You need to get one of those two.

Which means getting the experience somehow. Unpaid work is one (expensive) way of doing it, but so is getting into a related position and working your way across. QA is potentially a good path for this: hired to do simple things without the degree requirement, move into test automation, move across into development. Then you have it on your CV.

It's actually pretty tough to go from QA to dev.

Teach yourself test automation (Selenium, etc.). Shockingly few QAs know even the basics of scripting/programming.

It seems like that would be a ticket to a QA automation job, not a dev job. People say QA -> dev is a good way to get in, but I've seen very few people actually accomplish it.

I've seen it happen several times (my employer may be unusually prone to hiring jr devs as qa automation).

I agree that if you can hold out for a dev job, do that and save a year or two getting to the same place. If you really can't get a dev job and need the income, get a QA Automation job and start migrating early by asking to fix small bugs yourself, or work on the automation tooling.

At a smaller company, working on the build system and QA automation tooling might be more interesting and get more attention than what you would do as a jr software dev.

Agree. Don't get into QA if you want to be a dev.

Yes, but it's also quite hard to get hired as a dev without either qualifications or experience. If you've got the qualifications you can go in directly.

It probably varies from place to place but in the Bay Area at least you pretty much have to get a degree of some sort. There are so many programmers out there that the degree/no-degree has become an easy filter for recruiting types and no-degree + no experience (which means no one to talk to about how you work and what it is like to work with you) makes it doubly difficult.

That said, it doesn't have to be a degree from Stanford or Berkeley, it can be from pretty much any accredited institution. Typical path forward here is community college for a couple of years and doing the general education requirements, then transferring to one of the state schools to finish a degree in a STEM subject (typically math, cs, ee, or physics)

Silicon Valley used to be famous for the exact opposite: the story was always that formal credentials were less important than demonstrated competence. Have things really changed that much?

Anyway, at least here on the East Coast, I find that many (most?) companies don't have a strict requirement regarding a degree. At least, not if you have real world experience. Maybe it's more crucial if you're going for your first job.

I certainly agree that formal credentials are secondary to demonstrated competence, but in the specific case of neither credentials nor experience, people with credentials and no experience have always had the first choice at the job.

When you have neither, getting a job in uncertain, there are many variables outside of your control. But getting a degree is completely within your control so it is the better choice of your time. Given the monetary constraint ($3,600 / year for community college (x2) and $7,500/year (x2) for state college) From my experience the job you will get in year 4 (and during the summers of year 3 and 4) will pay you more and offer better advancement than if you had started working in year 1 and not pursued a credential.

If you already have experience, then you also already have a network of people who have worked with you and know what you can do, and getting a job is a matter of finding the person in your network who will vouch for you.

That sounds about right. For me, I fell into a weird scenario where I was still in school right during the peak of the late 90's "dot com bubble" era, when anybody could get a job as a programmer if they could turn a computer on. So I quit school and went to work. And after keeping that first job 4 and a half years, I never had any trouble with a job after that, even without having a bachelor's degree.

Strangely though, I've accumulated 3 associate degrees (general education, computer programming, and high performance computing) over the years as well. Somehow, with all that, nobody ever mentions that I never finished my bachelors degree.

Not sure if it's possible to replicate that career path these days or not. I may just be the product of a specific era of history.

> Silicon Valley used to be famous for the exact opposite: the story was always that formal credentials were less important than demonstrated competence. Have things really changed that much?

It still is and same for the other tech hubs.

The tons of complaints are likely from people who have no degree AND no experience and want to break into the industry and the 100k jobs. Of course, they have troubles, for good reasons.

Simple maths; For every experienced HN dev, there are 100 redittors with nothing who wants in.

Where are you on the east coast?

The RTP (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC) area.

I moved to this area from the West Coast and found the market much better for these same reasons. Happily living in a forested area while working as a developer.

Yeah NC and GA seem to have much more / better jobs than SC (where I am stuck). I might have a developer job if I was still in the Atlanta metro area.

I've only once in the past 6 years been asked about a degree, and it wasn't even by the people trying to hire me(away from my current employment situation). It was a veto from the CTO who didn't want engineers at the company without CompSci degrees, against all objections. This was by far the odd experience out. People are usually surprised to find out later on that I have no degree.

So, I'll have to disagree about the no degree + experience. No degree + no experience is a very tough spot though. Should still be possible though. As others have stated will probably need an entry level-ish position first and then impress the right people and move across. A bootcamp might also be possible.. Companies do hire right out of there, so with the right aptitude and performance in the bootcamp I can see that gaining a foot in the door somewhere.

Start contributing to open source projects on github that solve business problems. Usually for popular projects there are a good number of issues that are available to solve at varying levels of difficulty.