Ask HN: How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

I have worked in software dev for over 40 years with no degree at all. Mostly self-taught, but I got quite a bit of employer-provided training and mentoring especially early in my career. I got recruited by a big company while in school, put university on hold and never got around to finishing. I'd have a history degree if I had gone back to school -- programming started as an interest and hobby for me, one that took over all of my spare time in high school and college.

My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.

Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.

Dropped out of college in 1988 after one semester. Never touched a computer there; they were still VAX systems reserved for certain programs at that point. Got my first computer (Commodore 128) soon after that, and started learning BASIC and 6502/Z80 assembly language. Got my first Internet account about 1993, and it came with a shell account, so I started learning Unix tools and a little C. In 1994-ish, a friend asked if I wanted to get in on a new ISP he was starting in my hometown, so I moved back and got a crash course in more Unix/Linux, networking, Perl, and more. Just been doing what comes along and learning enough to keep up ever since.

Majored in Philosophy. Started programming in 1973 on mainframes. Became a full time developer, systems analyst. 72 years old now, with 50 years experience in IT. Co-founded a couple of start ups, made a little bit of money. Went back to corporate life for a while. Ended up as a Program Architect at Salesforce. Resigned to start a company which develops and delivers commercial LLM/RAG solutions. Going reasonably well. Simple principles: keep learning, do what you want to do, not just what the man tells you. I saw a note from another Philosophy grad saying that Philosophy is actually useful in that it gives you a framework and a perspective to look at things a little differently. I agree with that.

Majored in philosophy, now running AI infrastructure at a mid-sized startup. Been coding professionally for 6 years after teaching myself through building random tools - including an AI photo enhancer that eventually became https://flux-kontext.io. Tech's beautiful because what matters is what you can ship, though you'll need a killer portfolio to get that first break. The non-STEM background actually helps sometimes - gives you different perspectives when everyone else is stuck in engineer brain. Just be ready to constantly learn and prove yourself through work, not credentials.

I was always into programming, and am a self taught dev. I used to write Runescape macros in Pascal and then Java, had an internship at a CD & DVD driver company (used by iTunes and many others) and got to work on automation of burner testing.

But 2008 hit, job market was terrible and I ended up working at a computer repair store chain while trying to pay my way through college until 2011, where I got a LAMP dev job for a large travel website. I dropped out of college at that point and haven't looked back.

I got to program for a bit over 10 years before moving into leadership, selling two startups along the way.

I work at Google as a SWE working on the Cloud. I'm a little 'behind' level wise for the straight years of experience I have, but I also feel like I'm doing pretty darn well for my level as well.

For the first ~ten years of my career I worked shit jobs for pretty mediocre pay at small companies that overworked and under appreciated me. I did Open Source to stay sane, to learn, for fun, and I leveled up every few years, learning CS, hardware, algorithms, FP, type systems, and more.

Eventually I worked at larger companies, smaller companies with big scale, and eventually FAANG.

I started working at eighteen, tbh I had lost my way schoolwise, but i had always been interested in computer graphics, CAD and was savvy enough to get my hands on software i perhaps could not have afforded that gave me some base skills that led from one job to another,

Sometimes i feel like working with CS people, and i’ve worked with some really good ones, so please don’t get me wrong, but sometimes i feel some have just done it because it’s a good career, and show zero interest or curiosity past their immediate positions.

No STEM here - but I'm not an engineer, I'm a tech interested product guy who has worked for online companies all my career (2002 onwards)

I did a Media Studies (theory) degree, but all the way through university I was making websites for fun and for profit (badly), and managed to get into web 'producer' roles before moving to 'Product Owner' type roles. Though I am non-technical, I took the time to learn about the technologies we use, likely more than my peers.

These days I work in IT strategy and support the CIO - though most of the leadership team I work with do have engineering backgrounds, many of people my level do not.

I took visual basic in high school (I'm old now lol) then 100 level C++ and Java, but dropped out of college after one year. Most of my self teaching was Linux/homelab/server stuff, very little programming, though some web dev (jekyll/html/css)

I did an apprenticeship in 2020. 6 months of class, 6 months interning at a Fortune 500. Paid the whole time. That company hired me after the 6 months, i worked there another year after that, moved companies and cities in 2022 and been in the same spot ever since.

I was technically full stack at first but I've been front end exclusive for three years now. I've dabbled in angular and vue, been full time svelte at this job, plus a little bit of JavaFX, and took my classes in React and Express.

The job placement that accompanied the apprenticeship was clutch, and i couldn't have done it if i hadn't been getting paid (barely living wage, but still) during the class portion.

Mostly self-taught, been very lucky with the people I've encountered. Regularly accused of STEM/CS because I read far too many manuals. Actually not as 'classically trained' as I'd prefer... but also don't care; servile nonsense all the way down.

Have done almost every job, found system administration/DevOps/SRE stuff the most interesting. Security stuff is cool but also too product-oriented for my tastes.

Graduated with a B.A. in History from Cal in 2011. Struggled for 6+ months to land a job. Took any miscellaneous writing job on oDesk (now Upwork) that I could get. Saw a lot of contracts for something called "technical writing" and they often paid much better than other writing work. Figured out that it was basically "instruction manuals for computer professionals". Realized it was a good fit. Took a bunch of basic C.S. courses at community college. Family friend got my foot in the door at an IoT startup, but it was really those C.S. classes that persuaded them to give me a try. And the fact that I would work for peanuts. Turned out that I was competent in the work and I really enjoyed programming. A few years later, Google recruited me, and I've been at Google ever since.

I technically have an A.S. in C.S. from that community college, but I think my circuitous path fits the "non-traditional STEM background" criteria.

Computers have been great to me! Very thankful that I stumbled into this path.

History major. First job was managing inter-modal shipping in a giant Excel spreadsheet and emailing it to our India office every night. At the time, I thought Excel was so cool because it seemed like I could do anything with it. I didn't know anyone who wrote code. I had no no idea what was out there.

11 years with R/Python/SQL in a very small team. The last 5 years over 1500 web scrapes running everyday, and then aggregating, categorizing, and analyzing that data.

I've only interviewed a handful of times since starting. It's not come up in any of them, but I've often thought a good response to a "what's one of your weaknesses" question, would be to say that I'm self taught. Nobody has ever reviewed any of my code. I have no pretense of it being elegant or the best way to solve a problem, but it's simple, it works, and I'm determined to solve the problem in front of me.