I have met and worked with as many talented non-degreed SWEs as degreed. I number of years back I had posted a dev position where I specifically left off any degree requirements only to find HR had “helpfully” added a degree requirement to the posting.

At the time unemployment was low and the candidates I was getting were crap (but all well educated). I checked the post and realized a large portion of talented engineers were being excluded. Fixed the post and found a great candidate in short order.

> "Yahoo!" offered their index as a text file that would fit on a 1.44 floppy

Are there still records of this somewhere? Can't find anything on Google. I don't remember this as I didn't exist but it sounds interesting to read about.

To be clear, I was asking why OP wanted to study these specific subjects - not get a Bachelors in general.

I've gotten more than one job that required a bachelors before I had one. They almost always offer the "Or requisite/similar experience". I think most employers in the Software Development space understand there is a non-trivially-sized set of qualified developers who didn't choose that path.

> I have 25 years of enterprise web application development and I'm getting no progress in over a year of job searching.

I don't want to be rude, but if in 25 years of working there isn't a long list of coworkers trying to lure you to the company they are at now it seems like you've never impressed your coworkers.

People with a network don't have trouble finding jobs, and the best network you can make is simply being a good developer to work with.

really helpful stuff, thanks!

Completely agreed. I don't have a degree and have been gainfully employed in the field since I graduated high school in 2001. Only the first few positions were difficult to land interviews for since I didn't have work experience to fall back on either. Since then most of my new opportunities have come from others I have worked with who wanted to work with me again. I have also been placed a couple times via recruiters, but like anything it's difficult to find decent folks in that space to work with.

In my experience there is also a lot of recruiting going on at relevant user groups and code camp style events. Me giving talks on Node.js when it was a new technology and I wanted to force myself to do something outside of my comfort zone (public speaking) also got me a job. What I've not had to do is blindly submit my resume through HR portals and hope to make it through some opaque filtering process which I suspect is where a lot of the struggles come from.