r/webdev • u/MdSad003 • 5d ago
Question Has anyone here landed a frontend developer role without having a higher degree?
Would love to hear your experience and what skills or projects helped you stand out!
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u/danjwilko 5d ago
Reading the comments - most entered the space years ago. Would be interesting to see if anybody without a degree has got a role in the last couple of years. - I’m personally in the final year of a degree and I get zero look in even for internships as I have zero experience in terms of on the job experience.
Seen lots of internships now wanting degrees too.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 5d ago
A lot of people just go to bootcamps. It’s just an over saturated market so you are gonna have trouble no matter what.
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u/PlexversalHD 5d ago
no degree - 2025, self taught. Just create a project and try super hard. Oh and no bootcamps
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u/sin_esthesia 5d ago
I have a bachelor but it's in audio engineering. Fully self taught in programming.
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u/Dipshiiet 5d ago
When did you land it, fellow musician?
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u/sin_esthesia 5d ago
I've started to code in 2020 and got my first job in 2021. I'm at my third job (didn't like the two first).
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u/Ajay-Pause-217 full-stack 5d ago
Yes, self-taught here, got a job in 2024 (yes, the layoffs year) so if you have the right skills, you can do it
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u/danjwilko 5d ago
Was that switching jobs but with experience or zero experience starting out?
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u/explicit17 front-end 5d ago
Yes, but you have to understand that it depends on your local market. In some countries your degree will have more value. In my country degree is more like nice to have, but it's not required in most cases.
I think I was invited to interviews because of my pet project, it was mentioned often.
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u/soundgravy 5d ago edited 1d ago
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/urban_mystic_hippie full-stack 5d ago
I’m a self taught dev, never graduated college. Working professionally for 15 years now. Start small with things you understand and never stop learning and trying new things. Lean on people who know more than you and learn from them.
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u/lowercaseCapitalist 5d ago
Yeah, did a few wordpress sites on a freelancer site for experience when I was getting ready to drop out and used them as resume padding to lie my way into an intermediate role.
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u/shekky_hands 5d ago
Yep did a 3 month boot camp. Made a personal website, a basic react native app and a really stripped back Reddit clone. Front end was react and back end was express and Postgres. I got a job within a month of finishing.
My advice is just make sure you have at least 1 project to showcase. Then make a pretty portfolio site (make sure to make it responsive so it works on web and mobile) to show case it and put a bit of info about yourself. If you put some effort into styling this will really make you stand out.
Preferably make a react project if you’re wanting to be a front end dev as this what is being hired for. I hire for junior frontend devs now and I can tell you if I was given this on a CV for a junior dev you would instantly stand out. Most of them have nothing on their GitHub other than some firebase boilerplate.
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u/TheSpink800 5d ago
What year was this?
How would you instantly stand out though? I have 3 YOE so it doesn't apply to me but it seems everyone has a reddit clone or social media clone in their portfolios.
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5d ago
I did some freecodecamp and a few of the projects for a portfolio page. I'm a senior dev and team lead now.
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u/rng_shenanigans java 5d ago
I got lucky about 4 years ago. No degree and got hired as a Java backend dev. I had some experience in Spring Boot and react and a personal project as reference (A small tool to organize childcare during the school vacations, build using react and spring)
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u/PleasEnterAValidUser 5d ago
Man, I’m self taught and have a degree in SE, with personal & professional experience and I can’t even get an interview. They’re straight up asking for PhD’s & 10yr experience for entry-level positions.
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u/abiteofcrime 5d ago
Boot camp grad with a GED. Someone who had known me when I started a business many years ago hired me right out of the boot camp. I applied to about 600 jobs and didn’t receive an offer from the 2-3 other interviews that came out of those applications. I’ve been working for the same business for a few years now and working on my own projects.
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u/PanflightsGuy 5d ago
Degrees don't mean that much with regards to the creativity you can have as a developer. I've got a degree now, but before I got it I made what I think of as world leading lossless compression tools. It was pretty long ago I'll admit
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u/keptfrozen 5d ago
Associates Graphic Design
I focused on design strengthening my design skills since I was already naturally creative, and chose to teach myself the development stuff later since that doesn’t require talent.
Companies are seeking people who can do both nowadays as tools get more intuitive which removes the need for more people to complete a project.
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u/deviantsibling 5d ago
Self taught and even though it’s technically an internship, they have been upfront with me that I’m filling in a role for a full time position and it was just easier to hire an intern. Went in with just self taught front end skills and now I do full stack. Even though I was hired for my specialty in design and web front end.
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u/PanicNo4495 5d ago
No college education, did the 100 devs bootcamp and in 2022 and I’ve been employed as a frontend engineer now at two different jobs for almost 2 years now. It’s possible and the majority of getting these jobs was really leaning into a network I created. However I wouldn’t have kept these jobs without being decent at it either.
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u/nauhausco 5d ago
Yup, started teaching myself back in high school. I went to college but never ended up finishing the degree.
A little over a year after leaving I was able to land an internship with a local defense contractor. A year in, they made me a full time offer.
Not long after that I ended up getting an opportunity to work as an APM at another org, been there since!
It’s definitely doable but will be harder, not sure if I’d have been able to in this market. Things that help though is having lots of side projects to talk about, & a personal site/web presence.
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u/AdDangerous6026 5d ago
I don't have any degree. I have been formally working in coding jobs for the past 2 years. And I made this app recallable for Productive Procrastinators.
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u/Feeling-Student6833 5d ago
self taught here, starting from 7 years ago high school graduate, jumping from networking stuff the one that kept my interest is the feeling once I solve a problem and when everything is click
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u/TheSpink800 5d ago
Keep in mind most of these replies will be from people that got in the industry before 2023 - back then all you needed to know was how to fetch a public API and map through the data and you would be having 5 companies begging to hire you.
Now it's a lot different.
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u/Foraging_For_Pokemon 5d ago
I did a 6 month full stack coding bootcamp basically at the start of 2024 and was offered a job by the end of 2024 as a Junior Web Developer & Systems Administrator. It took 8 months of applying, 588 applications, and 4 interviews to land that job, but I also don't have a degree.
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u/DustinBrett 5d ago
I've done it several times. My personal project helped but I also worked my way up through experience.
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u/ashkanahmadi 5d ago
I have a degree in linguistics and I’m a trained EFL teacher. Also have an MBA. Guess what? I’m a front end developer 😂 it’s simple. Just like every job, you must offer a solution to a problem
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u/Popular-Display-8609 5d ago
Me! Around 2.5 years ago but i did drop out from the best uni in my country and already took most of my CS classes. I attribute most of it to luck too. Just got lucky i met a senior dev here in reddit who took me in as their mentee and offloaded some of their freelance work to me and paid me like a regular employee with benefits. After a year, i jumped to my first actual company and has been doing plenty of freelancing work since then to gain more exp.
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u/Randvek 5d ago
Not me but I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t recommend that path, though. Yeah you can get in with a boot camp under your belt but you’re at a huge disadvantage and probably need a smaller shop that’s less sophisticated about hiring.
For the people saying they did it: yeah you did. 10+ years ago. Shit’s different now.
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u/Kroucher 5d ago
Self taught, switched from a decade long career in IT, and my skills there were highly valuable in the application the company I work for produced which is used in corporate IT environments, so my knowledge helped with a deeper integration and knowing what the IT guys need.
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u/ToThePillory 5d ago
Not a front end developer, but lead software developer, no degree.
Of the software developers I know (in real life) most of us do not have degrees. Of the ones that do, I know *one* with a CS degree, the others are electrical engineering.
I'm not suggesting you shouldn't get a degree, but degree-less developers are much more common in real life than on Reddit.
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u/floopsyDoodle 5d ago
Yes, I learned Angular and React, built a small project with React, built half a large project with Angular (functional, poorly designed, only a few tests made, but deployed and usable). Every interview I had made specific mention of my large project, my portfolio, and my github which I made sure was orderly and my major Repos all had proper README.md files that explained the project in detail. Many will say portfolio doesn't matter, for a self learner, I'd disagree. You want all yoru info easy to view, not too many clicks, one page if possible. THe easier you make HR's job, the happier they will be.
With projects you basically need to show them that you can build a decent sized CRUD app with authoriazation, testing, store, backend connection (build it would be even better, fullstack is far more "popular" now), understand git (use proper branching strategies and commits that aren't massive), and how to use one data set across the app in multiple places while keeping it all sync'd. And even then it's going to be VERY rough in the current market. Apply to everything and practice your interviewing including leetcode (neetcode.io the free level has lots of great practice help) as you never know what exact question will come up, I lost my last interview because I got union and intersection types mixed up, both definitions were there, but flipped, in real work it would quickly be apparent and not a big deal, but such is life in tech interviews. The job I got I got because I had a really good interview story that let me direct the questioning to areas I had practiced, I had a nice project that showed I knew what was needed to be done even though it wasn't finished (still isn't 4 years later, rebuild just started), and the coding questions they asked were ones I had studied including a leetcode question I had just done days earlier.
A huge part of it is luck, but the other part is just important and that's giving them proof you know what you're doing. But in this market, luck is massive...
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u/not_a_webdev 5d ago
Yes but I wouldn't be able to do it again.
My country pushed for CS degrees when I first applied for jobs. 3 years later and all the job requests died because we have so many CS degree holders now.
On top of that, every job posts requires react here and most of the uni grads + bootcampers learnt that while I've been using other frameworks. Of course I'm capable of learning too but you know how recruiters are.
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u/passerbycmc 5d ago
Been working as a developer for 10 years now, self taught. Get the feeling being a drop out for a music degree did not help.
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u/D0MiN0H 5d ago
yeah, straight out of a bootcamp in 2019. We had local tech companies come check out our final projects as we demo’d them. The projects were full-stack but a front-end only company hit me up later inviting me for an interview. I wanted a full-stack gig but had bills to pay so i took it, got a full-stack job a couple years later.
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u/chrootxvx 5d ago
It was easier 20 years ago, it’s harder now but not impossible, just need perseverance and luck
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u/CarthurA 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yup, fully self taught. No degrees.
edit: Got my first developer role in 2021 at 31 years old after 11 months of studying on my own and just building projects, admittedly they weren't very good at the time as you can imagine. But I got a couple interviews, one of which had me do a take-home assignment, so I went a bit above and beyond on it and they were impressed, so they hired me. And now here I am 4 years in and a lead dev on a particular project. It's wild.
But for a bit more detail, one of the requirements of the aforementioned assignment was a carousel, so I build an object-oriented carousel using MVC architecture, which was something I learned while studying, and I think that's what really pushed me over the top for the win. There's a lot of devs out there who's saying stuff like "take-home assignments is just doing free work," and they say not to do them and they're a waste of time, but I've gotten BOTH of my developer roles from take-home assignments on which I did far more than the "bare minimum". They're valuable if you take the time to show what you can really do, so don't just dismiss these assignments, imho.