Is it even possible without college degree for SWE position? Is this a trend as well? Also seeing similar threads on people ditching minimum wage jobs and successfully move to software development jobs by attending bootcamp…
Sure. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% give or take program without degrees. The bigger question is, what can you do without a degree? It’s probably limited.
The Government and its Contractors would generally require a degree for any SWE position.
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Do you think the degree needs to be in CS or related fields or… could someone with a BA in a non-tech field and with a boot camp certificate qualify?
Government contracts would typically specify the educational and experience requirements for all personnel being assigned to work on a given contract. A degree in CS would not necessarily be required but a relevant technical degree generally would be required (i.e. Engineering, Physics, Math, etc.).
I’ve not seen a boot camp certificate, or equivalent, ever listed, but I cannot say that it has never happened.
My firm (large fortune 500) hires many people that don’t have CS degrees - but they all have college degrees in some field plus relevant work experience. We have 0 people that have boot camp training and no college. And some roles do require CS degrees. Additionally, all our fresh out of college hires have CS degrees.
Same experience at my previous firms as well.
So… with just a coding boot camp someone can still get a well paying job but it would have to be in a niche field like maybe game development or web design. Opportunities for mobility and growth would be limited.
I’ve seen non-CS degrees such as Biology and a boot camp certificate work at a govt contractor and big commercial company. Also seen lots of math majors work in SW jobs without any sort of boot camp cert (they’re relatively new).
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I have encountered people with bachelor’s degrees in humanities or social studies, or no college at all, working in technical areas of computing (without any boot camp). But they are relatively uncommon, since that requires the motivation and ability to self-educate the needed CS. Most people would learn the basics better in a more structured manner that is studying CS in college.
The coding boot camps probably vary widely in content, quality, and subarea emphases, so anyone considering such may want to ask someone who knows the field to give a look at what each one under consideration says that it teaches.
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CS covers a wide spectrum of areas. The reason to study CS is to learn to solve problems using a variety of computational methods. SWE is just a small part of it, even though many CS graduates end up in SWE. Even in SWE, there’re many different kinds of jobs. Some require CS degrees because a formal CS education will be highly beneficial. Others don’t because the skills for those jobs can be learned more informally.
This is the major point. Can someone be a SE w/o a degree? Sure. Will they have the skill set to do cutting edge, problem solving work? Probably not.
My grandfather was a Civil and practiced without ever having finished his degree. You couldn’t do that now, but the point is, the complexity of what he did was way less than what my dad did with a BS/MS in Civil from MIT or my uncle did with a PhD in Civil from Stanford.
Sure, I’m just curious about someone who has a degree in something else who decides after they graduate that they want to do bootcamp and work as a developer. They can always get additional education if they decide they love the field.
I know several young people who have done boot camps with a degree in another field. I kind of see it as not all that much different from the amount of on-the-job learning any developer has had to do over time to be able to stay relevant.
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