[spiderxxxx]

>That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time.

Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would be worse. There's online communities for learners for specific subjects that are full of people offering good advice.

[lurking_swe]

I don’t have the time to provide a citation, my apologies.

I’ll leave you with this thought though. Of all the professions, tech is probably the one where this is the easiest to do. There are many companies that don’t require a bachelors. For most of the last 15-20 years tech was in a “boom” cycle, and yet the vast majority of software engineers I met DID have a bachelors degree.

Why? If it’s as easy as “pick up a book”, then why didn’t more people take that path? I think very few people have the drive and discipline to accomplish a full career prep on their own.

If your hypothesis was true, wouldn’t tech be mostly filled with self-taught engineers?

[tpmoney]

I would argue that while tech is the easiest to get into without a degree:

1) The cultural zeitgeist around higher education (at least in the US) is and has been "you must go to college and get a degree". It's been over 20 years since I dropped out of my first university. I'm doing just fine, and yet to this day, I will be asked by older members of my extended family if or when I'm going back to "finish" my degree, or whether my company will offer tuition assistance to help me go back. If you graduate high school these days (and for at least the past few decades), the expectation is that you go to college and get a degree. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well get the degree in the field you want to go into.

2) As a corollary to that, while new / younger companies might have set aside the degree requirements, the big tech houses definitely still preferred them and having the paper was still a leg up in the hiring and recruitment process. And even in companies without an explicit preference for a degree, it's often listed as a requirement on the job posting. "BS or Equivalent Experience" is easier to match both as a candidate and as an employer if the candidate has the BS as that is an objectively verifiable fact.