Where is the pressure coming from? Your employer? I’d guess it varies widely between companies.
- Current employer: "Your salary is already good for someone without a bachelor's degree"
- Current employer: "We're sorry but this promotion requires a bachelor's degree"
- Future employer: "We're sorry but we hired someone with a bachelor's degree for this job"
- Date: "You don't have a bachelor's degree?"
- Friends: "You're the only one without a bachelor's degree"
- Meetup: "What did you study in college?"
- Country: "We can't grant you a work visa without a bachelor's degree"
- Family: "You will have more opportunities with a bachelor's degree. We'll even pay for it." (offer expired)
- School: "Here's a scholarship" (offer expired)
- 80,000 hours: "You basically don't exist"
- Brain: "Maybe I'm not a superstar coder and job security is important"
Perhaps some of these are hypothetical, but they feel the same as if they had been concretized.
I’m sure my classes in COBOL,FORTRAN, and data structures in Pascal made any difference. Well, I did take a course in C and 16 bit x86 assembly.
2018 Apple had 20 million registered developers and it has only increased since then.
It's still very easy to become a developer right now (sambo found it to be the easiest path forward for example, from no experience at all), but the trend is quite scary. I have frankly no idea how it look when I turn 60.
In the immortal words of every in r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”. No I didn’t do that to “get into a FAANG” but it is a much easier route than the one I took.
If you want to go the enterprise route, if you have experience and do enough resume driven development and can answer basic techno trivia on a company’s chosen stack, it’s even easier.
I suspect the pressure never really goes away.