Career outlook in tech without a CS degree?
Hi all. I'm a mid-20s Economics major who has been thinking about transitioning into software engineering, and am wondering what the long-term career prospects are like for someone without a CS degree. That is, even if I managed to find an entry-level job, would I ever be taken seriously for promotion?
For background, I'm currently working in finance, but have been coding as a hobby since grade school and have started to think about making a career out of it. My sense is that some tech companies are willing to hire people without CS degrees if they have the requisite skills, but I wasn't sure what their attitude was toward the same people after they got their foot in the door. I imagine a CS degree has both substantive value and signalling value, and wasn't sure how disadvantaged I'd be to lack that background.
Thanks in advance for your input.
The hard part is getting that entry level job. My route was by way of tech support first. It gets easier from there. I’ve never had any difficulty finding a good job. I get promoted at a normal rate. After 7 years, I was getting frequent, high quality recruiter contacts for jobs that were interesting to me. After 15 years I was able to basically choose the exact job I wanted in my chosen specialty and go get it. I’m now 25 years in and so far I detect no ageism (and I have never detected credentialism), knock on wood.
I cannot specifically recall the subject of my no-college status ever coming up in an interview, or in a negative way at work.
I am completely self taught and have had no problem finding employment as a developer.
I have noticed a social phenomenon that I call the developer factory. University CS programs, at the bachelor level, appear designed to mass produce developers who aren’t really competent. The goal is employability not competence. They are really good at writing way too much OOP decoration to solve an otherwise trivial problem and really good at doing some whiteboard interview algorithm they will never use on the job. Unfortunately any deviation from those results excuses and failure. Everything must explicitly conform to the patterns they were taught in school.
Many large employers look for this because they know what to expect and it’s a single paradigm form of thinking that easily conforms to their other university-factory minded developers.
You can take the fintech route. Wall St for example, is basically tech firms that do finance. There is no other way for them to compete. Target a fintech hub. The larger the hub - new york, london etc, the more opportunities, the more open they will be. Dont sit around a small town. You have to get as close to where the action is to increase the odds. Put in a year or two and then shifting to pure tech will be straightforward. Your finance background will be an asset to get your foot in the door. Every bank, insurance, accounting firm have huge tech operations these days.
Look for ways to leverage your current experience and background. Don't just jump into entry-level web development or something completely unrelated.
That's unless you really hate what you do currently - I know some people want to move away from their current field as fast as possible.
Once you get maybe 3-4 years experience, nobody will give a crap. Work experience trumps all.
No one cares. I majored in Neuroscience, and I’m usually never even asked about what I studied in college in interviews. Within the job, I work with plenty of people who majored in something else, or didn’t even go to college, and they’re not taken any less seriously. The hard part is just getting your first software engineering job, since there’s way more competition for entry level software engineering.
Only HR flunkies worry about the degree. They’re trained to check-off that box.
FinTech startups would likely find your background of interest.
Look for the guy WHO you can help. Ex: CTO or Head of Engineering.
Reach out to them direct for an initial conversation.
My advise is to get a technical job in tech support in a large company's which then later give you the option to do rotation. Other option is to do a boot camp program like Hackacademy.
Go for it, with a good public portfolio that you keep working on while at the first job you'll have no trouble making your first few hops and at that mid-career point your degree is way less scrutinized
If you only started programming a few years ago, you probably aren't strong enough yet. A boot camp or preferably a CS degree would do you good.