How I Became a Software Engineer | Quitting College Computer Science

Here's my full story of how I became a software engineer even though I quit computer science in college.

Disclaimer: I know I got *really* lucky and am so privileged to be able to work in this field. My story is one of imposter syndrome and self doubt. But, I'm so lucky to be where I'm at today!

📚 Learn More 📚

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Learning to Code

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[omar_mtl]

I dropped out of mechanical engineering due to family emergency, and learned coding by myself. I landed 2 unpaid internship, and the current one is ending this Friday. I hope this helps me land a full time job. Thanks for sharing your experience.

[codeSTACKr]

No CS degree here either... Another great video! Keep it up :)

[ashwinnarasimhan]

Lol at the gatekeepers who think you can't call yourself a software engineer without a degree. So many great engineers are self taught. Thanks for sharing your story!

[eltebux]

Honestly this industry moves so fast that having a CS degree has minimal impact in the performance of devs, i have a design degree, for a while i thought i was not as prepared as a guy with a CS degree but in reality no, it depends on how you move in your career. And never stop learning.

[bwebdev]

I can’t agree more with the comments included here. This is a very upfront and honest breakdown of your path from Uni to working as a software dev. More videos would be great!!

[codu]

No CS degree either and always love hearing these stories. Always good to have perspectives for those new people grinding. ❤️

[TavetteDarville]

Hi Ali, I think this is a great story. It wasn't what I was expecting based on the title because even though you don't have a CS degree, you took college level CS classes and literally worked as a teacher's aide. However, that doesn't take away from how hard you have had to work to start and grow in your career. My biggest takeaway is to make the most of the opportunities presented to you, don't be afraid to reach out to people, connect, ask for what you want and keep working really hard. Thank you for sharing and always being transparent.

[anthonybeckford]

i really appreciate the transparency in your story! I enjoy your content

[FierceAmbition]

Fullstack Developer here...No CS Degree as well!!! I'm also making Tech videos. I never believed it was possible and i'm an example for others now. Hard work & determination always pay off :)

[bdougie]

The ring lighting looks great. Also loved hearing your story.

[TomNook.]

Weed out courses are so toxic. We had this in first year CompSci, but in Java. The first semester the lecturer did everything in notepad, compiling using javac. No linting, intellisense etc. It was chaotic in some of the larger pieces of code. He then fully introduced us to IDE features in the last semester, all the annoyances we found just wiped away.

A third of our class dropped out because of that, I do wonder how many of them would have still been in software now were it not for that lecturer.

[yoshreimi]

Thank you so very much for making this video. It motivates me to continue learning Python as recently saved enough to learn it full time through different sources. This was really valuable. Thank you again

[russellquaicoo]

Nice experience. I'm still in the university though, 2nd year. I also thought computer science was about writing code in 0's and 1's before I entered the university to know what real coding was about. I am aspiring to be an ML engineer.

[nikhillokhande]

DS & A is a total weed out class, btw shout out to the focusrite scarlett

[misterjaypeasmith]

I’d love to see some Django content from you. Maybe with a separate front end in React 🙏🏽😅

[vanessa]

This title is cheecky. Like girl u went to college. I'd really wish people would stop clickbaiting. I'm trying to find someone who has not gone to college and just self taught went to bootcamps and became successful as a developer. And what is the age thing with coding.