Ask HN: What other good careers exist for those without a college education?

But that's less than 50% of lawyers, and it's voluntary.

If you don't have a college degree, you just need to find other ways to show potential employers you're intelligent and hardworking, regardless of industry.

To think about this from any other perspective is to unnecessarily pigeonhole yourself.

So if you're good at software, then do that. There's little chance for the demand for software developers to go down; it's one of the safest career paths there is. There is of course a chance that the software market will change and that demand for Ruby or Ember will drop. But if you can learn those, you can also learn to develop in Python and Vue or something.

Keep learning, keep diversifying.

Of course it's possible you have other talents. Maybe you're a good comic artist, cook, salesman, manager or something else entirely. Work on those skills when you can, and build up a portfolio so you can prove to people that you're good at these things too. There are plenty of fields where talent is far more important than a degree. A degree is merely a way to develop that talent and prove you've done that.

I don't have a degree, but I still got the first job I ever applied to (as a full-time BI dev, not internship). I was lucky that they had an entrance "exam" that I could use to prove my capability.

The entrance "exam" looked like this: they asked me what programming languages I knew. I answered Python, C, awk. They said ok, then here are 3 simple tasks, do these in either Clojure or Elixir, get back to us when you are ready. I submitted my answers in 72 hours, talked my way through them on the interview and basically that was it.

The whole point of this was (I guess) to measure how quickly can I learn new things (functional languages need a different mindset than imperative languages).

Now I'm focusing on doing side projects that I can put on my webpage and resume, right next to the work experience.

But I don't believe tech is going away. You better work on getting this anxiety away, you were probably thinking "oh shit, things are going down because there are too much clowns getting funding and giving web dev projects that makes no money for them and go bankrupt". I did that frequently, maybe you also did, I'm just trying to view things from your perspective.

The other side of the story is that for every 100 clowns, there is 1 that succeeds and controls a whole industry. Programming will be well paid for a while. Most of the people can't/won't even learn how to program or be willing to do it to earn a living, no matter how good it pays.

Consider actually learning other platform, such as systems engineering/mobile etc. That will definitely help you out with that.

Even if you would help people writing VBA functions in Excel you could make money. There are a lot of old people making 6-7 figures that can't open a PDF. Remember that. The economic and the system as today, isn't going away. There will always be banks, politicians and entrepreneurs creating jobs and keeping people busy.

As long as you are willing to work, you will do just fine.