A common worry I see in self-taught developers is that not having a degree means that you’re not a good programmer and no one will hire you. I’m not going to lie, having a degree does make it easier to get an interview, but it in no way guarantees that everyone with a degree is a better programmer than everyone without.
Here’s a fun fact about hiring developers: having a degree tells interviewers so little about whether you can code that people came up with the idea of asking candidates to code a very, very simple math “game” called fizzbuzz to figure out if you can write a for loop all by yourself. I’m completely serious, in the mid-late 2000’s fizzbuzz was all over the programmer blogosphere. If you poke around online you will likely find a bunch of criticism about how fizzbuzz is too simple to tell you anything interesting about a junior programmer candidate, which I think is true but is not the point of this post.
Back at my point, it sounds completely ridiculous that you would need to ask a new college/university grad to prove they can write a for loop and a couple of conditionals. How could someone graduate and not be able to code? That question really deserves its own blog post, but part of it is that memorizing facts for a test is a very different skill than writing code on the spot to solve a problem.
Ridiculous or not, people started asking developers to code fizzbuzz for a reason and it’s not because hiring without it worked so well. Fizzbuzz exists as a programming concept because interviewers needed a quick way to weed out people who simply couldn’t program at all.
If you don’t have a degree, don’t feel bad. If you can program at all, then you’re already ahead of the game. You’re probably just as good a coder as anyone who does have one. In a lot of ways being self-taught is more impressive because once you make the decision to go to college/university you’re essentially locked in. Aside from feeling like you have to get your money’s worth once you’ve started paying for a degree, there’s a massive amount of social pressure not to drop out and feel like you’ve disappointed your family and friends.
If you study something on your own time, on the other hand, then it’s much easier to just stop when you’re bored or it’s hard or you’d rather go have a pint with some friends. When nobody will know or necessarily care that you stopped, it’s a lot harder to keep going.
To be fair, having a degree/diploma/certificate from a bootcamp/etc does open doors, and you can end up with really frustrating gaps in your knowledge if you’re self-taught. My husband is a sysadmin but he grudgingly does a little bit of programming when he has to (he’s weird and thinks setting up servers is more fun than writing code). Not so long ago I had to tell him about maps/associative arrays/dictionaries because the last programming class he took was in high school and the language they used didn’t have maps. Turns out there was a point to all the time my teachers spent hammering datatypes into our heads in college after all :)
A degree or a diploma doesn’t mean anyone is special or a better programmer than you are. It really just means they had the good luck and inclination to pick up a degree and some ability to follow through, at least when a large amount of money and the prospect of their parents being disappointed is on the line. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one asking new grads to code fizzbuzz one day.