Ask HN: No formal software education – is there hope for me?
I realize I&#x27;m not doxable so you can consider my comment &quot;fake&quot; but I am a contractor SE making $83K&#x2F;yr in midwest, no degree. Granted also means I have no health insurance(personal choice).<p>I went to school&#x2F;failed out, left with some debt(still in debt). I was going for Phys&#x2F;Eng co-op program(5 years).<p>I got into web development luckily(personally trying to make high traffic ad revenue websites) that didn&#x27;t work out but I became a full stack developer(can build an interface&#x2F;make matching backend with auth in LAMP).<p>I freelanced online(UpWork) then got into a local web developer agency(WordPress... templates...) then I got lucky to make the jump into a local corporation in my state where I&#x27;m now an SE. It was unreal to me at first as my previous job I only made $50K&#x2F;yr and mandatory 45 hrs for &quot;salary&quot;.<p>Now I just keep learning so if I lose my job I can hopefully get hired elsewhere.<p>I was washing plates&#x2F;worked in a factory&#x2F;did data entry... yeah I&#x27;m super lucky I made it.<p>So it&#x27;s entirely up to you and I&#x27;d say with a degree the odds are even more in your favor since that always bothers me as a lot of jobs I can&#x27;t apply to &quot;no degree&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s entirely up to you, you have to want it. For reference I was not into computers when I was younger, we had one and I just played Runescape on it. My journey in this field started in 2013 so it&#x27;s not something I just pulled out of my ass overnight.<p>Use LinkedIn by the way it works, but be truthful as well, don&#x27;t game the system.<p>...<p>Personal rant<p>This is a personal opinion but I&#x27;ve been pretty stressed out at my job, mostly the &quot;bureacracy&quot; like &quot;every line of code&quot; is traceable. JIRAs, design docs, unit test&#x2F;selenium&#x2F;regression testing... so much work I can&#x27;t just &quot;solve this problem&quot; you know... I don&#x27;t know. It&#x27;s interesting, my prior job sucked because there was no chance to learn and it got super repetitive building template after template from a design. But there was also barely any sort of structure&#x2F;no testing... we barely knew how to use Git as a whole.<p>Clarifying, I&#x27;m not against the concept of testing. It&#x27;s nice being able to run old ones and see the app didn&#x27;t break when a new feature is added. Just saying there&#x27;s a lot of &quot;paperwork&quot;. Which... get a hobby right or change jobs(what I&#x27;ll probably do).<p>I&#x27;m at the point now where I can almost make anything I want. Granted I am not a scaling-god or super devops heavy(aside from using Docker)&#x2F;not an algorithm guy. Also have not bit the ML&#x2F;AI bullet yet. But yeah, there&#x27;s a lot to it, the surface area, but a lot of technology now makes it super easy to get into&#x2F;accessible. Think React and React Native&#x2F;Electron so easy to build cross platform. Crash courses online to quickly pick something up.<p>And all the commoditized services eg. Twilio&#x2F;Mailgun&#x2F;AWS&#x2F;Browserstack&#x2F;etc... (I don&#x27;t like AWS expensive).