I’ve made a career out of website development, despite not having my degree, but it was a very hard path in the beginning. Things have changed a lot, and it’s easier than ever to get an engineering job without a degree, but I used to strongly advise people to get their degree if they want to enter this field. The amount of work I had to put in to build a good enough portfolio to land a corporate job was ridiculous. There were times when I was working 15-17 hours per day, 7 days per week, for months on end, and still broke as fuck. That was after spending years acquiring the skills, and building the connections required to land that work in the first place. The way I see it, you can either go have fun in school for a few years, and then land a bad-ass job at some fortune 500 company, or you can bust your ass for years on end, starving and being broke, while never knowing if it’s actually going to pay off or not. In my case it paid off, in many cases it doesn’t. Of the two paths, school is the far easier one.
I’ve made a career out of website development, despite not having my degree, but it was a very hard path in the beginning. Things have changed a lot, and it’s easier than ever to get an engineering job without a degree, but I used to strongly advise people to get their degree if they want to enter this field. The amount of work I had to put in to build a good enough portfolio to land a corporate job was ridiculous. There were times when I was working 15-17 hours per day, 7 days per week, for months on end, and still broke as fuck. That was after spending years acquiring the skills, and building the connections required to land that work in the first place. The way I see it, you can either go have fun in school for a few years, and then land a bad-ass job at some fortune 500 company, or you can bust your ass for years on end, starving and being broke, while never knowing if it’s actually going to pay off or not. In my case it paid off, in many cases it doesn’t. Of the two paths, school is the far easier one.