Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team?

#1

Post by _hugerobots_ » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

tldr: it's been a few years since I've run into anyone in the pool without a degree.

quixotic history aside, how rare is it to get contract work as sendev, devops(sysop ftw) or mid-pm at some F50 houses? My offers are usually about 60% of CS holders... but I'd rather do than don't. Could just be the market in Vancouver, probably a skill issue.

Re: Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team?

#2

Post by VirusNewbie » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

I don't have a CS degree. I was born in 1982. Work at Google now as a L5 SWE.

Re: Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team?

#3

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

I have a CS degree and they taught class with Pascal, not exactly a marketable skill so I did tech support at first. Every day I still feel stupid about something, I think that just goes with the industry we're in. There is too much going on to be an expert in everything.

I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.

Re: Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team?

#4

Post by _hugerobots_ » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #3

I have a CS degree and they taught class with Pascal, not exactly a marketable skill so I did tech support at first. Every day I still feel stupid about something, I think that just goes with the industry we're in. There is too much going on to be an expert in everything. I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring…

You're right agents always short-change the no-paper-crew around here, but I always thought this was just a Vancouver thing. My contracts are in the f50 range for mag7 teams.

Just last night an analyst came into my little startup/store. Asked him to take a look at my latest scratch build. Told me to just get a degree from a cert-farm and go for Bay-Area-level work. But, maybe I need therapy instead, because I just don't know a single colleague at the F50s in this city that say the same thing.

Re: Self taught gen-xers with senior dev/pm exp. Where's my imposter syndrome team?

#5

Post by apothegm » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

There were far more hobbyists than degree holders available during the first dot-com boom, and the post-bust comparative oversupply of programmers only lasted a few years. Meantime, “web development” (HTML/CSS) continued to grow in demand and provided a foot in the door for people without the CS degree. When demand picked up again faster than new graduates were being produced, a lot of them were able to edge into the industry because they’d learned PHP from Wordpress themes and such.

When it became evident how much developers were in demand and could earn, there was a flood of late millennials and zoomers into CS programs, so the percentage of self-taught dropped to nearly zero. For a while when demand for SWEs still exceeded supply, that was augmented by bootcamp grads because getting the entry level job had become the hardest part and a bootcamp was a signal of legitimacy.

Bigger companies without tech DNA are more likely than small companies or tech giants to insist on degrees. When hiring was tight, they might ignore that signal; but right now HMs are overwhelmed with applicants and filtering by degrees is just one way to whittle the field down to a size they can hope to wrangle.

And it’s common for people over 40 to get out of the field for one reason or another — or shift to consulting, typically as “fCTOs” rather than contract developers — so that older self-taught pool is shrinking.