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

Most have no degree because they bailed out in between. That's not self-taught!

In my case I was already better than my professors, already taught my own university courses, so there was no need to get a degree. Work was better than uni.

My history is pretty wack. I have a graduate degree (MFA) in physical performance, and my work history until I was 40 was entirely in theatre: acting, writing, directing, and teaching. (And, you know, waiting tables, and selling shit, and all the other gig-work stuff actors have to do to get by).

Thing is, I was always a tech nerd, too. I put up websites for every project I worked on - and plenty for friends, too - going back to the late nineties. I programmed (and sometimes physically repaired) lighting and sound systems. I built plug-ins for lighting and sound software, to solve problems various shows had. I set up networking stacks for a couple of theatres. In 2004 or so I built what was basically Brown Paper Tickets (before Brown Paper Tickets existed) for a theatre company I was working for at the time - backed by an Access database, of all things, running on an old box in the office because that's all we had to work with without paying for it. Later I built effectively MailChimp, to promote my own show. Arguably I should have monetized one or another of those tech projects, and done theatre later, but that was never the point. I enjoyed messing with tech, but didn't want to do any of it, except insofar as it made possible something else I really wanted to do.

At 40 I lost my teaching job (enrollment dropped, and arts are always the first to go), and my wife and I didn't want to move, and were thinking of having a family, so I finally sold out. A restauranteur I'd worked a fair bit for in my twenties needed an IT Director for his growing company, and figured I could do it, which it turns out I can. I make three times what I did as a teacher, five or six times what I did in my best year as a working actor, and... Eh. I like my job. I'm pretty good at it, but it's what I'm doing in order to do what I really want to do, which these days is to support my family.

I don't recommend my career path to anyone as a way into tech (lol!), and I think our world would be a better place if there were less money in tech, and more in arts and education.

Started in QA in 2008, moved to build, then tools engineer, core tech, backend, etc etc. I wouldn't say I'm self-taught though - there were a few excellent and thorough code reviewers on my teams early on who taught me a ton.

No degree. I began as a wildland firefighter, later worked as a private investigator. During a break, I taught myself programming and got drawn into low-level systems. Today, I work as a software engineer, building things close to the metal.