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Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

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Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#31

Post by woodruffw »

I majored in Philosophy and went directly into industry after my undergraduate. I got into programming, specifically open source, as a hobby.

I've been in industry for 7 years, and have done a few different things: DARPA-funded program analysis research, open source security engineering, running an open source engineering team, and now doing security engineering once more.

In my experience, not having a STEM degree is not a significant barrier to success (and as others have said, can be an advantage in specific contexts). My experience is that virtually nobody has cared, apart from some very funny compliance/procedural contexts where people assume that "Philosophy" means "PhD in Computer Science."

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#32

Post by tguvot »

working almost 30 years. no stem degree or high school certificate. bought first computer with money earned at summer at carpentry shop.

started working in dial up isp. going to the clients home to install trumpet winsock and netscape navigator. from there moved to do some web development (php/fi, ajax).delphi. perl. over time gravitated into network/security software development and telecoms.

now oversee a few hundreds of developers that work on rather big system deployed in multiple locations arounds world.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#33

Post by MattIPv4 »

While I do now have a CS degree, I was hired into a big tech company prior to having that degree based on my work in open-source. I'd been (and still am) an active contributor to some large web projects for a few years, prior to this company reaching out to hire me (projects were unrelated to what they do, FWIW).

I did then get my degree in my spare time while at that job, with my salary covering the costs of tuition, which was very nice. I see my degree as a backup, if for any reason an employer has a strict requirement for it or if I leave this field -- I expect my experience to be what gets me jobs as it stands today.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#36

Post by nmaley »

Majored in Philosophy. Started programming in 1973 on mainframes. Became a full time developer, systems analyst. 72 years old now, with 50 years experience in IT. Co-founded a couple of start ups, made a little bit of money. Went back to corporate life for a while. Ended up as a Program Architect at Salesforce. Resigned to start a company which develops and delivers commercial LLM/RAG solutions. Going reasonably well. Simple principles: keep learning, do what you want to do, not just what the man tells you. I saw a note from another Philosophy grad saying that Philosophy is actually useful in that it gives you a framework and a perspective to look at things a little differently. I agree with that.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#38

Post by secretsatan »

I started working at eighteen, tbh I had lost my way schoolwise, but i had always been interested in computer graphics, CAD and was savvy enough to get my hands on software i perhaps could not have afforded that gave me some base skills that led from one job to another,

Sometimes i feel like working with CS people, and i’ve worked with some really good ones, so please don’t get me wrong, but sometimes i feel some have just done it because it’s a good career, and show zero interest or curiosity past their immediate positions.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

#39

Post by nperez »

No degree. I've been working the full stack for almost 15 years full time, including recently learning to train various types of gen AI models. There are still orgs that are rigid about their requirements, but I'm a mid-30s guy at an experience level where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to overthink what I was learning 2 decades ago.
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