I feel like im in the authors worst case scenario, as a PHP dev coming up on three years experience, im having a hard time even getting interviews at java/.net shops.
I've lost track of the times ive heard "you have a math degree? Not CS?"
I've lost track of the times ive heard "you have a math degree? Not CS?"
Aside from that, you may well be getting filtered by the HR department’s recruiter who is just going down a checklist. Smaller companies/start ups are more likely to have actual developers looking at candidates and more likely to be more flexible in requirements.
Now I'm looking to jump to JavaScript or Elixir and analysis paralysis has set in. Unlike the previous transitions, I couldn't have these as my primary focus. I have to resort to personal projects or get very lucky to work with Vue from time to time. Proving myself to myself or other people seems much harder without a very current Github profile and gearing up for interviews requires a form of study that's difficult. I use these techniques consistently enough to be highly proficient but it's not easy to keep that breadth of knowledge on hand to answer most interview questions. I feel like this matters more than a degree at all tbh but there seems to be a bit of selection bias if they're specifically commenting on the type of degree you have. When CS is largely rooted in mathematics and a math degree tends to cover way more advanced topics that I feel are largely applicable.
The industry is so self-defeating.
One is like the other comment pointed out, having personal endeavors that you can show off is huge for showing that you can build something and that language and degree are less relevant than creatively being able to solve problems. I had built a commercial CMS tailored for artists all in PHP, built my own theming framework, ORM as well as the payment process and all of the visual design for the system, themes and website. Mind you this was from 2004-2006, and had a lot to learn as I went. I say that not to brag, though I am proud of it, but it's a big part of how I got noticed at the company I'm with. It showed that I could handle multiple areas and solve a domain specific problem (this product formulated when Movable Type was the way to get a blog going, and visual artists, including me, didn't understand all the weird unixy stuff like the command line and the PATH, etc). So I'd recommend finding an itch you'd like to scratch and see if others have that itch as well and build something. Another upside is you are actually making your life easier in some way.
The second factor that led me to joining this company (I still hate Java and .Net, though I understand their strengths), was because of the company culture itself.
Not only had I technically shown that I had value, but they actually saw my background as a good way of avoiding a monoculture where innovation can't happen. The company was young and it was a risk (we were about 20 people then, now over 800), but it was one that I took mainly because the company's cultural and work values mirrored mine.
If you're getting rejected because of your background and the type of degree, you may just not even wish to work there. I've had interns and hires come in with degrees ranging from math, electrical engineering, and biology to music and even intercultural outreach, and they became amazing software developers. Heck the original creator of normalize.css and svg4everybody was one of those with a very non traditional background.
So also think of the place you'd like to work for.
I'm not saying those companies are wrong per se, they gotta do what they need to, but personally, I value pragmatism, creativity, transparency and flexibility more than boxes that are just checked on a piece of paper.
There's a somewhat similar dynamic with PHP; when people aren't simply outright going by their own language preferences, they may assume that your caliber as a dev is roughly equivalent to the highest quality PHP codebase they've encountered & groked. And not only has there been an awful lot of low-quality PHP code written, the most commonly deployed PHP code probably doesn't fit the most common web MVCish architecture choices that've coalesced over the years.
You can, of course, use both kinds of judgment in a form of reverse-discrimination.
I think the other solution is to get more concrete about the kinds of problems you've studied/solved. If your Math degree brought you to lots of material about matrix & numerical analysis, hey, you studied machine learning foundations. :) PHP? Maybe you're now partly a domain expert in content management systems.
(But also, probably best to add a language Java/C# folks look at with respect...)
Like the acronym though.
Have you tried Python?