Coding Employment Success without the CS Degree: In 2008 I had the opportunity to bid on and build a web development solution for a comedy club in Beaumont Texas. The board at the time was more interested in a pressumed college degree than it was in any actual down and dirty, in the trenches web development experience.

Part of my application for the job involved me putting together some rather simple writes that involved streaming along with a pay wall of some sort tied together with a subscription service that would be API’ed through to a local bank.

Long story short — I didn’t get the project.

These days it’s a pretty different scene. Coding isn’t all that cloak and dagger mysterious trade thing that most were led to believe it was back in the 90’s. Coding just isn’t a geek thing any more as more and more people discover that it’s secrets aren’t really secrets after all. Coding is a thing to be learned just like anything else, and once you learn it, there isn’t a college degree in the world that can compete.

True life successes happen every day in the world of coding. Here is just one example where the college degree lost out to an actually position of employment.

I got the job!!!!! Weeeooow!
No CS degree, no background in programming (I'm a nurse!). Just hours of studying and reminding myself that ANYTHING is possible with persistence and determination! 😊😊😊😊🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳#igotthejob #SoftwareEngineer #100DaysOfCode started it!

— Ingrid (@IngridEliseV) December 24, 2020

All this person did was study and learn, computer science degree be damned.

We see this more and more every day. Here we have a nurse, from Bondi Beach, Sydney, NSW, AU learning to code without having to go through all of the huff-n-fluff and expense that a CS Degree might require and all at an extremely minimal cost.

Back in my day, we had to learn all of this by the seat of our pants, and once we learned it, it was extremely difficult to get past all of the snobbery that existed in the so-called elitist dev community. Somehow we managed. Today however, we have places like Udemy, where you can learn this stuff for just pennies on the dollar.

Congratulations to Ingrid. Your success is proof that young people today are bucking the system and reaching out to take control of their future.