Your best route to employment is to: 1. Learn the basics of programming. This means writing software to get a computer to do things, even as simple as adding a

Your best route to employment is to: 1. Learn the basics of programming. This means writing software to get a computer to do things, even as simple as adding all of the numbers between inputs n and m, which is not a bad beginner exercise. 2. Find an OSS project that interests both you and prospective employers that has active development on IRC (likely freenode). 3. Start handling small bug reports and adding minor features. 4. After familizing yourself with the code base, start collaborating with the more experienced project developers on bigger changes. More veteran developers are likely to be happy to offer advice/answer questions on how to do things like them. 5. After a year or so, you will likely be able to get a job, assuming that you do not have offers already. I sort of did this unintentionally when I started contributing to OSS projects for the sake of improving them for my own use. That eventually lead to consulting for a time before I found full time employment at a company that I felt was a good fit. I went a few years without asking even asking if I had a degree until a year into full time employment when investors wanted everyone to submit resumes. I believe any degree would have been sufficient. My manager for instance only had an applied math degree. For full disclosure though, I have bachelor of applied science and engineering that is a double major in "Computer Science" and "Applied Mathematics and Statistics", plus partial graduate CS study. Also, my company went out of business last month. I have options for both employment and consulting, although I now favor full time employment due to familial pressure. That being said, it would be easier to advise you if you said specifically what area interests you. There are different areas such as operating system development, systems programming, embedded programming, web development, user interface design and others. That matters quite for step 1 in picking your first programming language. Being multilingual is great (and I certainly am), but you will find things easier if your first language is language used by what you want to do as your first job. That way you save some time on becoming proficient.