In my country, the Netherlands, it was almost impossible in the late 1980s to land a tech job other than a low-level service technician (read: roadie or cable guy) if you did not have at least a bachelor's degree or higher in a tech subject or a degree from a technical community college. College dropouts were turned away before even getting an interview, and bankers would rather commit suicide than finance tech startups founded by anyone without an appropriate college degree.

Times sure have changed.

I used to work for another very large company doing the same thing, but as a contractor. A FTE position opened on our team but I was told by HR that I wasn't qualified for the role (even though I had been doing it for a few years on the same team...) because I didn't have a degree (not a requirement for a contractor)

My brother had to get a degree with evening classes for the same reason but since he was already doing the work, it was fairly easy - assuming the cost of studying isn't prohibitive where you live.

That said it is such BS. The whole contractor vs. FTE thing is.

Where I work, FTEs get laid off before contingency staff is fired. What is the point of having contingency staff if they're more permanent than FTEs?

Contractors who do the work for years can't get interviews because they're overqualified for the FTE position they apply for but the same hiring managers are happy to string them along doing the same work they're overqualified for, on the same team but as a contractor with less pay and none of the benefits.

I understand contractors applying to a junior role to even get a foot in the door when it is the only FTE role that opened for over a year... But you'd have better odds landing an FTE role straight out of graduating from college than with a track record of doing the work well for years as a contractor.

And they're "cool" so they let contractors attend a bunch of FTE meetings which has the primary effect of rubbing in all the great diversity and inclusion initiatives they are excluded from due to their second class citizen status.

At some point those companies don't deserve to have you. But even if you get paid half what the FTEs make, it's still a guilded cage with a 6 figures salary so it's hard to just give it the finger and move on.

Running into a self-taught person at all was rare, but when I did their story rarely involved not transferring from another career and leveraging some SME knowledge to get started. They already had training or a degree just not in this.

I'm not sure screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore.

There are definitely places that won’t talk to you without a degree, but many, many places will take a degree or equivalent.

> screwing around at home will actually land you a job. Not anymore

I don’t think “screwing around” will land you a job whether it’s at home or at college/uni. But a degree tells me that you can stick by something for longer than a few months even when you don’t always feel like it by our own volition.

Someone who has spent a year on and off learning to code hasn’t shown they can code or that they have any sort of consistency- both of which are (equally) as important as each other in a workplace. Someone with a degree in marine biology and a handful of GitHub projects and can pass a programming test? They’re probably my first choice. Someone with 3 years experience of writing code on their own? Absolutely. Show me those candidates and I’ll interview every one of them for a junior role.

Not speaking for where you work but they might not even pass the automated resume filters anymore unfortunately.

I go back to school for the remaining 2 years, and when I graduated I had 5 competing offers with salaries starting at double what I would have accepted when I had not finished school. This huge reversal in outcomes was purely the college degree as far as I can tell- I had less time to send out applications, no internships, and no new personal projects of any substance.

My experience is that there are too many college grads and boot campers with github profiles to get into the industry off of some basic home tinkering.

If you're going to do it, I imagine you've got to go one step up and stand out.

Like Minecraft? Factorio? Modern tools allow for very small team to quickly generate very AAA games. Eye candy is still an issue, but AI is quickly creeping into that space. I would not be surprised if within the next decade we have the tools for a single person to generate what we would today call a AAA game.

Minecraft and Factorio are both simpler productions in terms of visual fidelity and lean on gameplay that is captivating. AAA is not a label for the quality of game, more of a style/level of execution.

Both Minecraft and Factorio started indie to my knowledge which is a separate path and approach from AAA games. Unrelated to good/bad.

AAA requires not just using but creating the latest visual and audio innovations, creating a huge surface area prone to bugs which all need to be polished out and creating tools to manage your version of that complexity, optimize everything so it runs smoothly and doesn't take an unreasonable amount of disk space.

Even with AI, anything an individual could do, hundreds to thousands of people are also doing at AAA studios. An individual might innovate in a few aspect, but never clear the AAA bar as AAA is a constantly moving goalpost, and most tools the individual can use are likely contributed back by AAA studios to popular AAA game engines like Unreal.

It's like racing in a hamster wheel against the person making the wheels...

So by definition, they did not use modern tools.

To be clear, there are plenty of games that do that, I just think those 2 are terrible examples.

Also, Factorio was crowdfunded via a kickstarter-like platform.

Also both are around 15 years old. They are both closer in age to 1995 than today.

I got my first Apple programming job, because I had a Mac Plus at home, and learned to program it in ASM and Pascal.

I've only taken some non-matriculated math courses. All the rest was pretty much OJT and home study (and a lot of seminars and short classes). My original education was High School Dropout/GED.

a lot of employers actually like engineers who come from a personal hacking background more than traditional paths, because we're truly passionate and care deeply. we're not in for 8-5 and a paycheck.

Still waiting for my breakthrough.

And then later that was used against me to accuse me of lying about not knowing how to check the voicemail on my landline.

Man, I'm skeptical, at least in the US. Since the pandemic, I've seen an absolute explosion in offshoring, which makes perfect sense when so many people are working remotely anyway. I've worked with lots of excellent engineers from Argentina to Poland and many places in between. It's tough for me to see how an American "tinkerer" will be able to find a job in that world if he wants an American-level salary.

Also, I know the adage about "this time it's different" being the most dangerous phrase in language, but, at least in one example, something really is different. In the early 00s, after the dot com bust, there was a ton of fear about outsourcing the bulk of software work to India. That turned out not to happen, of course, because (a) remote meeting software was nowhere close to where it is today, (b) remote work in general wasn't common, and (c) the timezones issues between US and India were an absolute productivity killer. These days, though, everyone is used to remote work, and US companies have realized there are enough lower cost locales with plenty of timezone overlap to make offshoring the norm these days.

You can definitely build a nice portfolio of open source software (and even hardware) on github. I would hope that is enough to get a job, but it might not be, especially in the current era of AI-fueled employment pressure.