Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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I have no CS degree, and I've been in the industry in various forms since the mid-90s, software developer full time since about 2001 or so. I have no CS degree because I just did not have the math grades to get entrance to university.

I've been working at Google as software engineer for 7.5 years now.

I guess you could say this is success, but I would not recommend this path; even after 20 years, there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out. Impostor syndrome can be an issue.

At my age with family mortgage kids, it's too late and pointless to go back and re-do all the HS math etc. I'd need to get into a CS program. But I do wish I'd done this. It took me a long time to elbow my way to where I am now.

> there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out.

I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?

I've had a similar experience to other poster, but relative to tech stack.

I learned .NET and Javascript early in my career. Every single job interview I had at a .NET shop brought up my lack of a college degree as a possible barrier to "handling" or being "good enough" for the position (their words). Not a single one of these companies invited me back for another interview.

Never had the same problem with JS, and now I happily work as senior-level engineer (using Python and Javascript) while encouraging other more junior engineers to take up and pursue the JS ecosystem.

U.S. East Coast.

It might be a Canadian thing, too.

I've never encountered anything like that (or maybe didn't read the signals?), if anything people are usually impressed by the fact that I'm self taught if they knew me beforehand. I've never felt like it's held me back in my career, but I do feel the lack of some of the math background sometimes.

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