u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Haha I like the analogies :D
I think that today, success is still proportional to talent and hard work, but the things that's changing is **TIME**.
If you are talented and work hard for \~2 years, I think you can get a job without a Stanford CS degree, but people are expecting that to happen in 12 weeks + 1000 applications over 6 months.
I have an engineering degree, but what got me my job at Facebook was actually self teaching web programming on my own. I was doing a full time 13 month internship/co-op at the time and woke up early and went to bed late working on a web platform (it was an internship review website, from scratch) for about 8 months straight. I learned so much by having real people using this thing, turning into a corporation with 3 other people, acquiring a competitor.... not just about programming, but product building and growth and marketing and all kinds of things. **And still, I was barely an entry level engineer**. I was promoted to mid level at Facebook in 3 months internship -> 3 month full time, but that's because of my crazy growth at Facebook and was not qualified to be a mid level when I started.
This is my journey, and not the only way to do it, but all of the engineers I know are people who have been tinkering and problem solving for years and years (formally and informally) before it become a career.
If you are in the "Late 2022-2024" bucket, nothing is stopping you from truly demonstrating your determination, and if you don't have the drive and focus to build ONE SINGLE PROJECT for 8 months straight on your own, then try to find a place that nurtures that kind of thing, and then helps you translate that into an entry level job role.
This is actually why I'm personally very against Codesmith's strategy where grads exaggerate their resumes and saying they spent 4 months on a 4 week project and having OSLabs sign off on a reference check, and then telling people they are now mid-level engineers by doing such a project and that the project is indeed "equivalent to months of engineering work". It's a perverted strategy extracted from the natural paths most people take to become engineers.
**I'm not gatekeeping, I don't care what credentials you have - the truth is it takes time, and you can't add more hours to the day and calling that out isn't gatekeeping.**