I skipped college and became a programmer. About 15 years later, I have yet to ever see one single piece of evidence that any employer or recruiter has, at any point, ever had the thought, “I would think better of this candidate if they had a degree.” I have had offers from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (none of which I accepted, so they don’t show up on my resume), and recruiters spam me constantly, so this isn’t just a tiny eccentric startup thing. Maybe IBM cares. Do you specifically want to work for IBM that bad?
Presuming you can do the usual other stuff to demonstrate your competence and find jobs, which I think is likely if you are hanging out posting dialogues on LW (e.g. you are really good at programming, sharp sounding, publicly visible work, charismatic, willing to approach people) I think you should assume the degree is a totally worthless piece of paper and work from there.
(Obvious caveats: Maybe this doesn’t work outside of Silicon Valley culture, or maybe it doesn’t work well until you have one job on your resume, or maybe it doesn’t work if you don’t look like a stereotypical hacker type, or something. I can mostly only speak to my own experience.)
I skipped college and became a programmer. About 15 years later, I have yet to ever see one single piece of evidence that any employer or recruiter has, at any point, ever had the thought, “I would think better of this candidate if they had a degree.” I have had offers from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (none of which I accepted, so they don’t show up on my resume), and recruiters spam me constantly, so this isn’t just a tiny eccentric startup thing. Maybe IBM cares. Do you specifically want to work for IBM that bad?
Presuming you can do the usual other stuff to demonstrate your competence and find jobs, which I think is likely if you are hanging out posting dialogues on LW (e.g. you are really good at programming, sharp sounding, publicly visible work, charismatic, willing to approach people) I think you should assume the degree is a totally worthless piece of paper and work from there.
(Obvious caveats: Maybe this doesn’t work outside of Silicon Valley culture, or maybe it doesn’t work well until you have one job on your resume, or maybe it doesn’t work if you don’t look like a stereotypical hacker type, or something. I can mostly only speak to my own experience.)