I'll share my own story and try to answer your question in that context. I was working as an underwriting assistant at an insurance company and became interest

I'll share my own story and try to answer your question in that context. I was working as an underwriting assistant at an insurance company and became interested in landing a job as a software engineer. I took a Visual Basic class in high school and a Java class in college. I dropped out of a biology degree late during my second year of college. I managed to get a job at my company's IT helpdesk, supporting a specific application on a level 2 team. I did a 6 month coding bootcamp for node/react, which I left feeling like I had a good baseline in coding ability. While working on the IT helpdesk, I built a webapp that allowed external insurance agents to submit tickets online by integrating with our ticket system API, but I still couldn't get an interview for a dev gig. I eventually asked an internal recruiter why I was never hearing back, and they stated that they were only interested in hiring straight from our college hire program. I was pretty crushed. Out of the blue, six months after coding bootcamp ended, a project manager whom I had known in the past asked me if I'd be interested in a SQL-heavy systems analyst job. I happily took that, and while on the job, I did some internal instructor-led Java training. While I was an analyst, I was able to start taking on some small pieces of work on a Spring Java backend. I was able to get employed as an engineer on my team after working a little over a year as an analyst. I am currently working on finishing up a dual Comp Sci and Math degree. This is to better my long term job safety and career prospects. I am going at a pace where my entire degree will be paid for by my company, without me fronting any money. Ultimately I was able to get employed as an engineer having done a coding bootcamp without a degree, but I think that was only possible because: - I was well networked at my company and maintained relationships over years with prior colleagues - I had substantial domain experience, in insurance, in my company's systems, its business processes, etc - I developed a career path that spanned multiple steps to get to engineer, with each role building on the prior I don't think I would have been able to get employed as an engineer outside my company without some in-between steps