Dropped out in the eighth grade, taught myself, and I've been working as a SRE for the past decade or so. Have been working in tech for a little over 20 years.
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?
#42Went to Drexel for CS, but dropped out in my Sophmore year back in 2004. Did PHP webdev in my home state of CT until 2011. Moved to the SF Bay Area and transitioned to doing Erlang and C++ for some F2P games for a while. I'm currently a Staff Engineer at Discord focused on AV and other "native" stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#43What is a STEM degree?
I must be old and non-us lol
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#44Graduated with a B.A. in History from Cal in 2011. Struggled for 6+ months to land a job. Took any miscellaneous writing job on oDesk (now Upwork) that I could get. Saw a lot of contracts for something called "technical writing" and they often paid much better than other writing work. Figured out that it was basically "instruction manuals for computer professionals". Realized it was a good fit. Took a bunch of basic C.S. courses at community college. Family friend got my foot in the door at an IoT startup, but it was really those C.S. classes that persuaded them to give me a try. And the fact that I would work for peanuts. Turned out that I was competent in the work and I really enjoyed programming. A few years later, Google recruited me, and I've been at Google ever since.
I technically have an A.S. in C.S. from that community college, but I think my circuitous path fits the "non-traditional STEM background" criteria.
Computers have been great to me! Very thankful that I stumbled into this path.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#45I was working without a degree for 15 years, but got a BSCS from WGU a few years ago. Took 2.5 years and cost $20k, but I finished what was once a life goal.
The course quality was on par with a brick and mortar college I attended prior.
Nobody has cared about my degree so far.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#4610th grade dropout. Got in at Apple. Wrote about it in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#47What is a STEM degree? I must be old and non-us lol
Science technology engineering and math
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#48Another interesting question will be: are recent STEM grads/people in STEM courses right now going to be able to enjoy a fruitful career in the following decades?
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#49Philosophy and Letters bachelor's degree here.
Not even sure what the "Letters" part meant. I was helping with IT services at my college and started my LLC the same year I graduated, doing mostly IT support and web dev services. That turned into backend development, then infrastructure, now YouTube and getting into hardware dev. Strange progression but common to have completely unrelated major, especially among my open source friends.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
#50> How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?
Many tech big names got by without a degree. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison.
After a short, successful career in aerospace engineering, I bought an Apple II in 1977. Wrote a best-selling word processor (Apple Writer). Retired at the age of 30. Seventh-grade dropout.
In fact, apart from Elon Musk, I am at pains to find anyone influential who has a degree.
Some may insist that a degree is more common than this narrative suggests, but granted that, it seems there is a weak to nonexistent correlation between technical career success and an advanced degree.
Young people should learn this, before preparing for a career that might not rely on the degree. Or before signing up for a course of instruction that teaches skills no longer in demand -- like computer programming.