11 years in and still no degree. some honest notes

this is not a joke post. i do one of these about once a year and then immediately post something stupid so nobody has to look me in the eye

i dont have a degree. i dropped out of community college in 2013 because i was working nights at a warehouse and something had to go. i learned javascript from free tutorials on a laptop with a broken hinge that i propped up with a hardcover book i never read. i got my first dev job in 2015 by building the warehouse a shift swap app on my own time and showing it to the ops manager, who knew a guy

some things i wish someone had told me

• the degree filter is real but its leaky. it mostly lives at big companies and in automated resume screening. small companies, agencies and startups hire on "show me". i have been rejected by automated filters maybe 200 times and by an actual human for not having a degree maybe 3
• build things for real people. a todo app proves you can follow a tutorial. an app that 30 warehouse workers used every day proves you can deal with users, which is the actual job
• the gaps are real too. i learned big o notation at 29 from a youtube video in a hotel room the night before an interview. i still cant do most dynamic programming problems without looking things up. nobody at work has ever asked me to
• impostor syndrome doesnt go away with years, it just gets quieter. i am a senior engineer and last month i nodded through a conversation about b-trees and googled it in the bathroom
• find the people who will answer dumb questions without making you feel dumb, then be that person for someone else later. half the reason this topic exists is i wanted a place where people laugh at the job instead of at each other

also the burnout part. i spent my first 4 years working like i had to make up for the missing degree. weekends, side projects, saying yes to everything. it did not make me better. it made me tired and a little mean. i only got good after i started sleeping

if youre self taught and reading this at 1am wondering if you belong here: you do. the bar is "can you make the thing work and can people work with you". nobody checks your diploma when prod is down

ok thats enough feelings for this year. normal shitposting resumes tomorrow