[eoin_murphy]

I took this to be less a post about not having a degree but rather, not keeping up with the market. How it's easy to just do the work that's in front of you and not consider how your choices now will affect your career in 10~20~30 years time.

Not having a degree doesn't help finding work (it shouldn't make a difference, but unfortuantely with most HR depts it does) but if the poster had been willing to aggressively work on their career instead of coasting at the "traditional office" the story could be very different.

I've done a few years with a mixture of small company/freelance work myself and I'm back in an enterprise company for the first time in ages and on a purely technical level it's a giant step back. There's huge resistance to changing existing code and/or introducing new technologies. Often with good business reasons (the product is done, it's in production and huge changes are not needed) but if you're on the technical side then you absolutely have to be looking out for your own skills if you ever want to work outside of that company again.

If I was a hiring manager, seeing 10 years at a "traditional" company on a CV with no signs of interest in the field outside of the job would be setting off alarms. I absolutely would rather hire someone with experience and fully developed professional skills than a fresh grad, but the nightmare is that your experienced hire is used to just following their 80 page internal process guide every day and they wouldn't be able to handle any new situations.