[ghamrick]

Formally uneducated developer here. Due to the circumstances of my youth (foster homes, boys homes), I did the usual service level jobs (construction, restaurants) until I stumbled into a data entry job back in the day and managed to leverage myself as a unix sysadmin, then C, perl, Java dev with some fairly prestigious companies. Pretty much all self taught. Despite my adverse origins, I managed to not freak out or commit a felony. That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education, and I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.

[danso]

I'd have to think from an employer's perspective that someone without a degree who has made their way through gainful employment has proven themselves to be as reliable as any college graduate. However, the fact that college graduates are more frequently hired may be a result of the fact that there's way more of them than there are the people who worked their way through life, at least in the white-collar sector.

[wpietri]

I think it depends a lot on the employer.

Some employers believe they have the competence to directly evaluate job-relevant skills. They will lean heavily on practical interviews and discussion of actual work experience.

Other employers are much more credential oriented because they can't tell a good developer from a bad one. Sometimes that's because there aren't many technical people in the company. More often, it seems, it's because hiring is done by people who are not working developers themselves. (E.g., HR screens resumes, interviews mainly done by non-techincal hiring managers.)

Since I'm of the former sort, I look especially hard for developers who don't have the "right" credentials. Not only are they more likely to have certain valuable characteristics than people who take the prescribed path, they're also likely to be overlooked by organizations that value credentials, and so easier to hire.

[crdoconnor]

> That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education

That might be true, but there's a very limited number of courses on a typical computer science degree which actually do help. I think on mine it was mostly just data structures, theory of databases and concurrency. Possibly math.

Many others were interesting but I wouldn't say that I ever used them.

[taneq]

> I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.

I think this is a significant factor in the skew from 'experience is king' to 'you need a degree'. The industry is much less of a 'wild west' now than it was even 15 years ago, so people with more than 15 years experience have a much higher chance of being self taught than people with 1-5 years.