit to establish yourself. While I don’t have many good things to say about the established education systems, it’s beyond naive to act like “just do it on your own” is a scalable approach. Even today, some doors will stay closed for me, simply because I will always have to justify why I have no formal degree (and the doorkeepers are not incentivized to even listen since the pool of candidates is big), and some of those doors are highly interesting.

[busterarm]

I'm in a similar experience as you, but as my career grows longer into the decades I realize that it takes just as much mental fortitude to stay working in this field as it did for us to break into it from the unusual path.

The half life of software engineers is quite short. Even some of the brightest minds I met who went to some of the best schools ended up just being tourists in this industry -- flushed out and disillusioned after only a few years.

[inductive_magic]

I’m not just thinking about software engineering. There are lots of interesting positions which require any degree just as a basic requirement, especially in emerging fields, strategic roles, and generally in big companies. Maybe they’ll consider me qualified after I’ve built my own company, but if they encode the degree as a hard requirement the screening AI will just ditch my resume.

I don’t plan to stay in software for the rest of my life. Currently, my company develops knowledge engineering solutions, but in 5-10 years, I’d like to get some fresh air.

[Tutitk]

I started blog and Github project, in a year I had a good job. It takes a lot, but there are much more efficient way.

College takes a lot of time and money. If you do this early in your career, it will hobble for decades.

Imagine you spend 30k on education, spend 3 years and get kicked out in final year, because you disagree with teacher. Or someone makes complain.

> Even today, some doors will stay closed for me, simply because... no formal degree

Degree is only needed for higher positions, those are not accessible to young people anyway. You can always get degree latter, it gets so much easier and cheaper, when you have experience . For me it was just a formality, I spend maybe like 200 hours total for my masters.

[epolanski]

These doors are closed for political reasons.

Nobody wants to explain why the CTO who fucked up big had such a CV.