Ask HN: Are there many professional devs who don't have any degree?

I started out as an electronics tech dropout (long story) in the 90s, apprenticing with a small engineering company via a gov't-funded job-creation program (Canada, EI-based). I was lucky to work closely with a couple of young engineers; programming Z80s, wire-wrapping prototypes. When the www came online, my engineer colleagues had me working on our first company web-page, so that got me introduced to html/javascript/css.

Enrolled in CS program at uni in 2000, got a programming job with a company building an "online shopping mall" (in the model of [Shopify](http://shopify.com). The lead-programmer there was 19, I was 26. I started learning MySQL on day 1. Introduced OO-perl to young kid. I implored my boss-at-the-time "we need to hire some young CS grads, and he did. One guy in particular was much more talented all-around, I found, so I quickly encouraged him to take the reins and lead us.

I've been self-incorporated and working from home for ~5 years now. I specialize in Ruby, Rails, complex Javascript SPAs and Cordova (including custom plugins on the native Android & iOS side).

I made a name for myself in the Sencha/ExtJS universe (which is fading now), but I got a lot of work directed at me by taking part in that community.

I've always been pretty active in OSS projects and I'm always managing some of my own for niche applications, which seem to gather a small audience. That's been pretty important over the years, getting someone hooked on your OSS code.

If you're doing Cordova apps and you need battery-efficient background location-tracking on iOS/Android, Google: "background geolocation", I might be the 1st couple results :)

I don't really do much hunting for jobs these days, they come to me instead (so far). When my plate is full, I raise my rate higher as a filter.

I should add, while I don't have a CS degree, I did have 1 year college electronics in addition to 3 years of vocational high-school electronics which gave me the fighting chance.

My experience is that many who doesn't have a degree(including myself) gets an offer during their studies from their part time job for example, and then continue working there for some time and not going back to university

Most devs that I've noticed as really passionate and good at what they do, don't have a degree. That's just my experience at half a dozen startups, but a majority of the devs I've met thus far don't have a degree.

I've been in the industry for about 8 years now, and not having a degree hasn't made any measurable difference to my career prospects (in the long run).

Actually, it's pretty routine for a boss or coworker to ask me a year or two into a new job "hey, what university did you say you went to?"

My response: I didn't go to school.

Starting out though, it was a little tricky: I was making $27,000 as the sole developer at little photo-lab in downtown Dallas, TX. However, once you get a year or two of experience down on paper, and assuming you kicked ass those first years, not having a college education isn't a problem.

I have too many stories...I had dinner with Edward Teller and he described what really happened at Los Alamos (saying that he would be put in prison for such disclosure), I was fired and rehired multiple times by Steve Jobs, I did a stint as an Oracle Product Manager for the core database and saw how they cook the books, I wrote code in the ATT UNIX kernel, in the Oracle source tree, and in the Apple source tree. I've been doing big data now and teach NSA, CIA,... (so I've heard stories about a level of spying that I can't repeat. But I will say that the people trying to keep us safe don't care about the laws and don't report what they are doing up the chain of command.) I taught technical classes at the School of the Americas to people who don't exist and heard more stories that I can't repeat. And I've coded while sitting beside several well-known names in programming. All of these are interesting stories. But one for this group... Steve Jobs made yearly trips to give talks at major universities. His real goal was to convince post-grads who had innovated to drop out and port their work to our platform. Steve would fund them personally - with just enough cash to eat beans and live on friend's couches. If he thought he could sell it, he would later make them employees - and burn them out to get them to produce more and faster. After he got their work, those engineers would typically leave. So Steve would make more billions to hide offshore, and the innovators would get a salary and be burned out. A true robber baron.