Nope, although I'd say that a STEM degree does help. My observation is that around half the people I've worked with in this industry have a CS degree, and most

Nope, although I'd say that a STEM degree does help. My observation is that around half the people I've worked with in this industry have a CS degree, and most of the rest have an engineering/maths/physics degree. There are a few people who don't have typical qualifications (myself included) or no degree at all, but as a general rule I would say it's less common. If you don't have a degree, it doesn't matter - but you will still need to demonstrate that you can do the work. Having 1-2 substantial Github projects in your portfolio is a good way of achieving this, along with studying online courses such as CS50 so that you know basic data structures/algorithms.