I get that anyone with the skills can still make it in this industry, but getting your foot in the door without a degree at this point seems nigh impossible. I highly doubt I would ever get a shot today at the junior roles that I did 10 years ago, as a dropout with no experience. Competing with the hordes of CS grads getting churned out now would be futile.
In retrospect, the professors were right. I've rarely used C in my work, but the theoretical underpinnings that I learned have been an invaluable foundation. But I could have also spent those four years learning "more practical" skills and I doubt it would have changed much. Like many students at the time, I already knew scripting languages when I started the CS major, anyway. And I expect that's much more common these days.
So, all that's to say - while I appreciate the theoretical foundation I got from CS, I don't think it was strictly a pre-requisite to becoming a software engineer. Besides, I still consider myself self-taught anyway, since I learned to "program" before I went to school for computer science, which - as my advisor was quick to point out - was a wholly separate different endeavor. And I have an easier time connecting and empathisizing with fellow self-taught engineers than I do with fellow alumni. Or at least, it's a different kind of connection - in a self-taught engineer I see a kindred intellectual spirit, whereas in a fellow alumnus I see inside jokes and a shared experience of college debauchery.
Now I'm a co-founder of a startup, and we've hired five other engineers, including one former aerospace engineer who graduated from bootcamp and whom we've molded into a junior engineer with an initial skillset perfectly tailored to our stack. We've built a really strong remote team. We actually avoided hiring people with brand name degrees, and looked instead for demonstrably practical skills and the ability to work independently. Based on those evaluation metrics, someone who is a self-taught programmer is actually our ideal candidate. So I wouldn't feel bad for them - on the contrary, I'd feel bad for the prestige chasers who need to compete with every intellectually curious hustler with a computer.
Prior to this, I had a high school job as an assistant manager at a retail software store before going into sysadmin consulting.
Engineering systems thinking and discipline comes from practice and experience of doing difficult things. Brand Name degrees have a bad rep now in a post-Theranos world where there's the easy ramp to capital and support based on pedigree tick boxes, which doesn't necessarily translate into hack and hustle. There's another phenomenon where people who come from well-off backgrounds are often under pressure to go well beyond ordinary expectations of education and job performance to avoid the perception of riding pedigree and upbringing.
I look for engineers who mildly obsess over correctness, remove tech debt and net LoC, weigh the tradeoffs with discretion, express continuous curiosity, and bonus points if they're partially extroverted and easy-going. I've worked with engineers in title who fell into their positions via a transition from IT roles, but sometimes engineering ingenuity and curiosity are missing and that's a bit disappointing.
That's not an easy path, of course, but neither is autodidacticism.
You are just gonna get fired during your first week once the background check comes through. No matter how much brilliance you manage to demonstrate during that first week or how much your teammates like you, I do not foresee the person not getting fired instantly upon the background check detecting that lie and confirming it as such.
There's time after the technical interviews and before the background check.
Yes, and? I said as much, you will get to work for about a week or two before the background check results come back, and then you get fired. Or was your plan to just hold an infinite chain of 2-week jobs?
I am genuinely confused, which part do you think I had misread that goes against what I said earlier?
Why wait until the Background check? Doesn't fired imply getting hired?
Do you think HR runs background checks before or after the team greenlights a candidate?
No idea how it is at all companies ever, but i can tell you about the ones I worked at.
At both, I was asked to do the background check after i already signed the offer and started work, so after the team greenlighted me (obviously). At the first one I got the results back during my 2nd week of work, at the second one i got it back during week 1.
HR definitely checked it after, because they requested certain documentation to prove my previous employment with my previous company. Because the previous company i worked for was merged into another one, so it technically didn't exist anymore, and they couldn't verify with them that I indeed used to be employed by them.