I have a GCSE in IT, and a degree in CompSci and… I completely agree. You don’t need any of it, relevant experience is worth in the region of 5x-10x for every hiring manager I’ve known, and for myself.
However, it does cause a bootstrapping problem. Getting that first opportunity can be tough, and there’s a good chance that you’ll be filtered out at CV vetting time by a recruiter matching keywords and tallying CV content before you even get to a stage of consideration by hiring managers.
And they both have pros and cons. The pros of not doing a degree are mostly fiscal. I’d advise anyone who can afford the overhead of doing a degree to do one still.
tl;dr - lack of education isn’t and shouldn’t be an obstacle to starting a programming career, but you should still understand what you’re up against in the average hiring process and tune your approach accordingly.
You don’t need any of it, relevant experience is worth in the region of 5x-10x for every hiring manager I’ve known, and for myself.
The only time I had to brush up on data structures and algorithms is when I apply to job ads, and recruiters put up bullshit ladder-pulling trivia questions to pass to the next stage of a recruiting process. It’s astonishing how the usefulness of a whole body of knowledge is to feed gatekeepers with trivia questions.
Absolutely. I generally find any kind of analogous coding tasks - leetcoder style or otherwise - to be a huge waste of time.
It tells you significantly less than a 30 minute conversation will. Someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about will out themselves quickly when you get into the nitty gritty of the full software delivery lifecycle.
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