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Wave your liddle white flags proudly! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I grew up kinda hard, with untreated mental illness and spent some time on the streets as a homeless teen, got my GED as a result and never went to college.
But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old.
When I was 18 I went from being homeless to moving in with my b/f in seattle and from there straight to Microsoft.
I started taking senior and lead positions before I was 20.
Outside of software development, for example when I moved from Seattle to rural Washington state where there were not development jobs I drove a cab, jockeyed cash registers, and even worked on a farm.
I'm not qualified to do anything skilled but write software.
I can't tell you how grateful I am that this industry values talent over credentials.
I'd be in a very different position today if it weren't for that. I have a friend I grew up with who never launched into a software career despite us programming together but his primary interest is language so I guess I understand - I learned C++, he learned Latin. I have another friend who I came up with together and helped him get into development, and then he moved to NYC and got rich, and he has a similar background as me, except not crazy. None of these people have degrees. Both are ridiculously intelligent. But it makes me think, you know?
I count myself fortunate, and I am grateful not just for me, but for anyone like me who found their way despite lack of opportunities and access to "white collar" work generally.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I think having worked on a farm is an important skill!
Any industry with common sense values talent over credentials. The ones that don't are typically licensed or unionized, which is primarily a way to reduce competition and make it more lucrative for those who are allowed in.
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I don't know. My FIL is a master electrician. Union man. Never had a degree either. He worked in a wonderbread factory before apprenticing, and then busted his behind until he got where he was at.
I'm here for trades. And frankly, I'm a member of an industrial union myself, though I work for myself, not a union shop since I don't employ anyone.
That's all I'll say on that, for fear of turning this further into a political discussion.
I'm in the distinct political minority here.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I was young, raw, and cocky. Being in a union helped me smooth those edges out and gave me the training I needed to move forward. Eventually I moved into a position that was no longer union backed, but I'm grateful that being in a union allowed me the chance to grow.
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honey the codewitch wrote: I'm in the distinct political minority here.
That's possible, but you aren't alone either. 
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One of the problems with today's business environment is the emphasis on pieces of paper rather than demonstrated skills and knowledge. However, I wouldn't want to be treated by a physician who didn't have a Medical degree and a license! For the lay person, the pieces of paper provide at least some assurance that the person holding him/herself out as an expert really is.
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If he didn't have a license, you could ask to see his his degree (most of them have it on the wall anyway) or proof of malpractice insurance, which someone unqualified would find rather hard to obtain.
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Certainly understand and agree:
"However, I wouldn't want to be treated by a physician who didn't have a Medical degree
OTOH, those EMTs coming to pick up you or your loved ones after an auto accident or a stroke or a heart attack or gun shot may have a few hundred hours of state training.
If you're lucky the EMT may have military experience too.
These people are very skill just in a limited field of first aid.
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I have a similar story but I did manage to get a degree.
Kicked out of a dysfunctional family situation at 16 with a 10th grade education, went in the military did 2 tours in Nam (20+ months). After I got home 2 years of homeless, drifting, drugs , alcohol.
Then got married, dysfunctional relationship that lasted 17 years but in that time managed to get a degree in Engineering Physics.
Nasty divorce, quit computing for 13 years and then tried to get back in but too much time had passed and couldn't keep up.
So here I am retired and still hacking, but loving it because I choose when and what I want to learn. No pressure, no deadlines, no politics, no bullshit.
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I was way too ... gender non-conforming and clearly gay to be in the military. I'm pretty sure the recruitment office would have opened fire on me if I got within 300 yards of them.
Different times.
My brother is military. So was my stepfather. It was never in the cards for me.
I'm glad though. I think if I had gone in I probably would have washed out anyway, but even if I didn't I don't think it would have put me on the career path I had. I never would have worked for Everdev (which I loved) just for example.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Yes different times indeed. Turns out that a couple of guys in my unit were gay, one highly decorated and even wrote a book. I was totally unaware he was gay, it would not have made a difference to me but at the time the military was very anal about such things and he probably would have been ostracized and booted out?
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Mike Hankey wrote: at the time the military was very anal
Um, I think perhaps the opposite.
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Yeah, there was DADT and all that. It just wasn't for me. I'm not the type.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I just lived through it.
At the time the draft was going on and my number was up so I enlisted. Probably saved my life, I went into communications instead of infantry and in 67 things over there were hot.
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I'm glad it worked out for you in the end. Elephant knows it didn't for so many. 
That war was just.. SMDH
I don't know whether to say sorry or thank you. I have ... feelings about vietnam vets that sets them apart for me from other war vets. I won't get into it for risk of making this thread political, but you (and if not you then or at least many like you - i don't want to speak for you) deserved better.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Thanks...yeah let's just leave it there.
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sorry I get emotional with certain things.
mov ax, [feelings]
xor ax,ax
There.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I think until you do
mov [feelings], ax
you won't get the desired result.
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yeah well, i claim literary license.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I had a great childhood, good school, University, and everything, just never schooled in IT.
Yet here I am! 
I was recently discussing this with someone and I told him any idiot can call himself a programmer, there's no entry barrier to the field.
I also pointed out that around 90% of the programmers I've met are absolute bunglers who couldn't tell good code from bad code.
He was flabbergasted!
If you want to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant, you need expensive degrees*.
However, if you're writing business critical software that enables thousands of people to do their jobs and generate a revenue of millions a day... You need only a computer.
A lot of untrained and often unskilled programmers work for local companies, enterprises, the government, non-profits, they're everywhere.
There are IT companies who gladly hire a rookie fresh from college and sell them as sr. expert consultant for €100+ an hour**
It gives people like you and I an easy chance to start over in a profitable field.
The flipside of the coin is not so great, I'm afraid...
Let's put it this way, failing IT projects really aren't always the manager's fault.
* Which still doesn't mean anything, there are terrible doctors, lawyers and accountants too!
** I have a cousin who is sold as an AWS solution's architect with two to three years of experience and some certificates. When asked what types of databases I could get in AWS I got blank stares... "What do you mean?"
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Hmm. At the risk of being flamed, I'm going to comment here. I ran the traditional route. I majored in computer engineering at Wright State[^], graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984. While I was a sophomore in early 1980, I started working as a part-time programmer. I also filled slots during that period as a system manager (VAXen) and as a technical writer.
In the ensuing 40 years I have worked with all kinds of folks with different backgrounds. One of the best programmers I ever worked for had a degree in physics. Another guy didn't have a degree but was a phenomenal embedded developer with a meticulous style that, ten years after he retired, makes his code still some of the easiest to maintain I've ever seen. I worked with a college-trained programmer who had enviable credentials, but wrote the sloppiest, most bug-ridden sh!t code I've ever seen. After he left, I spent over a year rewriting everything he wrote on my product, as I got tired and pissed off over the constant bug reports. Another college grad wrote decent code but was an elitist and couldn't be bothered to document it or make it easy to use.
Based on my experiences, I can make the following observations:
A college education does not guarantee that you'll be a great developer. What is does is give you a broader and deeper skill set than you're likely to have if you're self-trained. As an example, the fantastic embedded guy I mentioned? His only data structure was an array. He knew about linked lists, trees, and all sorts of other things, but they weren't tools he could use comfortably. College educated folks think that grants them a certain level of expertise, often over the self-trained developer, that may or may not be warranted.
Practical experience obtained through self-training is great, because you don't have preconceived notions about how something's going to go while you're learning it. Since you're self-motivated you tend to work harder when learning something new, and pay more attention to the nitty-gritty details. That said, it also means that there can be potholes in the road that you might know intuitively from the education that you'll miss entirely if your experience hasn't included it. Many self-trained folks also have a chip on their shoulder about it, and disparage the education as needless academic fluff.
My point is that both paths to expertise have value. Choosing one over the other is a mistake.
Software Zen: delete this;
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What makes you think your post could get flamed? It was interesting to read about your experiences, and your observations make sense.
I would say that programming is always mostly self-taught. University can inform you of techniques (data structures, parsing, state machines...), but it's mostly a case of the more code you write, the better you get, so long as you strive to make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
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Greg Utas wrote: What makes you think your post could get flamed?
My experience has been that some college-educated folks can be a little dismissive of the self-taught, and the self-taught are sometimes defensive as a result. Taking the middle ground means you disagree with most. Greg Utas wrote: the more code you write, the better you get
Very true. You learn the "why" of writing code in a particular fashion, as expressed in the mental scar tissue from excruciating debug sessions.Greg Utas wrote: make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
That's been one of the great things about switching from defense contracting to commercial development. With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done. I have commercial applications now that I've been developing, maintaining, and enhancing for 20 years. Going back to code you wrote 20 years ago can be a humbling experience .
Software Zen: delete this;
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