I would second this, and also say get any degree. A real accredited CS BS degree is incredibly difficult and time consuming. But a BA can be knocked out in 2 years and makes you infinitely more employable on paper than just a high school graduate for any position.

I'm not sure any random BA can help these days. Anecdotally at least, one of the recurring news stories about Millenials is about how so many can't get jobs with their BA degrees. OP is probably better off going to Lambda School or a similar technical boot camp.

This is just my personal experience. I've been successful in this industry for nearly a decade now, working my way up from junior to senior dev as a self taught programmer that dropped out of high school. It can absolutely be done. But that doesn't mean it ever helped me to have not had any academic achievements. I once held it as a point of pride to be able to make it without a degree. But I find it increasingly embarrassing as I get older and work almost exclusively with people that have those qualifications to not just have that piece of paper. The reality of life is that given identical skills and experience between two candidates, people are always going to choose the one with a degree. And justifying yourself at the higher levels of a career without one becomes increasingly untenable.

Anecdotally this is a popular idea, but it is surprisingly poorly supported by data. I did a deep dive on this a couple years ago, and there is actually little difference between early-career employment prospects for STEM and non-STEM bachelor degree holders.

I did not look at bachelors vs coding camp certificate.

I wonder how much of that is due to a big chunk of the STEM undergrad degrees (mainly science) being not so useful. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a scientist role requiring anything less than a PhD (at least nothing paying more then $40k a year) I find it hard to believe though, that the employment prospects for someone with an B.Eng. or B.S. CS are equally as bad for as someone with a B.A. in English or Psychology.

I think that's true for all schools below the top-10/top-20 (which covers the large majority of people, myself included).

For the elite schools, a STEM degree does confer advantage over non-STEM degrees.

I’ll support this too. I was more than a decade into my SWE career when I decided to finish college. It’s tough but being on the other side of it I can understand why a college graduate is preferable as a candidate more than someone who hasn’t. And it doesn’t have anything to do with learning to program. University studies are hard, and it’s not the material (for the most part). It’s the effort, and the dedication.

You might see if you can re-enroll in your school.

If he's on the verge of being homeless, getting a degree seems like too long of a timeline. A bootcamp seems more reasonable, but even that's a stretch.

One of my former co-workers at IBM went to a bootcamp in SF. She is pretty smart. Though, I feel that bootcamps are kinda scams. Not like colleges though.

I went to college and did a bootcamp.

College - 212K tuition (current) - 4 yrs - no job guarantee

Bootcamp - 18K tuition - 3 months - money back if no job within a year

Can you spot the scam?

While I sympathize with your point, I also see someone who made a really poor choice in picking a college. I'll wager that in every state there is a decent university that will get you a 4 year degree for under $60K.

It's as if I compared your average college with a crappy bootcamp. Let's not cherry-pick.

The number I want to see is the percentage of college grads with a BS in CS who get a (decent) job within a year, vs the percentage of people who complete a bootcamp who get a (decent) job within a year. I suspect the numbers will favor college, but I honestly have no idea.

Getting your money back sounds like a good deal, but you'd still have spent a whole year without a job, and nothing to show for it.

I would also say that going to college was a bad choice, but the one I picked was one of the good ones where the name means something. Still a rip off, but a lot of people paid the same for absolutely nothing.

> but the one I picked was one of the good ones where the name means something.

As someone who went both to an average university and one ranked 3rd in the country, I can tell you: The name doesn't mean much in the engineering discipline. Certainly, a CS degree from CMU will likely get you into more interviews, and they probably earn more in the long run, but the person who got his BS in CS from an average state school with a good GPA will almost certainly get a job within a year. Very few exceptions. With bootcamps, I expect that percentage is a lot lower.

As a data point, I work in a top tech company and while people from big name schools are slightly overrepresented, the majority of folks are not from big name schools. Certainly plenty of people from my average state school here have senior positions.

I know it means nothing in engineering, which I think is great. But I went for finance, which is exactly the opposite.

To be fair, money back promises are often used as part of a scam.

Personally i think neither are a scam (although 212k is ridiculous, glad i dont live in usa) just make sure you understand what they are selling and that it matches what you want.

I actually know someone who got the money back in this case, so not a scam.

Haha yeah. Though, some of the boot camp folks who I noticed . Usually have earned a bachelors with a major in something else than CS etc. Then made the transition to tech via a bootcamp. I applied to the recurse center a while back and got rejected.

I went to college and have many coworkers who went to boot camps, and we’re paid the same!

Look on LinkedIn for people who work at the companies you want to work at, and also went to bootcamps, to build a shortlist.

There are several boot camps today, in every major urban area, that carry major street cred in the local tech communities.

Counter-anecdote: I work with a couple of devs who went the bootcamp path. Great front-end devs. However, they are paid significantly less for the same work relative to fresh grads in the office. Wages aren't based off of fairness, but on market factors. They are paid less presumably because management knows they have less options.

Do you know specific good ones?

In the NYC area, the ones I can personally vouch for, having worked with graduates, are Flatiron School, App Academy, and the Recurse Center.

I’m sure there are other good ones, but I only personally know graduates of these programs.

Recurse Center is not a bootcamp

You’re right, but it fits in the mold of “nontraditional education” so I opted to include it.

I do know a handful of people who attended RC with minimal to zero prior programming skills, though this is definitely not the norm.

I've thought about it. Community College, Deep Springs etc. I think autodidacticism is a better way to learn vs academic path. Though I didn't want to finish high school but I did.. So, it might be just one of those things that I'll have to suck up and just do. I disliked that I would have to take 2 years of core curriculum stuff before even being allowed to take major related courses. I had to reach out to instructors of courses that sounded interesting to get approved to take them. After I started to take the courses I didn't really like them. I got good grades on my papers etc.

This was touched on above in slightly different terms, but I'm going to echo it because I see it in the answers here. You were raised differently by your parents. You are missing some basic social skills to interact with other people in a normal way, and unless you are exceptionally brilliant (which most of us aren't) people aren't going to give you a pass on those things because quite frankly it'll make it brutally painful to work with you because literally no instruction or direction can be taken for granted.

At this point in your life the best thing you can do is go to school, try to get some help from your parents or financial aid to focus on your studies, and absolutely do not try to carve your own way through the curriculum. Do the things they put in front of you. Show that you can take on tasks that are boring but necessary and get them done. Embrace the grind. And make some friends! Learning how to interact normally with your peers is a necessary skill that homeschooling rarely helps with.

Personally, I'm a college dropout. I was a mediocre student in high school and a worse one in college because I took time off in between, and was overly impressed with my own ability and didn't put in the work. It took me years to dig out of that hole professionally, but it's possible. And I would never have done it without the social skills and connections I made going to a major university, even if I didn't finish.

Getting a degree is only partially about learning. A degree signals that you were able to complete a curriculum that, frankly, will almost always have parts you don't like.

So some perspective for you to consider. The first is that as I have advanced in my career (its been solid if not extraordinary) the core curriculum stuff I thought was going to never apply working as a technologist has ended up being suprisingly useful. I wasn't a fan of linear algebra in undergrad, but now I'm using it on a data science related stuff. My politics concentration has ended up very useful at understanding the group and organizational dynamics. Even my forced sociology course lets me understand the reasoning of some my peers/superiors who buy into that line of research far more than if I was coming in blind. Theory of computation... remains useless, but they can't all be winners.

The second, and more important, perspective is that as a person who does some indirect hiring (interviewer plus technical lead, but not people manager), I worry that someone without a degree has trouble driving to completion in the face of disinterest, or is self sabotaging. My projects are mostly enjoyable, but sometimes I (or someone on my team) needs to spend 3-4 weeks writing up a government mandated security document. It sucks, but it has to be done. If I think you might be the type of person that will have trouble completing that independently because there is always more fun stuff to be working on, I don't want you on my team.

A degree is a noisy, loosely correalated signal that you won't be that person. However, as others have mentioned, your writing here indicates you MAY be that person, and not having a degree is a correalative signal that doesn't help your case.

> I think autodidacticism is a better way to learn vs academic path.

It often is a better way to learn, but that's not why I suggested going back to school. It doesn't sound like your technical skills are the reason you're not getting a job.

> So, it might be just one of those things that I'll have to suck up and just do.

Most jobs are full of things you have to suck up and do. As long as you work for someone else, sucking up and doing will be a big part of your career.

Oh, and if you start your own business and work for yourself, chances are you'll spend even more time doing tedious stuff - although it depends on your business.

Doing what you want is the domain of the financially independent, and (some) tenured faculty members.

>I think autodidacticism is a better way to learn vs academic path.

A better way to learn, yes perhaps.

A degree shows that you can consistently show up and complete tasks. That's the important part. I haven't read all your posts but it is unclear to me that you actually completed a degree and got the slip of paper?

Unless you have notable (4-5yrs) experience for the position I am looking for, I probably wouldn't hire someone without a degree. It's just a baseline thing you need.

Based on your comments you seem talented but unreliable.

Deep Springs has something like 18 students, right?

You’re young and you can change your trajectory—have hope!—but it will not be through some home run fantasy. Don’t apply to FAANG or Deep Springs or MIT. Apply to your local community college and to local companies’ IT departments. Keep the job, stay enrolled, get good grades, learn to stay quiet, learn to listen, and only then learn to argue well. After two-three years at community college (depending how fast you go, based on need to work), take your good grades and apply to a few colleges. Go to one that you can afford and isn’t intimidating. Do the work there, too, and graduate. Five years. And then all will be well.

Part of what a 4 year college degree shows is that you can stick with something for four years. Combined with some of your other responses, I think it might be a good thing to have under your belt.

Also, depending on the college scene, you might have more opportunities to socialize with lots of people which you may have missed with your home schooling.

Depending on where you live, community college varies from amazingly affordable to right around the same as a state university. Check on student aid as well.

Sometimes you have to jump through the hoops to show you can.

Seconded. If you aren't willing to go through school, why would you be willing to take up a job? Most entry-level jobs will generally be even more boring, require more discipline and jumping through the kind of hoops that you will not enjoy. Unless someone sees a sort of a raw genius in you, they will probably not take a gamble on you.

One reason I assume is that a degree is taking tens of thousands of dollars from you whereas the entry level job will be giving that to you.

Because university and work are completely different environments.

University is very academic, work is very practical.

> I disliked that I would have to take 2 years of core curriculum stuff before even being allowed to take major related courses. I had to reach out to instructors of courses that sounded interesting to get approved to take them. After I started to take the courses I didn't really like them.

You seem to have a real problem accepting that you have to work within the system and follow the same rules as everyone else.

For entry level positions, the best predictor of success hiring manager have is your GPA when you've completed a degree. Further, autodidacticism certainly can be better for some people, but unfortunately it makes it much harder for you to get past initial screenings. If you had stuck with some of your other jobs for a few years, this would matter a bit less, but if you haven't stuck with any job longer than two months, you don't look like a potential asset.

My advice is to go to school. Accept that the core curriculum requirements are there for a reason, and unless the university offers a way to test of part of them, then deal with it. If it's stuff you already know, then look at it as a way to help ensure you have a great GPA for when you do graduate. And when you're in school, take advantage to everything else that's offered - join a few clubs, look for opportunities to learn leadership skills and develop them.

Once you graduate, start your resume there - don't even include things before that - they don't know how old you are, so they'll assume you're just like any other recent grad.

Finally, when you land a job, keep your mouth shut and do the work you're asked to do. Give input when asked, otherwise listen. Listen to what your manager is saying, and to what senior engineers are saying. Watch to see who has influence, and how they wield it. In a few months if your work is speaking for itself, then it's the time to start speaking up more. If you have a good manager, ask for their advice on how to do speak up effectively, if you don't have a good manager, ask one of the engineers that clearly has influence.

Above all, remember that life isn't easy for most of us. It doesn't matter how smart we are, we have to work hard, work well with others, and learn how to work within the system. Otherwise the system will spit you out.

The autodidact path is a possible path, but its the harder one. To do it succesfully you have to go significantly above what your peers do to prove yourself. It also can often leave gaps in your knowledge and blindspots that you are unaware of.

In the world of software, that probably means having a portfolio of projects you can point to as examples (including but not neccesarily limited to open source projects. Other options include starting your own company (very hard), etc)

I always felt being enrolled in a community college was always a key differentiator for me as a candidate. Beyond being a stepping stone into a top 10 CS program for me, I feel like those lines on my resume communicate that I am just a super tenacious and scrappy person.

It is the highest ROI investment I have ever made in myself.

Go to degreeforum.net and learn about how to get a Bachelor’s degree in a year. Or read Miguel’s story of how he got a CS degree from WGU in one year. Alternatively if you want to know how to get a Master’s degree without a Bachelor’s e-mail me and I’ll tell you how I did it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467900

Without completely dismissing the idea of going to school, it might be more your speed to work on an open source project of some sort. If you can build something and launch it, that is cheaper, faster, and (potentially) a lot more fun than going to school. For someone who doesn't like playing the "games" involved in office work or interviews, setting yourself up for consulting work might be a good move too.

Yeah but that open source rarely leads to a job. Yes, many here on HN and open-source may have achieved that but it is extremely rare.

I don't think this person will be able to do consulting considering the actions they have done while interacting with managers, directors, executives.

When you're enrolled in college it opens up opportunities for internships, software eng is usually decent pay. Consider research, you don't have to interact with business people - academics are more understanding of autism spectrum behavior. I wouldn't expect career progression to be fast taking this route, but at least you'll get some experience.

Especially in this case, getting a degree would got a long way towards demonstrating dedication and maturity, and could even make up for earlier job hopping and quitting school.

And how exactly does this work for someone who is nearly homeless?

I have to agree. I don't think having a degree dictates whether a person can do a job or not, but they have sure convinced corporations that it's a requirement.

After I got a degree I started getting responses from places.