How hard will it be to move up without a degree?

Am I going to be stuck doing web development my whole life, when in reality I may be better suited for software engineering?

Maybe. I feel like I might be... which sucks...

but it's not related to education. You get pigeonholed as a web developer and the typical catch-22 applies - you need experience with X in order to get a job doing X, even if X is analogous to Y and you've been doing Y for years.

Nobody wants to hire me to write .NET because I write PHP, so obviously I don't know .NET, just because I don't use it at work every day. I've actually used it a bit now that .NET core is free and open source, I'm 100% confident that I could do an equivalent job using C# and the .NET framework just fine, but to the people doing the hiring it does not matter, nor can they understand that only hiring ".NET developers" is like only hiring "Honda drivers". It doesn't matter if you know how to read documentation and the principles of OOP and how to write clean code in any language. It only matters if you have experience.

There are some few people out there who both understand what software development is, and are responsible for reviewing software development job candidates. It's just very uncommon. With any luck eventually you'll find one and get a job with a buzzword that you had no prior experience with so you can put it on your resume. Or just lie as necessary, if you know can do the job, because life is too short to deal with all the bullshit.

PS. I say it's not related to education because I completely made up my education on my resume, I actually have an associate degree from a community college, but I put the old standard B.S. in computer science to get past the bullshit filter. I'm not just willing, I'm happy to take the risk that maybe, just maybe some company will make an offer and then try to verify my education. Nobody verifies education. What do I have to lose... oh, I can't apply at that company anymore? So sad, I'll have to pick from one of the 200,000 other companies instead.

PPS. I'm only writing defensively since last time I brought it up people were acting all holier-than-thou and telling me how something terrible would happen to me because there's false information on my resume. It's just a resume, not a sacred text. It only exists to help computers and sometimes humans decide who not to even bother phone screening.

/r/cscareerquestions Thread