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Comment by vymague | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if getting hired as a self-taught programmer is only possible in the US. Because their software industry has so much money. And perhaps cultural difference. It seems everywhere else requires you to have the relevant degree. To get your first job at least.

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Another self-taught programmer from Germany with no formal education to speak off, here. Job ads often pretend to require relevant degrees but companies will absolutely hire people without them. The "If this description doesn't fit you perfectly you should still apply" phrase they often put at the end of their ads isn't always just marketing speech.

Very true. Ended up working at multiple companies where the job ads stated that a degree is required.

Yes, I’m sure I missed a few opportunities because I used to take job requirements too seriously.

I'm a self taught programmer that has worked in South Africa, Botswana, UK, USA, and Germany.

I have emphasized my ability to ship. I have never gone to a potential employee and said "hey trust me, I can do it even though I don't have proof."

Rather: "Here is the work I've already done, and I can do the same for you, or better."

I'm also a self-taught programmer and I'm from Poland. I think it might be harder to get your first job without a degree in europe but it's definitely possible. There is one more difference that I think is relevant to this – in general university is free in europe so it's "easier" to expect that people will have a degree. But it's not a dealbraker.

I'm self-taught, and got hired in the UK. The stepping stone was an internship at a small company, who then took me on full-time.

I stayed at the first company for 3.5 years. During that time i also spent enough time on the then-young Stack Overflow to get 30-40k reputation. I have a solid degree in a technical but unrelated field. And i'd like to think i'm actually a decent programmer, and that this comes across in interviews. All that added up to make it pretty easy to get the next job in the normal way.

If a company is worth working for, they won’t be hung up on a candidate having a specific degree if they can show equivalent experience and aptitude, through OSS or similar. In the UK this is common as well as the US at least.

I’ve hired CS grads and they need at least a year to learn how things actually work in practice rather than what they’ve been taught. Often this involves taking the simpler path rather than the more complicated one that immediately occurs to them. This is fine, BTW.

Self taught from UK with social science degree that I barely achieved.

I learned by trying to build a few different things and hacking them together until it worked.

I had many late nights of watching youtube videos and reading tutorials to try to understand more complex stuff. I remember seriously questioning if I'd ever get better.

8 years later and I'm a Senior Software Engineer in an incredible team at an exciting company. It's possible!

If you are ever on the hiring side of the fence, you will have a better understanding of what people are looking for. Companies generally have a stock way of describing the qualifications for programmers, but what they actually want is someone who can do the work and make them money. When you apply for a job, that is what you want to get across.

Maybe if demand were low for programmers, degrees would matter a lot. It is a way to weed out people if you have too many applicants. But demand is high, and supply (from what I understand) is relatively low. So work on selling yourself. I imagine people's github profiles mean more than a degree does these days.

But please note: I am an American former programmer, so take what I write with a grain of salt.

I'm in Germany and self-taught and have had multiple job offerings. I guess it helps if you freelance, you can prove your skills without needing any credentials to be considered. Nobody has ever asked me whether I have a degree.

I'm also a self-taught programmer living in Germany. Only a large corporation has once found it weird that I didn't have a degree, no one else cared.

Self-taught, in NZ. Admittedly, it was hard getting the first interview, I did have to network and hustle a bit. A lot of people who believed that people without degrees write "unstructured code". And no, they wouldn't look at my code I had on a CD to see what they thought of my structuring. This was long before Github...

Self-taught, but I have not studied that much. Working in Japan and surprised that things seem work out well despite my initial lack of knowledge. I think there are more possibilities than we imagine and sometimes we simply cannot find those possibilities or we do not know that they exist.

Self taught from Norway here. My boss looked at my GitHub profile, and liked what he saw.

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