You certainly can compete with all the people without degrees where they can make as much total compensation as someone with a degree by going with the most instable parts of the field. But that competition will sound exhausting and the level you put in will be exhausting your other options in life while still probably being less energy than the bootstrap-only graduate.

I’ve been working in the industry, in Atlanta for 20+ years. I’ve been on the market 6 times (stayed at one company almost a decade) and it has never taken me more than three weeks to have multiple offers. I can guarantee you that none of those jobs or interviews cared about my CS degree. The quickest was when my contract was over, I called a recruiter, had an interview four days later and an offer the same day. I’m no special snowflake, any halfway connected, developer with buzzword compliant resume could tell a similar story.

My second job out of college my manager cared a lot more about my then encyclopedic knowledge of C from spending way too much time on comp.lang.c, my (self taught) experience with x86 assembly and that I was a big enough geek to be able to talk about some of the 65C02 assembly language hobby projects I did in middle and high school than my courses in Pascal, Basic, FORTRAN, and COBOL or even my one simple data structures class in college.

Do you think consulting companies are recruiting me now based on my 20+ year old degree or my more recent experience as a team lead, AWS architect, and my being able to be talk about “The Well Architected Framework”, Domain Driven Design, and the Cloud Maturity Model? Yes these are all buzzwords to a certain extent but consultants get paid a lot for them.

Whether I had a degree or not, if I couldn’t negotiate a salary commensurate with my experience - I would be doing it wrong.

But that competition will sound exhausting and the level you put in will be exhausting your other options in life while still probably being less energy than the bootstrap-only graduate.

Considering what I learned in college and how useless it was compared to what I taught myself even when I graduated or even more importantly the experience and networking I’ve done in the past twenty years, I really don’t see my career trajectory being that much different.

The only thing college did useful for me was get my first job based on an internship the year before. In today’s world, if a boot camp (which didn’t exist back then) could have gotten my foot in the door, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

As far as pension, it’s nothing special. A pension is just worth the present value of all the payments you hope to make after you retire, considering the difference in pay - and the flexibility - in the private industry even in Atlanta, you can easily save/invest enough over your career to create a greater annuitized income in retirement.

I delayed my degree while the first dotcom boom was in swing.. I did the only relevant classes before I delayed it, and not having the paper did make a difference. I could have argued my way into the same position I transferred to after getting the degree, but they would have delayed things, delayed upping compensation, maybe given me lesser tasks or been less convinced of my work in some cases. They also would know which other companies couldn't be competing for me.. again loss of compensation.

I would be very surprised if that 1996 degree isn't on your resume, equally surprised if anyone checked if the school is accredited and surprised if many of your choices were slightly fewer/different options leading to accrued path dependent losses on average. I.e. a first team lead isn't suggested leading to no path or a significantly delayed one to team lead on your resume.

I used university as a bootstrap back then, and then had the company pay for the rest of the degree. This could probably work for bootstraps and a degree today.. but the only reason I see for that path over credited time toward the resume item is if you needed to convince yourself of whether you want a tech job.

The dot com boom was fairly isolated, unlike what happened in 2008. In 1999, when I was looking for my second job, enterprises were so desperate for qualified developers jobs were easy to come by. I negotiated a relatively decent raise (not Silicon Valley type money) after the dot com bust because profitable companies still needed developers.

Even today, most corporate enterprise type developer jobs - where most developers are - wouldn’t know CS from a hole in the wall. They just want people who can turn business requirements into shipping products. The degree has never been what gave me leverage and optionality, keeping my resume in line what the market wants has been.

When I stayed at one job for 10 years until 2008 and was woefully behind the state of the art, my degree did me little good.

I would be very surprised if that 1996 degree isn't on your resume, equally surprised if anyone checked if the school is accredited and surprised if many of your choices were slightly fewer/different options leading to accrued path dependent losses on average. I.e. a first team lead isn't suggested leading to no path or a significantly delayed one to team lead on your resume.

Yes the degree is on my resume, but not the year I graduated. Neither is anything before 2008.

My very delayed path to being a team lead was a function of me taking my eye off of the ball for close to a decade and not gaining the skillset to be one. Being a team lead has nothing to do with how well you can do algorithms in most companies and is usual a combination of your interpersonal skills, your emotional intelligence, and experience with translating business problems into working systems. In fact, more often than not, it’s knowing what not to build and focusing your team/company on writing software that is within their core competency and outsourcing the rest or using third party systems.

That being said, I purposefully self demoted (in title not pay) from being the dev lead of medium ($1 billion in revenue) non software company to being a senior engineer at a much smaller software company who needed someone to modernize the software architecture. They were basically using AWS as a glorified overpriced colo. I discovered as a team lead that the real money locally was in consultancy and I had a few gaps to fill in.

My CS degree from 1996 definitely didn’t prepare me for my roles over the past three or four years dealing with enterprise architecture.