Ask HN: No formal software education – is there hope for me?
&gt;<i>Many places I apply to want people who have experience in software development or they want to hire a junior for some super low pay.</i><p>That&#x27;s because you <i>are</i> a junior developer and you&#x27;re only worth a junior engineer&#x27;s pay. Sorry if that&#x27;s harsh, I&#x27;m a bit blunt; but it&#x27;s not a value judgement or a criticism, it&#x27;s a statement of fact. Go work at a place that pays you a junior engineer&#x27;s salary and learn the industry skills you need to earn a better salary.<p>&gt;<i>I&#x27;ve got lots of projects I&#x27;ve done in the last year.</i><p>That&#x27;s really great, and it&#x27;ll give you a leg up on the other junior programmers who are applying at places. But projects don&#x27;t confer industry experience with a team, which is what places are looking for. It&#x27;s a world of difference between &quot;I&#x27;ve done projects on my own and I can complete them,&quot; and &quot;I&#x27;ve worked with engineers, product managers, managers, designers, non technical people and together we have shipped software.&quot; All of the stuff you&#x27;re doing is setting you apart from your competition, but realize your competition is for junior roles.<p>To answer the question:<p>&gt;<i>Is there hope for me?</i><p>Absolutely. You seem smart and driven and capable of communicating. In my 14 years of coding professionally, I&#x27;ve worked with people who studied communication, linguistics, a foreign language, creative writing, IT, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, music composition, etc. Some of the best engineers I&#x27;ve worked with had no formal training. It&#x27;s totally doable. Being able to teach is a really good indicator of at understanding complex issues and being able to communicate them, all valuable skills for a software engineer.<p>Also, don&#x27;t get discouraged during the pandemic. A lot of places are buckling down and if they do hire, it&#x27;ll be an experienced person who normally wouldn&#x27;t be on the market but is because of the virus. It&#x27;s gonna be tough for junior engineers for a while until the economy spins back up.