I realize I'm not doxable so you can consider my comment "fake" but I am a contractor SE making $83K/yr in midwest, no degree. Granted also means I have no heal

I realize I'm not doxable so you can consider my comment "fake" but I am a contractor SE making $83K/yr in midwest, no degree. Granted also means I have no health insurance(personal choice). I went to school/failed out, left with some debt(still in debt). I was going for Phys/Eng co-op program(5 years). I got into web development luckily(personally trying to make high traffic ad revenue websites) that didn't work out but I became a full stack developer(can build an interface/make matching backend with auth in LAMP). I freelanced online(UpWork) then got into a local web developer agency(WordPress... templates...) then I got lucky to make the jump into a local corporation in my state where I'm now an SE. It was unreal to me at first as my previous job I only made $50K/yr and mandatory 45 hrs for "salary". Now I just keep learning so if I lose my job I can hopefully get hired elsewhere. I was washing plates/worked in a factory/did data entry... yeah I'm super lucky I made it. So it's entirely up to you and I'd say with a degree the odds are even more in your favor since that always bothers me as a lot of jobs I can't apply to "no degree". It's entirely up to you, you have to want it. For reference I was not into computers when I was younger, we had one and I just played Runescape on it. My journey in this field started in 2013 so it's not something I just pulled out of my ass overnight. Use LinkedIn by the way it works, but be truthful as well, don't game the system. ... Personal rant This is a personal opinion but I've been pretty stressed out at my job, mostly the "bureacracy" like "every line of code" is traceable. JIRAs, design docs, unit test/selenium/regression testing... so much work I can't just "solve this problem" you know... I don't know. It's interesting, my prior job sucked because there was no chance to learn and it got super repetitive building template after template from a design. But there was also barely any sort of structure/no testing... we barely knew how to use Git as a whole. Clarifying, I'm not against the concept of testing. It's nice being able to run old ones and see the app didn't break when a new feature is added. Just saying there's a lot of "paperwork". Which... get a hobby right or change jobs(what I'll probably do). I'm at the point now where I can almost make anything I want. Granted I am not a scaling-god or super devops heavy(aside from using Docker)/not an algorithm guy. Also have not bit the ML/AI bullet yet. But yeah, there's a lot to it, the surface area, but a lot of technology now makes it super easy to get into/accessible. Think React and React Native/Electron so easy to build cross platform. Crash courses online to quickly pick something up. And all the commoditized services eg. Twilio/Mailgun/AWS/Browserstack/etc... (I don't like AWS expensive).