Ask HN: What other good careers exist for those without a college education?

I know some people who sell cars and don’t have a college degree but pull in close to six figures. They enjoy it but they also work for higher end dealerships and get to take fun cars (like a brand new WRX STI...) for a spin sometimes.

Cooking or baking is another option. Some great chefs out there never graduated from college or culinary school.

Running a business also doesn’t require a college degree. My wife owns a café and never graduated from college.

Consulting is a lucrative career path that relies less on college pedigrees and more on networking/reputation.

It is best to find something else, especially if you are a male. It is essential for tech companies to make sure women consist of at least 51% of the executive level and the same for the non-executive staff. As you know male domination of technology is why there isn't much innovation anymore, men created a toxic world with technology and now women must clean it up and run it properly. 2019 is the year of women.

IT, you can learn it by yourself, you can contribute to open source and get recognized and on the end run get the experience and recognition as an IT professional

Depending on where you are, a tugboat captain can clear $500k/year, and you'll have a 6 figure pension when you retire. Other hands on jobs that have lots of overtime potential (e.g. police or fire department, oil, welding, etc) can also pay really well depending on your level.

Your problem seems that you are relying on someone else to employ you. Why not create products by yourself and become a potential employer? Unless the society itself crashes due to large scale wars or natural catastrophes, people will always want and use useful software, and that includes time wasting entertainment ones. There are so many things that need to be done, so as long as what you create is not yet another tool that does the same old thing that twenty others already do with no differentiating aspect to it, its worth pursuing this path.

Software engineering is the most equalizing field in modern society. I mean, anyone with interest and reasonable intelligence can get good at it; they just need a used laptop and a decent internet connection. Add a good amount of CS understanding, and general creativity, one stands to make it big in this field. Compare that with trying to build the next generation automobile by self studying mechanical engineering, or creating a drug to cure your least favorite disease by learning bio chemistry through a MOOC.

Software engineering is the new humanities, albeit a lucrative one, in that you need just a bit of push in the beginning after which it is all up to you to explore and get good at.

The illusion of the requirement for a College Education to get a high paying job in any field is starting to diminish. Now Yes, it will be a bit harder to get a job when your competition has 6 Masters degrees and 2 PHDs. All a degree tells a potential employer is that you are supposed to know the degree field. It isn't ordinary for employers to give you a test to determine your knowledge, that's why everything on the Resume is vital and a degree usually stands out above the rest. With that out of the way, Especially when it comes to IT, most companies look for experience. Light up your resume with the experience in Ruby (or any other knowledge you have) and pound on it, sell it to the employter that you know what you're doing even more so than Joe Smith with his 90+ Degrees. I highly doubt that the demand for IT will go down in any field. If that is the case; You can always learn Welding (which will require a very short technical school,about 3-6 months for the price of a few paychecks dependending on where you live) Construction is also a decently simple field to get into and its usually union with very.. very high paying opportunities along with the self satisfaction of building structures to be used for years. But I recommend staying IT, Many other companies have a plentiful amount of openings in IT though it may not be Software Developers, Your experience so far will help you honestly find any door in Information Technology regardless of a degree.

Your real issue here is the irrational worry, not the lack of alternative career paths. I'd look into techniques for coping with anxiety if this seriously bothers you.

> I always wondered what I would do if for some reason the market for software developers would go down. I worry I would not able to find an interesting job, let alone a lucrative one.

You are right to worry ( https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?q=bscs ). It will be more of a problem when you're in your late 40's, maybe married with kids, and laid off in a tight economy, without a degree. I mean, if you ever see it in job ads, or have it mentioned in interviews, then it is a thing.

Consider signing up for a local college with a decent CS program (public or private) and taking one course a semester at night or on weekends. Then the default becomes you graduate eventually. Also, the fact that you are going and making progress helps as well. It also helps your programming - reflecting on mutual exclusion and critical sections for a semester will not hurt you any in your job.

Lambda School comes to mind. Try them, they seem to be working out for lots of people.

Sales

Because your output is more measurable than in most other roles, credentials matter far less.

People want to hire intelligent, hardworking people.

If you don't have a college degree, you just need to find other ways to show potential employers you're intelligent and hardworking, regardless of industry.

To think about this from any other perspective is to unnecessarily pigeonhole yourself.

Without a degree, doing what you're provably good at is your best option. A degree is basically an substitute for proof that you're good at something. (A degree doesn't actually prove you're good at it; at best it means you're more likely to be good at it, since you've been exposed to education about it.)

So if you're good at software, then do that. There's little chance for the demand for software developers to go down; it's one of the safest career paths there is. There is of course a chance that the software market will change and that demand for Ruby or Ember will drop. But if you can learn those, you can also learn to develop in Python and Vue or something.

Keep learning, keep diversifying.

Of course it's possible you have other talents. Maybe you're a good comic artist, cook, salesman, manager or something else entirely. Work on those skills when you can, and build up a portfolio so you can prove to people that you're good at these things too. There are plenty of fields where talent is far more important than a degree. A degree is merely a way to develop that talent and prove you've done that.

Everything computer-related is best right now. (Web design, UX, "social media person".) However, if for some reason you want to change that, I have found that writing and composing music are also well suited for the same type of mind. (You need imagination, constrained by rules. We're good with rules and, as far as I can tell, we're not bad at creativity either.)

You can work on a bakery, waiter, cleaner, sales and a lot of other jobs. Even if you are an introvert, there will be a job for you.

But I don't believe tech is going away. You better work on getting this anxiety away, you were probably thinking "oh shit, things are going down because there are too much clowns getting funding and giving web dev projects that makes no money for them and go bankrupt". I did that frequently, maybe you also did, I'm just trying to view things from your perspective.

The other side of the story is that for every 100 clowns, there is 1 that succeeds and controls a whole industry. Programming will be well paid for a while. Most of the people can't/won't even learn how to program or be willing to do it to earn a living, no matter how good it pays.

Consider actually learning other platform, such as systems engineering/mobile etc. That will definitely help you out with that.

Even if you would help people writing VBA functions in Excel you could make money. There are a lot of old people making 6-7 figures that can't open a PDF. Remember that. The economic and the system as today, isn't going away. There will always be banks, politicians and entrepreneurs creating jobs and keeping people busy.

As long as you are willing to work, you will do just fine.

  But I don't believe tech is going away.

If you're good you can do well with a lot of career paths, e.g. master woodworker, or expert welder or a good accountant. Of course, you'd have to learn a lot of new things first and that takes years, so it's probably not such a good idea to switch profession without a good reason, and it's even more unlikely that you'll really have to switch it ever...

Aside from the very obvious jobs that require a qualification (doctor, lawyer, etc) you can do pretty much whatever you want. After my first job my degree was more or less pointless. As for the first job, or any other, stop worrying about what's on a piece of paper and start figuring out what you're interested in and what will make people interested in that. Then just get out there and meet people. Conferences, meet ups, whatever. These are the people who will employ you, work with you, work for you, and introduce you to people who will all of those. Of all my friends that earn very, very well, there's little difference between those with lots of qualifications and those without - and far more so in tech. Good luck!

As someone with access to free education but without a college degree, without rich parents and still having done pretty well for myself, let me tell you my way of thinking about this.

There is a difference between getting an education and being educated. If you focus on educating yourself without worrying about what your title you have the chance of learning about subject matter transcendence i.e. you will become skilled at some mixture of subjects without being "the best" at any one of them.

This subject matter transcendence I believe is one of the keys to staying relevant and aware of what is going on around you as it gives you an intuitive understanding of how various areas could be connected.

As typical example is the designer/developer. A person who both know how to design and how to code. That person might not be the best at the individual disciplines but the combination is in itself providing them with an edge on 80% of the people BOTH in the design field AND in the development field.

Don't worry about confining yourself into becoming an expert in one field who then will need to compete with other experts.

Instead become an expert in your own chosen subject matter no matter how fractured and you will be able to if nothing else, start your own company solving a problem your unique understanding of the world might lead you to.

In other words. Don't worry just keep educating yourself that's the best you can do.

You have six years professional experience in programming. You can probably get onto the Oxford M.Sc. in Software Engineering but the deadline is soon. If you miss it the next one is in March.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

Applicants are normally expected to be predicted or have achieved a first-class or strong upper second-class undergraduate degree with honours (or equivalent international qualifications), as a minimum, in a related subject, such as computer science, informatics or engineering.

For applicants with a degree from the USA, the minimum GPA sought is 3.5 out of 4.0.

Applications are invited from anyone with sufficient experience or proven ability in software, security, or data engineering. A typical applicant will have at least two years' experience in a professional environment, and an undergraduate degree in a related subject. However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience.

Emphasis not in original

  Sewer Diver	       		130000 EUR
  Federal Minister		124046 EUR
  Flight Controller		 78000 EUR
  Offshore Mechanic		 58500 EUR
  Elevator Technican		 52000 EUR
  Driving Instructor 		 47500 EUR
  Garbageman   		         42000 EUR

These are annual gross salaries in Germany. None of the jobs requires college education. To put it into perspective, web dev averages around 55000 EUR here.

Cleaning toilets?

Air Traffic Controller. Saw it mentioned in a similar thread and sounds like decent pay for the trade off of high stress and crappy hours. Still it's defiantly something worth looking into if you are willing to make compromises.

Make sure that you have soft skills, the ability to learn by yourself and problem solve.

Coding is obviously super relevant now, and I personally believe for still a while, to remain employed. Yet, if you look at WEF prediction[0], it is soft skills – with obviously technical knowledge (that you already have) – that will matter in the long run.

So what does it means for you? The future of work is not about learning one tool (programming language for instance) and be done for a career. We can actually extend this to a type of job. The key is to be able re-train and re-tool. College education, and in general, lecture/instructor-based education, is generally training us the wrong way: we feed students with knowledge that is the answer for the exam in 2 weeks. In real life, we make money or are paid by solving problems (exams) but it's up to us to find the answer (the lecture). So it's completely backward.

Progressive Education[1], a movement that was created at the end of the 18th century is super relevant for our time. It's advocating for students to learn something by doing, to focus on problem-solving and critical thinking, soft skills and become a life-long learner. I am so in love with this methodology that I created a software engineering school using it, and it's working amazingly![2]

Since you seem to be self-taught, you probably already have this ability to self-learn, that's HUGE! My advice to you would be: try to learn something completely new, on your own. See how it goes. It might be painful, if so that is normal, keep going. I see that with our students who, especially when they start, are frustrated by the fact that we, as a school, are pushing them to find the knowledge by themselves instead of giving the answer by just raising their hand. The key here is not only to learn a new craft, but also and very importantly, to develop the ability to self-learn.

Develop your soft skills: collaboration, coaching, empathy, writing, negotiation, public speaking. Those are key to grow in seniority in the software track, but really, it is for any career.

Finally, I believe that tech isn't going anywhere, it's widely used by retail, finance, transportation, media, healthcare... Considering that you cannot remain employed as a software developer, no matter which position you end up working in, having tech knowledge will make a huge difference or be just essential.

[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/the-3-skill-sets-work...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education

[2]https://www.holbertonschool.com/

Every single one and no one.

Your education increases the chance of you getting into a particular field, but doesn't guarantee it. If you are capable of exploiting opportunities - there is no field that you can't get into.